> Credit cards are not documents. Many people don’t have them. Apple don’t provide any other way to verify your age because they are a stupid American company with American values in which you’re just as human as your credit score.
UK passed age verification law and people still find a way to blame the US.
> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.
While Ofcom hasn't required it yet, they have indicated that they very much plan to[1]. Apple is pretty clearly getting out ahead of this, and simultaneously removing the burden of compliance off all of the relevant app developers (which seems in line with their overall privacy stance - I'm more inclined to trust Apple with my ID than I am some social network)
That mentions app stores, but I can't see anything about device-level age-verification there.
Also, does Ofcom have the power under the Online Safety Act to mandate app-store verification (or device-level verification, for that matter)? Or would it require secondary, or even primary, legislation?
It's not about some American cultural attachment to credit cards. It's another classic Apple frustration move where they make the experience worse for their users in the hopes they'll blame someone else like the UK govt. They do the same thing with green bubbles.
What are you talking about, have you tried to exist in America without a credit score? It absolutely is an American principle, just because it's not explicitly stated in the constitution doesn't mean it's not true.
> First it attempted to check my Apple Wallet, it failed even though I have five cards in it and am able to use the App Store fine.
> Then it moved onto wanting me to manually add a card to verify myself. It failed with all my five cards. Four were debit cards, and one was a credit card from another country, cause you know I am an immigrant who has accounts still in my own original birth place.
I kind of prefer Credit Card over anything else if I have to do it. I give out my CC pretty regularly already so not much new PII to lose there. But it does sound like Apple has bugs to work out.
Yes. The point in the post is that it's very American to assume that every adult has a credit card. I'm in my thirties and I never had nor plan to have a credit card. I always have had only debit cards. In countries I've been raised and lived it's a sign of a poverty and total dependency on the bank with additional tax on your living, not an everyday tool like Americans perceive it.
Debit cards can be given to an underage, so I suppose they don't accept it for this reason.
In the UK, having a credit card is an overwhelmingly good move even if you never use the facility for credit. You can set up a direct debit to pay it off in full every month, making it effectively a debit card, but you get what are known as Section 75 protections on all purchases. So if you’re buying online and the firm goes bust (or you for any other reason don’t receive your goods), the credit card firm has to compensate you in full. For this reason I always make larger online purchases on credit card.
For many, obtaining a credit card just for the purposes of age verification, and not using it for shopping, feels easier than giving away their legal identifying information to a random third party.
In the US you're usually inundated with offers to open a credit card (often pre-approved) right in your mailbox. Even if you're a poor recent immigrant, or something.
Probably, but making a non-used CC just for using your own phone sound a bit weird, don't you think?
And I don't criticize US way of living here, but Apple is an international company and could do better adjusting to local cultural habits. But maybe they just punish people for this stupid law in the first place which is totally understandable.
Banks are subject to much more scrutiny (regulations, audits) than a random company. Or maybe even a highly established company which you'd rather not give your identity to, something like Pornhub.
You must live in an especially civilized place to be able to get by without a credit score. I wish I could close all my cards, but doing so would harm the score since card count and age are part of it.
Credit cards are a sign of poverty? Now that's a hot take.
I feel in Europe having a credit card means the complete opposite, only "rich" people have credit cards.
I have a credit card, I use it, I pay it off every month. Why am I seen as poor just because I have a credit card? It's just a tool.
It spares me from needing to maintain a 10000$ emergency fund in my checking account.
And in post-soviet countries you blink and you owe 15+% interest. I know many people who couldn't meet basic needs and pay a never-ending percentage. Or forgot to close the debt and lost more than ever gained from this tool in one payment. So people who can pay from their pocket just pay from it instead of endlessly tracking the grace period and counting the money.
I don't imply that's the same everywhere. Also probably depends on a local regulation and interest rates.
Also people here don't generally like to owe to somebody, that feels insecure.
At least in the UK it would be entirely legal for companies to use account age as a proxy for verifying you're over the age of 18. If your Apple account is over 18 then you probably are as well.
None of these corporations are going to have their CEO / CTO / CFO go to Jail, face the huge fines or get kicked out of the UK for you.
4chan, KiwiFarms etc. can stick a middle finger up at the UK because tbh they probably don't have that many UK users and have nothing there for the British Government to go after, the best they can do is probably nab the owner if they ever land on UK soil.
Apple could’ve opted to use the same (open, portable, privacy respecting) mechanism the euID architecture offers for such cases but of course Apple doesn’t do privacy, portable or open.
Right, Apple is a US company, with typical US culture, and they always try to "follow the letter of the law but not the spirit" when it comes to privacy and also when it comes to the age checks. In this particular case, they seem to have implemented the check in the worst possible way too, even the account age is above the age limit, what's hard to figure out here?
Is it surprising that people blame the company and the culture that fostered it, instead of the country that is trying to "protect itself", regardless of how misdirected that "protect itself" is?
> even the account age is above the age limit, what's hard to figure out here?
I have a gmail thats old enough to drink anywhere in the world, and never used it for youtube, accidentally opened youtube, they asked me for my age. At some point, I think its okay to just use account age instead of even asking.
Governments always want censorship and speech control. That never changes. The only difference is that now the general populace has accumulated enough disgruntlement to social media to be used against themselves.
No the difference is that when governments are still constrained by the rule of law it’s cheap PR to fight the government on data access claims but once they are authoritarian fascist industrialists fall over themselves to feed everything into Palantir
I'm comfortable reading much more than two paragraphs, even in online forums. In this specific case, unreadability is because of poor sentence structure. I quit in the middle of the second sentence.
They are not getting rid of Sora because people won't want AI videos lol. They're getting rid of Sora because they're so behind in this realm. AI videos online are mostly made with Chinese models, and the situation has been like this for more than one year.
The percentage of AI videos over the internet will certainly not decrease after Sora is gone.
The question is when will Chinese coding models have their Seedance moment and squeeze Opus/Codex out of market. It weirdly feels impossible and inevitable at the same time.
Its no surprise Chinese models will eventually win in a video generation race since they are far less censored and not affected by crazy copyright system.
It much easier to make Qwen animate tankman than it's to make any western model to generate indigenous people dancing because cough cough naked skin is baaaaad. Except this Musk one that will nonetheless affected by all the copyright mess.
Don't make games, but Unity does operate worldwide and has a LOT of supports for ads (their main money maker, unless something recent happened).
That globalization is a big reason many tech companies swell. When you need a team to work in and around every region's laws and regulations, you get big quickly.
But also, unity has slimmed down and scaled down on a lot of initiatives.
Seriously? Are you seriously making this argument?
Are you seriously comparing running a PC app store vs App Store? One is the most open platform and the other has only one (1, uno, sole, single) app store.
When I first heard about ripgrep my reaction was laughing. grep had been too established. No way something that isn't 100% compatible with grep could get any traction.
And I was dead wrong. Overnight everyone uses rg (me included).
Except it's not how this specific instance works. In this case the problem isn't written in a formal language and the AI's solution is not something one can automatically verify.
UK passed age verification law and people still find a way to blame the US.
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