Then I'll lose my account.

You know, using privacy-first services, de-googling and self-hosting has really insulated me from a lot of the Internet problems. Cloudflare went down? Didn't notice. AWS crashed? I'm using co-location and local hosting. Microsoft decided to put AI in Windows and turn the telemetry to 11? I'm using Linux (Arch, btw).

If I don't give my ID to them, then I lose nothing. What services are they offering in exchange? Social media full of bots and toxic political propaganda. Streaming sites which are fragmented, expensive and enshittified.

I'm just not seeing the value offer that they're providing.

Fuck you, take the account

Any site that demands my ID will be told where to go and how to get there.

Well they promise to delete the data when they're done with it, so everything is fine.

Starting to sound like ai is going to be useful after all..

To create a realistic old person character to bypass these.

I don't think we need experts to tell us this is not a good idea

I think I'll just lose my account, thanks!

Facebook started (for no legitimate reason I can see) to not allow me to login like three or four years ago because they stopped accepting my second auth factor. They told me the only way I could login from now on was if I gave them a scan of my driver's license, and I'm never doing that. So, I just let the stale account sit there in that digital graveyard.

Ok.

I'll go to whatever platform doesn't require it. Thanks though.

Experts Are Worried

nah anyone with a functioning brain is worried, fuck those 'experts'.

If a company I have a paid account with asked me to verify my age they'd lose my subscription so fast their head would spin. Ultimately I'm just one person but if enough people feel the same way it could be a deterrent but in the grand scheme of things there probably aren't enough of us