Anecdotally, I suddenly had almost my entire friend group on matrix after that as well. I had campaigned for months but AV was the thing that got them to finally sign up.
A child mode flag is fine. But a birthdate is a recipe for data collection and fingerprinting. And with Google, we're seeing a full verification requirement flag that means people have to scan identity documents or face pictures. It's a slippery slope.
The OS (I'll use systemd as an example) knows the birth date to determine whether or not you fall within an age range, but the applications are not offered the exact birth date by the API.
Fingerprinting, perhaps it is a higher risk, the age range is being more directly provided. However, once a user is under 18 they're already triggering more stringent privacy laws and rules, an inability to enter into contracts, etc, and then when you get to the "over 18" age range it all becomes rather vague.
Also, I highly doubt existing social media and Internet applications haven't already figured out most of their users' ages rather trivially using other means. Discord implicitly admits to this by saying that 90% of their users will not even be asked to verify their age. Discord already knows how old 90% of their users are with high confidence.
Of course when we talk about someone like Google or Discord we are talking about a privately operated service provider and business, which is a separate issue than the OS-level privacy flag and is worth separating as a distinctly different concept. Private businesses were always able to scan your identity documents or face pictures if they wanted to do that as a prerequisite to using their products or services regardless of the law. In almost all states, this practice was never banned, and even in states with more stringent biometrics collection requirements like Illinois you can still do this as long as it's implemented in a legally compliant way.
They will also likely dial up the sensitivity of the system over time. Maybe initially 90% of users are let through without doxxing themselves, like Discord claims. But over time, they have the knob to turn up the sensitivity to get more verifications so eventually everyone is verified. They love to exploit the network effect of making people think they're missing out while all their friends are in, exact same strategy they've used for years with the sudden demand for phone numbers on good standing accounts.
THIS. Nearly lost several large owned 'servers' on the account, too, due to the phone number demands! Support was awful, making needless month long hoops and ultimately not helping me at all.
Meanwhile Discourse (the open source forum software) has recently added voice and video calling. Matrix is a good option, also.
This site could be useful also since there's been a recent trend of abliterated model providers demanding a hugging face account and email collection. I assume this is so the providers can spam people since there's not much other benefit. Hugging face had also been making it harder to sign up with disposable email addresses since they throw a weird error during sign up if they detect it. Anyway, I see a site like this being useful to sidestep all that data collection.
Open code is great and I use it, however, they were caught uploading prompts to their summarization AI instead of using the configured AI model endpoint. This has since been fixed.
That said, running in a completely offline mode remains unnecessary difficult to configure. In particular, toggling off Zen seems to require a community plugin.
Likewise, opened a couple in the past few years and never saw this. That said, bank lobbies have tons of ambient cameras anyway, so they don't really need a selfie.
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/discord-dev-responds-a...
(Not everyone got unbanned for grid posting yet)
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