Compliance Tits
When the U.S. government recognised sesame seeds as an allergen, companies added them intentionally to recipes just to avoid needing to be careful about cross-contamination (citation).
We’ve evolved into a state where many (most?) consumer websites have evolved to rely on Surveillance Capitalism. I’ve lost track of the number of times when even people in very well-paid professions have expressed shock when I’ve implied paying for software access to online services. The abundance of “free” services (from social media to code hosting and more) has conditioned people to believe that “you just don’t pay for software or online services”. Someone still has to pay for it. Servers still cost money and staff still need to pay for rent and other expenses. It’s a cliché, but the user becomes the product.
According to Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence, who scraped the top 10K UK in September 2019, they found that the average site’s consent management platform (the cookie banner) listed 315 external vendors they share your information with. Further examples include Spotify that lists 95 vendors and Microsoft that honestly lists more vendors than I wanted to count - many of whom are advertising related.
For online advertising (and I guess offline as well), the more detailed and targeted your tracking data gets, the more valuable it becomes, and with the recent trend of every site asking for ID verification, your data just became a whole lot more detailed. Sure, everyone is claiming that they don’t get access to the raw data - just a signal about your age. For now. Give it a few years to boil the frog - just long enough to normalise handing over your government ID, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they stop making that claim.
We’re already seeing how companies are locking down their services to 18+ users only. Including ones that are quite conservative, like Anthropic with their Claude AI (honestly, I would be tempted to call them outright stuck-up, given how prude I’ve experienced the Claude auto-moderator to be at times). Now, they claim that they won’t implement in-chat ads. So, this isn’t a dig at their expense. But they aren’t the only company. Reddit, X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, Roblox and Discord (even though they delayed their plans) are all free/ad-supported services - yes, some/all of them also have a paid tier - which either introduced or discussed implementing age verification. And yes, this was done because of laws requiring this, but still - regardless of why this was implemented, or what/who instigated these laws - the water is boiling.
Now, that was a bit of a detour, but a necessary one. Now that I have set the stage, I ask, “How long until companies look for excuses to collect more personal information?” Once it becomes normalised and taking a selfie and adding a copy of your government ID becomes a standard part of filling in an online sign-up form. I’m wondering if we’re ever going to get to a point that along with the Terms and Conditions, Acceptable Use and Privacy Policy links, that we’re going to see a link in site footers called Compliance Tits. You click on it and you are directed to a small gallery of on-site nudes.
I’m humorously picturing the day that - similar to the sesame seed example from above - governments regulate that you can’t claim to need everyone’s ID unless you are an actual adult site, and just to make sure they don’t break the law, everyone becomes an adult site overnight.