5 ms·
Meta has spent $2B on verification lobbying. Very successfully it seems. In 1-2 years, you won't be able to browse the internet without scanning a body part an
by felooboolooomba 3mo ago
Meta has spent $2B on verification lobbying. Very successfully it seems.
In 1-2 years, you won't be able to browse the internet without scanning a body part and providing a ID for your ass.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-behind-metas-2b-lobbying-for-invasive-age-verification-tech https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh...
- masfuerte 3mo agoMy mother tried to buy something on Amazon yesterday. It wouldn't let her check-out until she'd entered a code sent via WhatsApp. Which she doesn't have and doesn't want. She'll be buying her tat on eBay in future. I dream that Amazon will lose lots of sales and backtrack, but I don't suppose they will.
- NuclearPM 3mo agoWhat is a tat?
- seanhunter 3mo ago“Tat” means miscellaneous junk. That said, the anecdote is made up or important details have been elided to make it sound more interesting than it is. Amazon doesn’t depend on whatsapp for 2fa. You can configure amazon 2fa to send an SMS and it’s possible that the poster’s mother has misconfigured her phone to claim that it needs whatsapp to read the sms 2fa message but I highly doubt even that. When I look on amazon it allows passkeys, regular TOTP like with DUO authenticator or google authenticator or whatever or SMS with a backup of sending the TOTP code to the registered email on the account. Whatsapp isn’t even an option.
- giardini 3mo agoHow does "tat" differ from "grot"?
- 6031769 3mo agoGrot is usually intentionally and always utterly unfit for purpose.
- card_zero 3mo agoGrot is from grotesque and implies dirty or primal, as in grotto, a cave. Sans-serif fonts were called grotesque because they looked primitive. The word grot appears in various 19th century poems as a noun meaning a grotto, where it was supposed to be a lovely place full of fairies. But that meaning wore off and now something grotty is something you'd find in a gutter. The US equivalent is grody. Tat meanwhile, like gunny, refers to a kind of sackcloth. These words are both from Hindi. The concept is of some cheap filler material. If you want to rush something out, you can wrap it in sackcloth, bag it up in sackcloth, sell it to them in sackcloth, make it quickly out of sackcloth. Or maybe it was left over and has been sitting in a corner for years, at the bottom of a sack. That is "some old tat".
- ChrisRR 3mo agoTat is general rubbish, but generally implies something a bit old fashioned as well. Those decorative plates and figures that old people love? Tat Grot I've never heard of in terms of buying stuff. Grot to me just implies something dirty
- giardini 3mo agoThank you all for the explications! My first encounter with "grot" was a BBC comedy, apparently " The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin", wherein a gentleman suffering a mid-life crisis tries to fail at business. However no matter what he does, everything he touches turns to money! At the end he sets up a series of shops named "GROT" which, of course, sell grot and also become enormously successful.
- phs318u 3mo agoPerhaps the options vary by region?
- felooboolooomba 3mo agotat n. anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition: * Like most souvenir shops, it sells a lot of old tat. * I'm not spending fifty quid on a piece of tat. People buy it all the time when they practice retail therapy.
- walrus01 3mo agoAre you sure it was actually via whatsapp, and not just a six digit code sent via regular SMS to the phone number on record for her account? It's possible whatsapp on her phone has simply hijacked the SMS client functionality and set itself as the default.
- NetMageSCW 3mo ago“which she doesn’t have and doesn’t want”
- subscribed 3mo ago> "WhatsApp on her phone" GP clearly said she doesn't have WhatsApp.
- walrus01 3mo agoIf I had a dollar for every time I've seen an older person that doesn't even know what application they're running, or can't tell the difference between the content of a website inside a browser window and an application that runs natively on their computer. I read what the GP wrote, I'm saying there's a non zero possibility she's misunderstanding something. It seems like something you have to specifically choose, on the amazon account side. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=TZJvM20USFlkA03xwj https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...
- subscribed 3mo agoI choose to not call a GP a liar or too thick for being unable to differentiate between apps :) I also chose their presumed first hand statement than your unrelated experience with unrelated third parties. Your point re: having to subscribe to WhatsApp notifications, if we're staying in the realm of "what ifs" and looking for the awkward but possible ways to discredit the claims, I can believe that she was enrolled without being asked. I've seen at least one person complaining about that exact scenario. Cheers!
- 3mo ago
- dude187 3mo agoSure it was Amazon? Sounds like a scam
- dude187 3mo agoSure it was Amazon? Sounds like a scam
- deltoidmaximus 3mo agoThe frustrating part is that since so many companies collect PII under the guise of security (and then use it for advertising) it's harder to tell if this is a legal scam or illegal scam.
- masfuerte 3mo agoYes. I'd gone round to see her and I checked her history to ensure it wasn't dodgy.
- jayGlow 3mo agoI has Facebook send a verification through Whatsapp, I legitimately thought it was a scam until I googled it and realized they do actually send verification that way.
- delecti 3mo agoStill annoying, but at least then it's the same company.
- hnlmorg 3mo agoWhich country was this? I’ve never known Amazon requiring WhatsApp. It uses SMS a lot. The only service I’ve used which does offer WhatsApp as a form of identification is PayPal. But even that is just one of many different authorisation options. I don’t have WhatsApp either and never once found that to be a limiting. So I wonder if the experience your relative was having is more nuanced than suggested.
