Yes, 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.
Yep. This is about discovering what kind of n00dz you like.
Thankfully, there's alternatives to google image search, like Brave or DuckDuckGo which at least pay lip service to the idea that you're not tracked. (Who knows if they actually do avoid gathering and selling your data?)
They 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.
They 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.
> 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).
They 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).
You may not have come across this yourself, but Google requries verified ID to watch age-restricted videos on Youtube in EU, EAA, Switzerland or UK. It just hasn't hit US in the same way. Louisiana set a dangerous precedent though, legally.
I'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.
fyi, 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.
Even 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.
I 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.
"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.
Yeah. 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.
So 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.
The "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).
Meanwhile, 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.
Are 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.
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.
That’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”
As 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.
What 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...
The 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?
> 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.
The 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.
It's part of what's more-or-less the design document for the federal government. So of course it doesn't talk about behavior of non-government entities. Not because that's not important, but because it's off-topic and out of scope.
The government is the ultimate monopoly, you have no alternatives to it.
Some things have changed but that hasn't.
Instead of the first amendment being somehow applied to private actors (really dicey because doing that would violate _their_ first amendment rights!) perhaps what you should want instead is the re-fanging of antitrust?
I see nothing in the First about obscenity. That's just one of the things the puritans have managed to get away with circumventing the Constitution. It's also a pretty meaningless term.
This is no different than treason, hiring a hitman, fraud or libel. The founders did not consider any of those to be free speech as well. Everybody at the time understood obscenity was not protected so there was no need to explicitly call it out as an exception.
The legal concept regarding freedom of speech as in the First Amendment only applies to governments, yes.
But the moral ideal of freedom of speech is for everyone, and individuals and organizations can support and espouse it or censor and suppress it.
We need a concept to distinguish these, like "free as in legal" versus "free as in voice".
As for the argument that freedom of speech doesn't apply to misinformation or danger or obscenity or whatever -- that just creates an arms race to declare everything you don't like as misinformation or dangerous or obscenity. You combat such things in the open market of ideas and exchange, not by censorship. That's just might-makes-right.
Indeed the problems is people want freedom of speech for the speech they agree with. So, in this case, images. But because they disagree with anti-lockdowners or anti-vaxxers or whatever --they don't agree with those argument for free speech.
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.
Yes. 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.
I 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.
> 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).
It 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.
> 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).
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")