Privacy

The government has the names of prolific pedophiles and all they do is protect these rich and powerful child abusers.

Any claims that they're doing stuff like this to protect kids is complete bullshit.

So, Discord says they will not be using Persona. Count me skeptical as to their supposed new choice and methodology, given that they appear to have either been:

1. Unaware of Persona's capabilities or
2. In on it the whole time.

Neither option leaves me with the confidence needed to remain on any platform which recently announced this sort of "update" for our safety and "convenience".

I told my friends on Discord that I am not telling them how to proceed - they can keep using it if they want to - but I shall remove myself from there (and apparently Reddit as well soon?) post-haste. One reason I came to Lemmy last week was because I was tired of Reddit's US Ownership and, frankly, from everything I've heard...the guy in charge is a veritable Nazi anyway. As for Discord, for my friends I've set up my own Nextcloud instance and we can use Nextcloud Talk. For general groups, I'll have to look into Element with Matrix, I suppose.

Just deleted my Discord account. It wasn't an issue since I have no friends and never use it but still... it's the principle of the thing?

... to combat online child exploitative material, fentanyl trafficking, romance fraud, money laundering...

How is romance fraud at the same level as child exploit or money laundering? These assholes want to take full control of the world population.

It really occurs to me that this emphasis on surveillance (Palantir, this Discord stuff, the cameras everywhere, etc.) really shows how afraid the billionaire class is. They're trying to identify those that are getting uppity to try and prevent organizing, which they hope would quash revolution. They know people are angry; they know they've been looting and pillaging; they know they've been denying access to badic things like food, housing, healthcare; and they know they work for hostile interests. Yet, they're going to keep on doing it. They even have a new police force.

It never works though.

I opened Microsoft Solitaire on my phone the other day and the fucking thing wanted to age verify me. Over on the desktop the same thing happened in MS App Store. The stupid part? I've had this Microsoft account for so long that it legally qualifies as an adult in its own right.

This is all very bad. But, much like with the tools used during the War on Terror to track "potential terrorists", I suspect this system has a problem of excessive false positives and false correlations.

Historically, the response to this kind of data sweep was not to target people based on the information but to justify targeting of people after the fact. Also, the FBI made a habit of setting out honeypots for (typically mentally ill or extremely naive) would-be radicals or even radicalization programs intended to foment prosecutable misconduct where none had existed.

Case in point, the Newburgh Four

In 2008, FBI-paid informant Shahed Hussain met James Cromitie in the parking lot of a mosque in Newburgh, New York, a town with a high poverty rate and large Muslim community. (Cromitie was not part of the compassionate release request that has set the other three free.) Hussain befriended Cromitie, a down and out petty drug dealer. Hussain claims to have told Cromitie that he was a member of a terrorist organization in Pakistan, which Cromitie allegedly expressed interest in joining. In subsequent recorded conversations, Cromitie made hateful antisemitic remarks, but according to evidence presented during the trial in 2011, when Hussain encouraged him to “make a plan, pick a target, find recruits, . . . procure guns, and conduct surveillance,” Cromitie did nothing. Hussain sought to motivate Cromitie by assuring him he would be rewarded in the afterlife for a jihadist attack, to no avail.

Hussain began offering more significant financial incentives for executing an attack, including promising Cromitie a BMW and cash, but Cromitie remained uninspired, taking no action to develop an attack plan. Even FBI agents thought that Cromitie was “unlikely to commit an act without the support of the FBI source.” Hussain’s enticements became more extravagant, including offering to pay Cromitie $250,000, an unauthorized inducement the FBI captured on a wiretap. Apparently tempted by the big payoff, Cromitie accompanied Hussian to scope out a potential target, but thereafter avoided Hussain and his persistent attempts to resume contact.

Cromitie avoided Hussain for almost two months. After losing his job and desperate for money, he reinitiated contact with Hussain and agreed to plot an attack. At Hussain’s urging, Cromitie recruited other Muslim men, David Williams, Onta Williams (no relation), and Laguerre Payen, to serve as lookouts. Like Cromitie, they too were impoverished with histories of petty drug crimes and mental illness. With the four men along for the ride, the informant Hussain pushed the scheme forward, selecting a synagogue and U.S. Air Force base as targets and driving the defendants across state lines (to ensure federal jurisdiction) to pick up mock weapons arranged by the FBI.

If these programs are allowed to run their course, I suspect we'll see similar stories springing up as less ideologically motivated judges recoil at investigations and prosecutions where the crimes themselves are entirely orchestrated by the investigating agencies.

We should all just take pics of our taint and send that in. Malicious compliance.

What? But Discord pinky promised that pictures would stay on my system, and be deleted immediately after verification. Are you implying that they lied? Pikachu shock face

Why can't people just go down to their local shop, show their ID like when you buy alcohol, and buy some kind of age verification token/code which can be used with online services?

"This person looks like they might commit a crime in the future. You guys should go arrest him before that happens so we can 'zero out crime' in our neighborhoods."

The neighborhoods where crime has been 'zeroed-out':

"Why wouldn't I use verification? I've got nothing to hide".

This. This is why you do not submit willingly, regardless of what you have to hide. Fascism doesn't give a shit if you're innocent.

"We have determined based on the shape of your nose that you are Jewish. Please follow us to the nearest train."

I thought discord moved to k-id and ditched this system?

Well, now I see why there was an avoid OpenAI movement. They actually allowed Persona to create an internal database of their users and may be a potential AI provider for gov surveillance.

Since when did OpenAI started using Persona, and is it widely known that they use it ? Does anybody know? I used their service way back at gpt 3.5 days, back then you didn't need any verification.