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This is nothing short of puritanistic surveillance state bullshit. It's censorship, and is not okay. On by default is ok—encouraged, even. Login required? heck
by cptcobalt 4y ago
This is nothing short of puritanistic surveillance state bullshit. It's censorship, and is not okay.
On by default is ok—encouraged, even. Login required? heck no.
(edit: ugh, what if this is just because they're avoiding cookies to store this? because of "privacy")
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoOh FFS. Read the article. The image is blurred, but if you click through it's not. So this basically just resorts image search for NSFL and NSFW images back to text links. Unless you log in to enable image links.
- cptcobalt 4y agoI did read the article, and I do think the we both understood the interaction impact similarly—yeah, you can click to unblur an image, but you can't change the global preference without the login. Requiring a login to change a preference rather than something that could be stored in a very simple cookie deanonymizes you, and creates an extremely clean audit trail of your usage patterns. There's far more friction in making scores of google burner accounts than it is to rotate VPNs and Incognito windows, if you're so inclined to obfuscate your trail. That's bad.
- giantg2 4y ago"Requiring a login to change a preference rather than something that could be stored in a very simple cookie deanonymizes you," Of course. That's basically step 1 in every proposed plan to prevent minors from accessing porn on the internet. Step 2 is verify age and linking it to the account.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoIf there is no shame in using porn, and nobody cares, you have nothing to fear™.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoYeah. I'm reminded of the news article a decade or more ago about this guy who bought porn or something like that. The company didn't deliver IIRC, and instead tried to extort money from the purchasers by threatening to doxx their purchases. And this guy straight up took them to court to get his money back.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoSo you make one burner account that you only ever log into from a VPN. Google gets slightly more relevant data, but it doesn't get linked to your main account. Or you make a separate account for each one of your fetishes or NSFL investigatory journalism. Hopefully that isn't scores of accounts.
- user3939382 4y ago> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoThe "Read the article" was used primarily as an emphatic for the following sentences, not a literal. The part of the article that highlights this particular point is also easy to miss (one very short sentence immediately beneath an image). And not all of us fully and thoroughly read articles (as indicated by my user name).
- zamalek 4y ago> puritanistic surveillance state bullshit Probably. Also consider how much the porn industry is willing to pay to serve interested users ads. Incognito probably represents a substantial loss of revenue for Google.
- erellsworth 4y agoYes, and simply logging does nothing to prove your age. Nothing stops a teenager from creating an account with a fake age. So then the next step "to protect the children" will be requiring logging in with an account verified by a government issued photo ID so they can track you much more effectively. That seems like where we're heading with this crap.
- NazakiAid 4y agoThey might use your Google Pay to see if you have a credit card attached and use that to confirm you are over 18. This is one of the age verification methods YT does.
- prepend 4y agoThey could if they cared about actually verifying age. But they don’t. In fact, I would guess that Google can predict your age with good accuracy without you logging in. I’ve had kids under 13 create Google accounts that said they were 75 or whatever. Google doesn’t care. They just want you logged in and selling “targeted” ads. I expect there will eventually be some sort of smoking class action suit that gets damages from emails knowing that accounts are 5 years old and not stopping it because of revenue. Of course I’ve been waiting a long time.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago> In fact, I would guess that Google can predict your age with good accuracy without you logging in. My Google account is almost 20 years old at this point, and they still ask me for credit card verification every time I want to see an "age-restricted" video in YT (and "age-restricted" topics apparently includes Verilog programming). Google can't predict anything.
- hulitu 4y agoThey know your age. They just want your creditcard and a confirmation that it exactly you ( else they need to trigger the profiling algorithm for a new person).
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoMeanwhile, ChatAI tech is coming for Google's bread and butter, but Google can't think of anything else to do but increase its role in creating a corporate authoritarian dystopia. Of course, ChatAI has the potential to be far worse than anything Google has been up to, but that will be little consolation to Google if they dwindle down to being the next Yahoo.
- ESMirro 4y agoAs we’re all meant to be living in the metaverse inside our self driving cars purchased by crypto, I’d wait to see what’s going to happen before making grand proclamations on the latest vastly overhyped tech.
- pancrufty 4y agoAre you talking about the same ChatAI that will go in a loop as soon as you deviate slightly from a “clean” conversation? Google cleaned up their SERPs terribly over the the last few years but still returns some results for any query.
- LarryMullins 4y ago> still returns some results for any query. On the contrary, Google's search has degraded severely. They now routinely tell me nothing was found when I'm searching for things I know exist, and know used to be indexed. Google is now third or fourth on my list of search engines because of this. They just aren't very good anymore.
