A Manifesto Says Refuse Face Scans Because You Can't Change Your Face
Never Give Them Your Face argues age-verification laws build permanent biometric databases to answer a yes/no question. Its closing line says platforms need you more than you need them. The top reply does the math and disagrees.
The site separates age verification (a yes/no) from identity verification, and urges mass non-compliance to deny the schemes their needed cooperation. The flip: a commenter notes 50,000 departures out of 2 billion users is a rounding error, so the leverage simply isn't there.
Never Give Them Your Face argues that age-verification laws are forced identity-tracking in disguise: they demand facial scans and government IDs, building permanent, breach-prone biometric databases to answer what is really a yes/no question. It draws a sharp line between age verification and identity verification, likens compliance to "a permit check at the door of every conversation," and warns that "you cannot change your face" the way you'd rotate a password. Its strategy is mass non-compliance: close accounts with stated reasons and deny the systems the universal cooperation they need.
The premise the thread refused to grant
The manifesto rests on one load-bearing claim, and the top reply went straight at it.
"It ends with 'The platforms need you far more than you need them'. And I think this is the misconception. No, they don't. … They will not care if they lose 50,000 users out of 2 Billion." — a commenter rebutting the core premise
Others questioned the messenger. One reader ran a whois lookup and found the irony hard to miss.
"Who runs this site? … A whois search returns nothing illuminating. So… is it part of the parable … Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?" — a commenter who ran a whois lookup
The prose drew its own suspicion.
"Can't we even write a short text like this without LLMs anymore, not even when it's really important, when it's about humans against the inhumane?" — a Head of Engineering at matchory.com
The most constructive turn supplied what the manifesto lacks: an actual alternative.
"There is actually a way to prove the age anonymously. Yubikey-like devices support attestation … Owning a key proves that one is adult without disclosing identity." — a developer proposing a zero-knowledge alternative
That reframes the whole fight. If age can be proven by attestation without a face or an ID, then the database is the deliberate design choice, not an unavoidable cost of keeping minors out — which is precisely the surveillance the site warns against, now with a technical exit it never names.
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