r/DigitalPrivacy

(no offense to anyone, do not attack anyone mentioned in the photos, including that person. I don't want this post to be considered brigading and this post is just for public awareness)

I'm pretty sure you may've heard of this person, especially on threads talking about social media bans, but they likely support the social media bans and is trying to basically spread a one-sided, fallacy view around age verification, ID verification, social media bans, etc.

Pretty much in most posts about social media bans or age verification, they will make a comment actively trying to defend the bans. They believe it either has to be "all kids should be on social media or no kids should be on social media at all" like if it's an all or nothing strategy. That's obviously false. Not all families, even those with kids use the Internet, right?

They are also very hesitant to actually listen to opponents of age verification and will keep spreading the same pro-AV/SMB stance to people, using tons of logical fallacies and not listening to real privacy concerns. It's likely they support the social media bans for minors. They don't even know that governments aren't trying to actually make the Internet safer.

Then, they will always talk about the "social norm" and apparently say that the bans/laws empower parents and change the so-called "social norm". That's obviously false, for two reasons. 1. Not all families have social media/Internet, but it is still increasingly common for the youth to use the Internet. and 2. They do not empower parents. The parents who want these bans really could've already set restrictions.

They once commented on my post and I tried to give them advice to take a break from talking about age verification because they don't understand the real truth properly and is just jumping to conclusions whatever. They framed my advice as a "personal attack" and blocked me. This user has had a long track record of wrongly persuading people to accept age verification without actually understanding the real risks of them.

Like, why won't they actually listen to constructive criticism and actually know how age verification's issues are? Seems like they have a tendency to get pretty defensive when called out rather than being like "hey, I should reconsider my stance, I should listen to people". They claim to be open-minded and even called me "close-minded", yet they're likely the one that's close-minded as their comment history (by searching their username on Reddit) shows they've had long a tendency to simply just not listen to anti-AV people.

Remember that they did hide their post/comment history on their profile, but just search their username in quotes like "USERNAME" then also some keywords related to social media bans/age verifications.

Before you guys suggest anything, I'm probably ignoring them and blocking them.

How Online Surveillance Capitalism Works. Your own data is used to make others rich, by influencing your spending and voting habits. https://quokkadaily.au #privacy

(most names censored to prevent harassment)

I get really annoyed when I see these people (or even occasionally, see them comment on my posts). Almost always they will use the same garbage "protect the children" excuse or other stuff. I get it, of course there's issues with technology, but it's unrealistic to expect governments and/or companies to 100% parent your child and decide for them. It's like how governments wanted to ban violent video games for minors back in the day, yet gamers were highly concerned about these new laws, and even how South Korea tried to step into government-parenting children in 2011 with their failed Shutdown Law. That law would just set mandatory screentime limits for online video games for anyone under 16, yet it could be easily bypassed by just playing on mobile games or faking registration numbers by committing literal identity theft. I all see this same bullcrap excuse of statements that governments use to cover up their true intentions, moral panic statement garbage, etc.

The parents are the most annoying people in this group. They KNOW they can already set Internet limits and restrictions on their children, yet they want government-enforced parental controls on their children, sometimes as old as 15 or 17 that may be a teenager. I get it that the digital world can have some negative effects on people (which is literally debatable) but why can't parents just do it themselves? Yes, I understand there's many permissive parents, and there's also many good parents, but it's still important just like how you need to monitor what your child does on TV.

Then, there's the political extremists (the far rights supporting them are even worse than the lefts) who lurk on unhinged subreddits like right-wing echo chambers for example. They're also annoying but are so difficult to deal with. When you call them out they will call you a pedophile/predator just because you oppose these laws and say "you don't want to protect the kids, don't you?" Of course that statement's garbage, we all WANT to protect the kids but it doesn't seem like they want to protect the children, actually.

And, there's the younger adults (aged around 18-30 or so) who support these bans and seem to be even worse than the 50 year old people who support them. They tend to have some hypocritical or weird view about their usage on the Internet, and they used the Internet well before adulthood or so. They'll usually say "as a teen, it was fine for me to use the Internet 10-20 years ago, not now" yet they can already be parents and teach their children how to use the digital world and technology properly.

I know that very little kids (5 years old or so) should not have technology or any child in general should not have unrestricted Internet access, but I really get tired and sick of these supporters of this. I know that of course, all of this digital ID stuff is coming from stuff like the UK Online Safety Act, EU's Chat Control, Keir Starmer and Donald Trump, The Anxious Generation book and movement by Jonathan Haidt, Australia's social media ban, etc. and it's sadly not uncommon for people to be brainwashed into supporting absolute BS. It's like how there were people who supported the violent video games of the 2000s without realizing they would obviously fail. Like, I would not give a 2-5 year old any kind of technology at all, but maybe as a adolescent, I would just monitor them with digital boundaries and teaching them online safety, and be a good parent.

I'm looking at you, age verification supporters.

The heavy handed treatment of ordinary people at airports is an indicator of what our governments would make daily life like if they thought they could.

Every time a landlord, Airbnb host, rental counter, or gig app asks for "a photo of your license," you hand over your address, DOB, ID number, and full face — all sitting in someone's inbox or camera roll forever, when they usually only needed one or two of those.

So I built CoverTrace (iOS). You photograph or import an ID/document, cover the fields the recipient doesn't actually need (box, blur, or pixelate), and export a clean, flattened JPEG or PDF with the original photo metadata stripped out. The tagline I kept coming back to: send only what they need.

The part I'm proudest of: it's 100% on-device. No account, no servers, no analytics, no third-party SDKs — your documents and photos literally never leave your phone. The only network call in the whole app is Apple's billing. (App Store privacy label is Purchases + Identifiers, nothing else.)

What it does:

• Auto-detects sensitive fields (name, DOB, ID/SSN/card numbers, address, the photo) with Apple's on-device Vision, so covering is a couple of taps
• Recipient "templates" — roughly what a rental host vs. a payment app tends to ask for — so you don't over- or under-cover
• Scans your camera roll (on-device) for old ID/card photos you forgot were sitting there
• Optional encrypted, Face ID–locked vault for documents you keep
• Optional: an invisible mark you can add so your own private, on-device log can tell you which copy surfaced if one ever leaks — nothing phones home

Solo dev, and it was a road getting it through review (Apple had… opinions).

Would genuinely love feedback, especially on the field-detection accuracy and whether the templates match what places actually ask you for.

I've had my account for over 20 years with the same phone number linked to it over 20 years. I have purchased hundreds of tickets for concerts, sports and comedy shows. After having them frequently mess with me and my account, I got "account restricted". Over half my life with this account and the customer service rep on the phone says I "have the choice" to either give my biometric data to Persona or create a different account.

I have left many platforms due to data privacy. I have avoided doing biometrics for everything but professional certification until now. All of this and I feel like I've lost the war. I know it's just a battle, but it's the first time I'm going to be forced to go against my beliefs and knowledge of just how unsafe these verification systems are. I feel defeated.

Edit: I was going to give in and do it last night, but when I logged in, the prompt wasn't given. I called and customer service could only offer "try again later time to time". So they give you a deadline, but if you don't complete it ASAP, it's possible it won't appear again. Customer service can't retrigger it. They asked if I had any email with instructions. Nope.

To confirm, I logged out, cleared my cache, then logged in again and I didn't get prompted. I have 4 concerts in the coming week and now have to worry about randomly receiving this prompt as I attempt to enter an event. You just can't make this nonsense up!