- pancrufty 4y agoThat’s why I said. Still not good but at least it won’t judge you by saying it’s “unethical” and “immoral”. Plenty of searches are still possible on Google but aren’t on ChatGPT, like “what are you doing stepbro”
- dw33zil 4y ago[dead]
- whstl 4y agoYou can definitely store this kind of "user preference" in a cookie without having to ask for it, at least in GDPR.
- themitigating 4y agoIt seems that we are entering a new wave of anti-smut. I wonder if it's cyclical
- extr0pian 4y agoI've been seeing this happen on YouTube more and more where they identify a video as being explicit and that I must login with a Google account. Not having a Google account means I can't view the video - even youtube-dl can't download it. There are other workarounds like viewing it on my phone via NewPipe or installing FreeTube on desktop.
- werid 4y agofyi, yt-dlp has some workarounds for this that youtube-dl doesn't. youtube-dl is more or less unmaintained these days (last proper release: december 2021), yt-dlp is the main fork. lots of development happened here in the last few years.
- someNameIG 4y agoEven when logged in there are still videos I can't watch on YouTube. I don't have a credit card, only debit, and I'm not sending Google pictures of my ID.
- paulpauper 4y agoI agree. I hate this. Stop protecting users from themselves. Yeah, it's easily bypassed, but why the change? If someone is going to look for porn, they will find it anyway. What changed to make google resort to such drastic measures? Who or what politician forced Google's hand. Not to mention, creating a Google account still requires a phone in many cases. So you have to give up your privacy, your phone number. I cannot wait until AI makes Google search at least a little less relevant.
- cesarb 4y ago> Not to mention, creating a Google account still requires a phone in many cases. Not just creating a Google account; logging into a pre-existing Google account can require you to add a verified phone number. I had that happen to a relative (who does not even have a phone): when trying to login to their account, Google required a second factor to prove that the account was still theirs, and having access to the recovery email was not enough, the only thing it accepted was a SMS verification (which made zero sense, since there's no way Google could know whether that phone number was actually theirs).
- LorenPechtel 4y agoIt actually does make some sense--the black hat isn't going to want to give their phone number, and if they're beyond the reach of US law they're very unlikely to have a US phone number available.
- cesarb 4y ago> they're very unlikely to have a US phone number available. ...guess what, we don't have any US phone number available either! We only have Brazilian phone numbers, and Google did accept the Brazilian phone number I tried (which was not theirs, since like I said, they don't have a phone in the first place).
- mc32 4y agoWhat was the old rallying call? It's their platform they can moderate their content at their pleasure. "When companies do it, it's not censorship" ...etc...
- gjsman-1000 4y agoThe 1st Amendment does not cover the private actions of companies. Of course... that doesn't change that on both sides, it will be used. "This violates the first amendment, they are censoring misinformation!" "This violates the first amendment, they are censoring n00dz!" "The first amendment doesn't require them to put up with misinformation!" "The first amendment doesn't require them to censor n00dz!" And so on... However, I will say, right now, that I find it interesting that the Hacker News hivemind in general is more sympathetic to the censorship of misinformation, than it is to the censorship of certain images. In which case, is it just a values judgement?
- hn92726819 4y ago> The 1st Amendment does not cover the private actions of companies This is exactly the statement the comment you replied to is criticizing. It keeps getting repeated in the wrong places, like here in this comment thread. There's free speech, U.S. Constitution amendment 1, and there's free speech as an idea. I'd wager when people complain about lack of free speech, they are more concerned about the idea rather than the amendment. I think most people here know that amendment 1 relates only to the government, so it's unhelpful and unrelated to even bring up the first amendment. Edit: of course, you're right that anyone complaining about lack of amendment 1 in this situation doesn't make sense, but note that's not the same as people complaining about a lack of free speech.
- Joker_vD 4y agoThe 1st amendment was written at a very specific time back when the governments were the biggest oppressors, and the megacorporations of modern kind didn't exist; so it has protections against historically well-known and well-understood state censorship but not against not yet existing corporate censorship.
- cyanydeez 4y agodont confuse basic capitalism with some other random agenda. The point of this is to ensure they collect the fertile data of the adult porn industry.
- 48snickers 4y agoYes. Emphasis state. Recently passed AADC legislation (Age Appropriate Design Code for the UK) and CA-AADC (same thing, California) are going to make these kinds of design patterns common.