Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check

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https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/25/hackers-expose-the-massive-surveillance-stack-hiding-inside-your-age-verification-check/

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Thing that was predicted to happen mysteriously happens.

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“Child safety” has simply become the marketing department for a rent-seeking surveillance industry.

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You now need to show ID to watch videos on vimeo.com. You send your ID to a corporation called persona

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Looks like I won’t be using Vimeo anymore.

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they have been working their assess off for the last decade to achieve this self imposed ostracism

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Isn’t persona the Palantir (AI powered genocide) affiliated company?

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Persona is the corp the article is abt

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What country are you in? I literally just did this (US) in my browser and watched (started) 3 different videos with no account or age checks.

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In shocking twist, “think of the children!” used once again as an excuse.

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For those who haven’t seen it, that’s one of the The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse.

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Every single time you mandate age verification, you are mandating the creation of a centralized database of extraordinarily sensitive personal information. Government IDs. Biometric facial data. The kind of data that, once breached, cannot be “changed” like a password. You get one face. You get one government ID number. When those leak—and they will leak—the damage is permanent.

Now do KYC verifications

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Hey, not two days ago someone said that connections between Peter Thiel and age verification was a “conspiracy theory”. Apart from the above link, the article states:

And as these mandates create a captive market worth billions of dollars, a whole ecosystem of venture-backed “identity-as-a-service” startups has sprung up to serve it. Persona, valued at $2 billion and backed by Peter Thiel’s investment network, is just one of many.

Unrelated to the above, but I like the wording too much:

“Child safety” has simply become the marketing department for a rent-seeking surveillance industry.

A note on the US v EU thing

Is this an US-only thing? There are several articles over the past few months hinting at US Big-Tech lobbying efforts in the EU. Thiel makes a living as a contractor of the surveillance apparatus. It is only in his interest to expand his business in the highly regulated EU, and I have not even started on his Dark Enlightment politics.

von der Leyen has no spine in this, if she isn’t actively complicit.

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Hey, not two days ago someone said that connections between Peter Thiel and age verification was a “conspiracy theory”.

someone said something similar (and in a foss community on this instance no less) about this age verification thing building a panopticon.

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I’ve seen this “conspiracy theories make it easier to enslave people” shit repeated on here for all kinds of subjects, but the Epstein one made me ragequit the site for like two days

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epstein had the opposite impact on me.

learning that multiple people have tried to unmask the epsteins in the past 100ish years, but it was always dismissed as nothing more than a conspiracy theory each time showed me the immense amount of control that the espteins have on our collective consciousness and watching westerners (especially americans) just shrug and keep doing what the epsteins want them to do anyways has been eye opening to me.

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these very firms are now lobbying for stricter age verification mandates. They’ve positioned themselves as protectors of children while actively working to expand the legal requirements that guarantee their revenue stream.

Lawmakers mandate an impossible task, VC-backed startups pop up to sell a “solution,” those startups then lobby for even stricter mandates to protect their market, and the cycle repeats.

“Child safety” has simply become the marketing department for a rent-seeking surveillance industry.

Excellent point

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wait, they actually designed this shit with biometrics?

I thought they tried to placate us with zero knowledge proofs, at least? No?!?

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Children are in real danger of harm, as a result of this. I am thinking of the general safety for children, in wanting them to not be individually identified and targeted for manipulation and have their data sold.

It also equally applies to everyone else. What absolute ghouls and/or dimwits that are pushing for this.

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Hopefully, we will have the means to strip out or spoof the SystemDOGE verification in Linux. Or even better, something akin to torrenting, where many false IDs are manufactured and shared, constantly replaced as needed by automated AI.

I truly don’t trust the corporations and government that wants to connect our physical and digital selves together.

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Hopefully. At the mo, it’s totally bypassable.

But what concerns me is, it could so easily slippery slope into being unavoidable. Most sites forced into requiring some PKI signed token. Token only obtained by giving your gov ID to Big Surveillance.

The requirements of modern life could end locked behind a mass surveillance gate.

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Kids need a little danger to grow.

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Comments in Privacy@lemmy.ml

Loyal Moses has been on about this. Apparently the bills require third party cloud storage of the information in addition to an online requirement (for logging in???), and continuous telemetry to in use apps on the desktop environment.

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“Child safety” has simply become the marketing department for a rent-seeking surveillance industry.

Damn ain’t that the truth.

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Was looking at a used car online. Found a site that had option to ‘reserve’ the car until paperwork was done. Started innocuously with email and phone info, to text updates. Fine. Then it asked to verify info, with scans of driver’s license.

Persona.

Noped right out.

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Sounds like a scam. My friend recently looked for cars online, saw one he thought was good. Had a weird description “only 70,000km on the odometre but air conditioning is broken” like how? Then my friend paid $300 for a “viewing” of the car and the scammer made off with the money. Needless to say my friend isn’t very smart and never was! Imagine paying just to see something. This is sadly what mental illness does to a person. Not the first time my friend was scammed either.

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I had a friend that stupid. Had.

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In other news: “Duh.”

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Agree but this does need to be explained to people who aren’t in the know. These laws are currently being marketed as “put the power in parents hands” in various states left, right, and center.

Its a good bet when there seems to be widespread bipartisan push for restrictive laws that literally no one asked for, it’s gonna be something bad. But you have to explain to mouthbreathers in the electorate why or this shit just gets rammed through.

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There’s no explaining it to the public at large in our forums. We already know. Unless people suddenly watch a couple trusted news sources en masse and those news sources choose to explain, ignorance will rule.

But then that’s the entire point of fracturing information like this. Fake news. Don’t trust science. That’s woke, don’t listen. Etc.

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“hiding inside” of it? No no, the whole point is surveillance with full KYC. With the end goal being digital ID and CBDC and social credit scores. What the authorities consider to be correct behavior will earn points and if you so much as breathe a syllable of a question about why they’re making you do something you’ll lose points and you’ll be locked out of things that didn’t require an ID to get into before, possibly even access to a grocery store or any other place or service you could get food from

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i want the 90s internet back, when only nerds were on it. it was way better back then.

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Some of those nerds are how we got to where we are today.

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So you’re saying forbid the rich from using the internet?

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I think we should just forbid being rich

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Every time I say this I get downvoted to hell

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I’d like to see people rebuild something like that inside i2p or something similar. But with modern browser fingerprinting it’s very hard not to be identifiable even there, unless you take precautions most people absolutely won’t do.

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the music, the clubs, the clothes, the food

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The Epstein class wants to reliably know who is (and therefore isn’t) an adult on the internet.

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They want to identify the bots from the humans. Partially for advertising.

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They want to identify the girls. For grooming.

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It was a typo. Fixed.

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Deleted by moderator

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I hear you do what you can, it is too late already but your effort is appreciated.

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Don’t LoRa mesh devices have extremely low bandwidth?

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Deleted by moderator

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Great article! Some writing cannot be accused of AI-generation… Because it’s good.

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Deleted by author

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Holy fuck I got about 10 minutes into this can someone do a tldr

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No. Some things are important enough to fully read.

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