For reasons that boggle my mind, I am required to keep a Google account for work (ties into some proprietary software the company uses)
Earlier today, I got the following -
Yes, I’m certain people under the age of 16 are known for their use of very specific EHR software that requires professional license to subscribe to in the first place. Makes perfect sense.
Anyone else get one of these “for you protection” msgs from Big evil?
My Google account itself is over 18. I wonder if that’s verification enough.
it could be passed down from your parents, fairly common to register emails for your unborn children, otherwise the cool ones might be taken by the time they are concieved and in need of an email. personally, i have reserved emails for many generations to come, my eventual grandchildren will have dope emails
How do you know the names of your unborn grandchildren of your unborn children?
Nope. I got the verification email on my 20 year old account just the other day
Mine went away, admins must realize I won’t comply before hell freezes over.
Not your problem. Call tech support.
Personalized ads are off
Timeline is offI see this as an absolute win, keep not knowing my age!
Right. Safe Search doesn’t matter because Google Search has been outclassed for a while now. There’s no drawbacks… other than the fact that apparently OP gets told about this every single day.
They will nuke your account after 14-30 days if you don’t comply.
Really? That’s… astonishing.
You know what? I hope they do that. So long as they give fair warning, so I don’t rock up to work one day and no longer have access to work files / OAuth / 2FA without warning.
They send an email, I can escalate. Not my problem then.
is this true? i think i have some few old google accounts i used to use, guess i should see if i can login and backup some data if there’s any left…
just upload the McLovin id from Superbad as your id. problem solved
I don’t really use it but I wonder if my google account I’ve had since 2007 will get flagged
Google tried for 3 months to get me to respond to their mail messages every day, now 1 year later I am glad I took the step to degoogle.
As a search engine I usually use No Ai DDG, searX,swiss cows,startpage. Browser is vanadium, ironfox,cromite on phone .
Librewolf or zen on linux laptop.
Filen as cloud storage.
Posteo.com as a mail provider
Lmao at specifying no ai ddg
Tell me, I want to laugh too, I’m still learning every day
I mean to be real, every search engine in the world has or will implement an AI quick search feature.
I feel so bad for ddg getting absolutely reamed for simply trying to innovate. They have one of the best most private ai implementations yet, and for that innovation they got nothing but hate.
If you don’t like quick search whatever, but ddg’s implementation of it is great.
I’m de-Googling right now, and I’m trying out Kagi for search. It’s paid, but so far I’m liking it. No ads, and very customizable in that you can boost or lower results from specific sites, among other things.
Honest question: if you’re paying for Kagi, how is that different than using a credit card for verification with Google? It would seem to me that you’re willingly connecting your identity in either case. Maybe i’m wrong.
Cheat code: Have your employer pay for it. ;)
A more serious answer is, you could use an anonymous payment card, or apparently crypto as well, if that’s your threat model. I’m not looking for total anonymity, but theoretically paying for the service means you are a customer and not the product. No ads/paid search rankings, no tracking, no selling your data to third parties. Yes, I do use uBlock Origin, I could block ads on DDG or whatever, but that doesn’t seem like a sustainable business model. I’m kinda rethinking the services I use and how much they are worth to me. I’m not here to sell you on it, I’m on day two of my Kagi subscription, but so far I like what I see.
Edit: I don’t think I really answered your question. Kagi isn’t in a position to be an identity verifier, and it doesn’t look like they have any interest or requirement to do that. It is looking more and more like Google/Meta/et al will be policing the Internet, and I just want no part of it. Google will absolutely sell your data to third parties. Kagi says they will never do so. I don’t know how they’d prove that, but I hope they are true to their word.
I’m a proponent of privacy for the sake of privacy and as a right. Anonymity is the only way to ensure privacy. Seeking privacy does not inherently imply nefarious intent (not that you explicitly said it does). Sounds like Kagi wouldn’t be a good choice for me. And that’s OK. Thanks for answering my Q!
I added some more context in an edit to my comment.
I agree with you about privacy being a right. It’s extremely difficult to have 100% anonymity, and I think that’s part of the calculus when deciding who we trust our data with. Google 100% already knows my identity, and therefore they shouldn’t need to collect any further identity verification documents “papers, please”-style. Maybe it’s more of a protest on my part, and I’m sure it’ll be just as effective as one, but I don’t want to participate in this identity police crap.