- mrec 3mo agoI've never had it require SMS either. Probably because I've never given it a portable telephone number. (Until a couple of years ago I didn't have one, and I still use it as little as possible.)
- whoopdedo 3mo ago> She'll be buying her tat on eBay in future. A third of the things I buy* from eBay come shipped by Amazon. I can't always tell if they were using the warehouse for logistics or the seller is doing arbitrage. Either way, it would seem Amazon isn't bothered by people "voting with their wallet". (*That are new of course, used and open-box still come from the seller as I expect.)
- iugtmkbdfil834 3mo agoWhile your post is joking in tone, depending on how much we push back now is the exact level of delta between actual future and 'drink verification' copypasta[1]. [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/1dfea32/drink_verification_can_formatted_for_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/1dfea32/drink_ve...
- yomismoaqui 3mo agoThat is funny, sad & scary at the same time.
- ryandrake 3mo agoI guarantee you that there are real people out there in tech who think getting to a "Drink verification can" world would be great for corporate profit, and are actively doing things that bring us closer to that world rather than farther away.
- Atreiden 3mo ago"I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning." — Sam Altman
- Cider9986 3mo ago>You've been blocked by network security. To continue, log in to your Reddit account or use your developer token ....
- inigyou 3mo agoIt's just the "drink verification can" meme, and could have linked to any site but chose Reddit...
- iugtmkbdfil834 3mo ago
- uhhhhwhaaaa 3mo agoI would view a website that requires users to go through a lengthy verification process. Given all the astroturfing from companies and governments, this would give a bit of trust.
- antihipocrat 3mo agoWould it? Or would it just open up another revenue stream for websites? Verified corporate accounts sure, but with prices set per number of usernames per account, billed monthly.
- dzhiurgis 3mo agoWasn't twitter/x meant to be that? Pay and verify to enter members club. Didn't quite take off all while destroying goodwill that blue badge used to have.
- salemh 3mo ago[dead]
- Herbstluft 3mo agoThe actors running astroturfing will just continue to get direct access. If those sites cared about those things they would have done something long ago. All the verification process does is making astroturfing and propaganda campaigns even more desirable.
- inigyou 3mo agoThat's Facebook. How do you like it?
- Aurornis 3mo agoMeta has not spent $2 billion on ID lobbying. That bogus number came from a complete AI slop Reddit post that was later removed. That’s why the only references you can find to it are from sites like your gadgetreview.com link that repost clickbait without fact checking anything.
- nottorp 3mo agoIt doesn't matter what they spent excatly but it's in their direct interest to raise legal moats for competitors. Kind of like what Allegedly Open AI tried with the "AI will kill us all" threats.
- Aurornis 3mo ago> It doesn't matter what they spent excatly If the number didn’t matter then the comment above wouldn’t have led with it to make their point. The flaw in the original study was that someone started with a premise that Meta was at the heart of this and all spending could be traced back to Meta. They made Claude generate a report but they didn’t read any details, so they didn’t notice that Claude couldn’t access the actual documents. So it started guessing and hallucinating until it came up with the scary number that Meta was spending $2B on lobbying. The entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination. Reddit obviously is adding login gates to combat AI scrapers.
- nottorp 3mo ago> he entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination. I guess the $2B is hallucination. But it makes sense for them to do the "think of the children" lobby.
- NetMageSCW 3mo ago>But it makes sense for them to do the "think of the children" lobby. Why? It seems more like that’s baseless speculation with an agenda.
- walrus01 3mo ago(13 years ago) https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630
- dredmorbius 3mo agoTIL the phrase's origin. ("Please drink a verification can.")
- dzhiurgis 3mo agoAnd ~20 years ago computer riddled with porn malware was kinda normal. Times change, so does certain expectations.
- teeray 3mo agoI really wish there was a way for the electorate to preempt the votes of their representatives, so this kind of lobbying would be less effective. Sure, they might try carpet bombing the airwaves with PSA campaigns, but if the people really really don’t want what the lobbyist is selling, they would still be able to rip the ballot out of their congress critter’s hands and change the vote.
- voakbasda 3mo agoI would settle for representatives that actually represented the interests of the people rather than those of the wealthiest and their corporations.
- win311fwg 3mo agoThat would require the people making their interests known, which would never happen in practice. The reality is that most representatives are well-intentioned and try to do the job in good faith, but only the wealthy/corporations ever give them the time of day to tell what their interests are. The representative can only work with the information they have available. When do you think the last time the average Joe talked to their representative to communicate their interests, as is their democratic duty? The answer is, unfortunately, half past never. A representative cannot represent someone who keeps their interests a secret.
- upboundspiral 3mo ago"Never happen in practice" is objectively false given the civil rights wins of the past century. While incomplete they were real, and real change followed. Starting with the premise that it's impossible won't improve society.
- win311fwg 3mo agoMaybe you have a certain story in mind, but the civil rights wins that everyone remembers were wins only after the people waited too long to make their interests known to their representative, completely boiled over, and threw themselves directly onto the fire to compensate. That is quite different to having regular conversations with their representative throughout the normal course of their lives so that the representative could regularly do their job with the full understanding of the people's interests. You've pointed out something real, but it does not appear to be within the scope of our discussion.
- tokioyoyo 3mo agoIt will sound insane, but I would love a parallel (not a replacement!) internet where everyone is ID verified. Time and place for both.
- inigyou 3mo agoIt's called the telephone network. Also Facebook.
- inigyou 3mo agoYou will if we create websites that don't require it.