I was broadly with them until the penultimate paragraph; the only “mess” GDPR has made has been one that was deliberately self-inflicted by petulant advertisers trying to make things difficult for users in an attempt to get it neutered, because it actually requires companies to treat your personal data with a basic level of care and respect.

Yeah, they do. AIUI there’s some nuance about what constitutes “legitimate interest” so it’s possible (probable in fact) they might only delete pictures where you’re the main subject but not e.g. group photos from events

I’ve always obsessively kept my photos off any cloud provider for years only to discover that the entire rest of the family have a treasure trove of fully tagged pictures of me uploaded to every major provider out there. In most cases I think it even ties the tag to my phone/email/birthday entry in their Contacts list.

Wait I think I’ve already been here

The interesting thing about this post is that it’s exactly equally as wrong whether you take it as sarcasm or at face value.

The biggest problem I’ve seen with the “use AI help but you’re ultimately responsible for what you submit” approach is that it’s damn near impossible to usefully define or enforce what “responsible” actually entails.

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humans will remain accountable

I see this a lot in clanker apologia, but it’s never clear what “accountable” actually entails. Unless it’s something of the order of a first-offense permanent ban from the project then it’s not going to dissuade anyone from being lazy meat proxies.

One of my former classmates got locked up for trying it on with an underage girl in a cinema. I’m not saying Showcase is a hive of villainy, but for sure it’s exactly the sort of place where you need to be particularly vigilant against predators.

Even right wingers like this dude don’t want authoritarian surveillance bs

There’s long been a hypocrisy with the right where they’re all about civil liberties and privacy for themselves and authoritarian surveillance for everyone else.

Honestly I think some people just want to be offended. “Oh I can’t use this in class because of the name” is complete nonsense. If the faculty are going to immediately assume you’re doing weird sex things with the kids then you’ve got bigger communication problems.

I had the temerity to finish my study abroad and return to my country shortly after I bought it, and it got a ‘blocked in your region’ even though it was a single-player game. Turns out there’s some Steam games that you only own for as long you stay in the country you bought them.

I understand that licensing issues exist that are country-based, the part I still can’t forgive is that the asshole in customer support lectured me like I was maliciously breaking their rules on multiple counts, first by being in the Wrong Country, and secondly by filing a support ticket to ask them to either fix it or give me my money back; he then hinted that I might be banned (subtext: lose several thousand dollars’ worth of my other games) if I pursued it any further.

So yeah, it does irk me when people get all fangirly about what noble defenders of the consumer Steam is.

I have firsthand experience of a game I’d paid for on Steam being taken from me with no refund, so I’m def gonna push back on any “relax, guy” posts on this.

(EDIT: shoutout to the downvoter demonstrating OP’s point about rabid fanbois perfectly)

There’s lots of cryptographic type approaches where the entity validating you is air-gapped from the entity certifying your age.

But if you don’t trust them it’s not hard to figure out a scratchcard system where for, say, £1 cash your local newsagent checks your ID and lets you pick a card that you scratch off to get a code that you can then use to obtain a cryptographic token online signed by a recognized CA. Neither the newsagent nor the card issuer have any way of tying you to that code, and if you don’t like the idea of using the same token on multiple sites you can always buy more. Of course you’d also have the option of obtaining codes online, but there’s something I think people would find reassuring about the existence of a visible physical gap.

There’s plenty of ways age checking could be decoupled from identity checking, and I find it extremely suspicious that the proponents of these laws aren’t promoting them.

weirdest use of that meme format to date

also the irony of 145 IQ man tripping over his own grammar