Thanks for the heads up about the edit.
Certainly 100% anonymity isnt possible, even with a VPN. Best practice is always dont do anything online that you wouldnt want attached to your real identity/life.
It sucks, there’s inherently a trade-off between anonymity and participating on the Internet. Here’s my step-by-step plan to staying anonymous on the Internet:
- Acquire a Thinkpad T480 with cash. Meet somewhere without cameras. Don’t drive past traffic or Flock or Ring cameras on the way. Leave your phone at home.
- Flash libreboot, install Qubes OS
- Spoof your Wi-Fi adapter MAC address
- Crack your neighbor’s Wi-Fi password
- Operate over TOR to exploit machines and build a botnet around the world under different jurisdictions
- Be active during set hours to appear as if you operate in a different region
- Build proxychains across your botnet
- Don’t do anything at all on the Internet because everything now requires an account and identity
- Go outside and touch grass
Edit: I don’t know how to format.
You can pay with bitcoin
I’ve been using Kagi for a couple years now and it’s been terrific.
Good luck on your degoogle journey, transfer gmail account piece by piece to new provider and test every login, Don’t do it automatically
Thank you. It’s a long process to migrate all these accounts, I have hundreds of accounts listed in Bitwarden, and I’m going through them one at a time. I’m moving my email to my own domain that I’ve had email hosting setup on for a while now. At least I shouldn’t need to do this again as I “own” the domain.
Another filen and posteo user here. Both are great
My work Microsoft profile as a civil servant in an American subject estate in Europe doesn’t require these documents. I gather my employer is swiftly providing them in my stead at the double
As an American sysadmin that mainly works in a mainly google house, there is literally just a checkbox that says ‘The users in this OU are 18+’. Can’t say for MS though.
I have to work with Microslop at work, i feel your pain
Since porno sites are limited to 18+ people, I suggest you could authenticate yourself by providing the link to a very specific type of videos
Just send them a pic of your dick wearing sunglasses, your dick has to be 18+ for that to be legal.
I’m so sorry. :(
My workplace hasn’t forces Big Evil upon us yet, but I think it’s just a matter of time. Whenever that happens, I’ll buy the cheapest off brand phone for that purpose.
Work should buy you the phone 🤷
Got a job at a BYOD workplace, so I ended up having to repurpose my old devices as my work devices. Fortunately I had many from my hoard to choose from. Still get taken aback when I realize that most of my coworkers have all their work stuff connected to their personal devices without a second thought.
Big ick.
100% 😞
Speaking of Google: has anybody noticed how unbearably slow Google sites are lately?
I almost never use Google search anymore. But I hit it the other day because I couldn’t find some really obscure kernel error message, and the damn thing froze Firefox. And it did so repeatedly and consistently after restarting the browser, until I killed almost all Google scripts in uBO.
The same “experience” can be felt on any Google site, like Map.
I’ve heard they intentionally ruin the experience for Firefox users, but my canon is that google engineers are simply incompetent. If they want to prove me wrong, they can fix it.
YouTube definitely does that. Im on Brave, been for years, and in the past year clicking on videos makes them load with several seconds delay, with a popup in the bottom left along the lines of “Experiencing interruptions? Find out why” and the help page it takes you to if you click it, basically gives the default reasons of “youre internet may be slow”, but IIRC it also includes the reason that you are using ad blocking scripts
Try ironfox ,cromite ,librewolf
Can’t says I’ve noticed, because apart from the stupid account, I don’t use google.
That’s on your end though
Take a ‘selfie’ of a 4k video of a talking person, beats it. Or if you have access to a paid gen AI service I would expect a high detail AI fake to work, although it doesn’t work with low detail.
Couldn’t it get flagged and manually reviewed leading to a ban?
The selfie is 3rd party so I doubt it. I did it to my main account when it showed up on YouTube a while ago and I’ve had no issues. However it works is too stupid to know I’m taking a photo of a laptop screen even though it’s unbelievably obvious to anyone with eyes.
