The fact that it verifies by ID scan is also not safe at all for a million different reasons.
A better way would have been to charge a small subscription fee - like $2/month or something. The fee filters out 99% of the trolls out there (who wants to pay to troll) and also gives the app/website admins access to billing info - name, mailing address, phone number, etc - without the need for a full ID scan. So the tiny amount of trolls that do pay to troll would have to enter accurate deanonymizing payment information to even get on the system in the first place.
And it can be made so only admins know peoples' true identities. For the user facing parts, pseudonyms and usernames are still very possible - again so long as everyone understands up front that such a platform would ultimately not be anonymous on the back end.
But oh no, that won't hypergrow the company and dominate the internet! Think of all the people in India and China you're missing out on! /sarcasm
I think you underestimate the willingness of people to pay to troll, it may filter out people but an app that was (in theory) meant to be secure shouldn't think of a problem as filtering rather than securing. Admins knowing peoples' identities simply moves the weakest link in the chain to the admins. I think an app like this was doomed from the start and 4chan simply pulled the plug on an already leaking bathtub.
I've thought about buying throwaway phone numbers just to troll linkedin. I'd be surprised if people weren't finding ways to get accounts on apps like this for trolling.
The only reason I haven't is because it feels like LinkedIn may have already jumped the shark and I wouldn't really get the value for my money.
> Admins knowing peoples' identities simply moves the weakest link in the chain to the admins.
And now you have a better chance at pointing a finger at someone, at the very least. And the thought of that finger pointing would be enough to keep an admin on top of things.
Everything is still up to whoever is running the platform. I'm just saying that, from an web admin perspective, that $2/month works. And if it doesn't, you have their billing info to track trolls down irl if necessary.
The issue is they decided to roll their own extremely questionable service and insecurely store sensitive images in a public bucket
Multiple SAAS vendors provide ID verification for ~$2/each. They should have eaten
that fee when it was small and then found a way pass it onto the users later
no, but it is _tremendously_ more difficult than email or even ID scans (unless you're doing actual verification, which is both more expensive and complicated than just charging a nominal fee or even just attaching a Card object to a stripe customer). Just getting to stand on top of an extremely robust existing system (payments) gets you so much adjacent help in keeping bad actors out, or at least getting it down to a human-team manageable level. It can be the difference between a viable business and not.
The first part is its goal: identity is secondary, the main purpose is money. It means a customer can put a fake name and address as long as the money part is considered OK. Most PSPs won't check the cardholder name (it can be used for fuzzy scoring, but exact match is a fool's errand). Address is usually only required for physical goods and won't be checked otherwise. And 3DSecure will shift the blame enough that the PSP won't need to care that much about the details.
The second part is the whole mess that comes with payments. You'll become a card testing pot in no time, and you'll be dealing with all the fuss just to check identities, you'll soon be rising the token payment to a significant amount to cover the costs, and before you realize it half your business has shifted into payment handling.
Especially if you only deal in government issued currency and refuse to use crypto. The US dollar is the world's reserve currency for a reason - we have tons of opaque and invisible systems in place to make sure it's rock solid. Systems that other countries either don't have entirely or rely on a series of privately owned systems that feel like chewing gum and string.
> you act like it's impossible to get payment credentials that have nothing to do with the user
This is incorrect. The parent acts like it isn't trivial to obtain payment methods that aren't linked to the payer. It seems like a reasonable possibility.
For whom? For people willing to be an asshole on the internet? For people willing to stalk other people online? This sounds exactly like the group of people that would look for ways of paying for something in ways not linked to them, even if that means "borrowing" someone else's identity
Imagine flipping the genders and writing this comment in another context: "Women will go to great lengths to try and manipulate men. $2/month just gets you less crazy bitches", and imagine the outcry and downvotes. However it's totally normal and acceptable to bunch all men into a singular group and demean 50% of the population.
Your example isn't properly gender flipped. That would be "Women will go to great lengths to take revenge on their exes. $2/month just gets you less broke crazies."
While the above statement would benefit from adding the word "Some" to the start, I'm not sure it would generate much outcry.
Women aren't evaluated on their income like men are, they are evaluated on their looks. An equivalent app would be something that lets men share if women are less attractive than their pictures.
You’re worrying about the wrong thing here. The fact that so many men do these kind of creepy behaviours, and that men who do them are largely indistinguishable from men you meet every day, means that from women’s perspective “men do creepy things, I need to be careful” is an entirely reasonable prior.
Thinking every man is a predator is a great way to mostly meet male predators and wind up alone.
On app dates, it's extremely obvious when the person you're sitting down with has the "every man is a predator" attitude. Being treated like that isn't fun. Then a lot of people wonder why all their dates fail or go nowhere or why they can't move outside the app.
It is always interesting to see which prior probabilities are seen as acceptable for use and which are not. Humans have a very limited amount of time, and coupled with risk of physical danger, it should be expected for prior probabilities to be used. I would even go so far as to say necessary for long term survival.
In this case, given the long, well established history of the subjugation of women by men, I would say they are well within their rights to be "careful".
—- About 41% of women and 26% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported a related impact.
—- Over 61 million women and 53 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
From memory I think those numbers for men include those in same sex relationships.
Also worth noting that men are much more likely to be physically or psychologically attacked by other men than they are by women.
I’m not minimising the idea that women can
Be violent, but we need to be careful to have in proportion. If you look at the most serious categories of harm, or only murder, the differences really are very stark.
Not at all downplaying the seriousness of emotional and psychological abuse, but these are very different things. Which is the main reason that the concept of this app doesn't bother me much. The immediate physical safety risks of dating as a woman are significantly greater than for men.
Sure, but it's about a factor of two -- the difference between the sun at noon and 5pm, not the difference between night and day.
Broken bones heal, but psychological wounds can last a lifetime -- and cut that lifetime short either through self-harm or the impact on chronic diseases. Sexual assault is so problematic because it has a very long term psychological impact on people.
Would you pursue that line of justification if the issue were ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and/or gender expression? I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, and there are sound arguments for and against equating those things, but it seems like it merits consideration before one comments, not after.
Because we live in black crime culture and blacks do violently attack whites on much greater scale than the other way around. You don’t have to be even necessarily evil for that, honestly just some normalised behaviour in some black people can be enough to become a criminal for white people.
But you are just explaining why you are bigoted, bigotry which, in turn, you imply explains why you don't think it's wrong to be sexist. Sexist enough to disregard the importance of publicly sharing people's information.
I’m a man myself, I have dated both men and women, and I did once experienced sexual assault by a men.
From a personal experience, I know for example a person in my friends group who turned to be a person that forces himself on drunken women at parties after they say no. And I don’t see anything wrong with letting all my friends know about this.
I don’t really understand why you here feel so afraid of people gossiping online. I’m a man that sleeps with women and I am not afraid about them talking about me. Even if they loose some platform, you know, they will still talk to each other.
I don't think you will find too many men being angry at your example comment just like no women will be pissed about what OP said about men. Don't be fragile.
Hey now! They use ID verification bub - how are you gonna fake that? It’s not like there are just public buckets of legitimate ID photos taken by real women for you to hoover up. Check mate.
The claim that it provides safety really is just that, an empty claim.