#assuming you have a couple of (specific) datapoints about me.

[where-the-water-flows]

If you know how to do it you can use someone’s phone number to find their full legal name and home address. It’s just a bit of Google and knowing what websites stores this kind of info. Saw your tags asking how a phone number could verify someone’s age

So, I appreciate you dropping into my askbox to pass that info on - genuinely, it's kind of you - and I can see how my tags came across, but what I actually meant wasn't 'how can you find info on someone just with their phone number??' -- I actually do exactly that kind of thing in my day job pretty regularly, and I have to conform to a lot of real strict ethic constraints that uh, bluntly, random discord moderators...do not.

What I was actually getting at is the fact that, assuming the hypothetical server is just using a phone number as age verification (and doing data broker/google search on that), how in the hell is it controlling for someone doing what people under the arbitrary age limit du jour have been doing since we started implementing this sort of check, ie, lying like rugs and supplying info for someone in their family/social circle instead who is older than [whatever age].

like. sure. maybe you get a phone number for age verification. awesome. plug that into your data broker/google/etc of choice, run your searches, and ok, it belongs to jane smith, 38 years old, accountant who lives in ballarat, she's totally fine to join the 18+ server! come on in jane, the smut is plentiful and the doves are extremely dead. Jane smith has a kid. jane smith's kid is 15. jane smith's kid isn't allowed in the server, because it's an 18+ only server.

jane smith's kid almost certainly knows their mum's mobile number.

how the hell can Hypothetical Server Mod control for 15 year old jane smith's kid putting in jane smith's mobile number instead of their own? and also, separately, how the hell is HSM dealing with the many -- many many many -- different privacy laws around the globe?

not just in terms of handling that sort of information on people (and also requesting it in the first place!), but also just. some countries you can get so much fucking info on someone! (the US. I'm talking about the US.)

some you can't. because privacy laws, because the info isn't publicly accessible, because it's not online and is only in hard copy at the local government office, because it's collated but only in a nonenglish language, because it's geolocked-- etc.

also, like. even if the hypothetical phone number brings up someone in the US, and also your hypothetical mod team has decided, y'know, fuck privacy laws, security of information and data ethics can take a long walk off a short pier, we're keeping this server 18+ or dying trying!

data brokers aren't...actually consistently what you would call...super accurate, or like, accurate at all. if you have a unique name, yeah, sure, you're probably kinda fucked! (assuming you're in, again, somewhere the data brokers focus) but like. if you're named something a little more common - say, james smith, or maria sanchez in the US- uh. well. there sure are a lot of people you could be, and some of them - most of them! - are over 18.

and ok, sure, a phone number is (usually) only associated with one person, but. you can get a lot of false positives, false negatives, and straight up 'we don't know 🤪', the latter of which is sometimes hidden by the databrokers going 'our best guess is that this person is: An Age!! somewhere between 0 and 200 years old. 😇'

again, I use this stuff for work, I can tell you exactly how inaccurate it can get as soon as you throw something like 'not based in the US/UK' or 'uses a nickname/multiple name formats' or 'isn't super online' or 'older than 65 and not turbo wealthy' at some of these - I've had more than one confidently tell me that [my wallet name] is an accountant based in darwin who makes horror films in alice springs on the side, and also, is 26, and had 2-3 kids with her husband Lauchlan.

literally none of these facts are true. like. even vaguely.

and that can of worms doesn't even get into if someone has requested to be removed from data broker databases and/or takes online privacy Very Seriously and/or is just fundamentally ungoogleable, which is...more common than you'd think. less common than you'd like, but more common than you think, even before google started enshittifying itself out of existence.

which is why when you're trying to do things like prove your identity to uhhh goverments, banks, etc, they want multiple forms of ID, one of which is usually a photo ID, none of which anyone should be sending to a random on discord, or, frankly, asking for from a random on discord, both bc my god privacy and security risk but also like. handling that information can actually have legal requirements!

anyway. extremely long ramble on the failings of databrokers over, I appreciate you reaching out to help explain and it was very kind of you anon, sorry that I have. uhhhh kind of a lot of professional feelings about data privacy and basic social engineering, by which I mean saying 'no I'm totally 18 pinkie swear' in the grand tradition of teens wanting to get into age locked areas ever, your forebears lied on LJ so you could lie on discord.

[apenitentialprayer]

@mommabearlaciii said:

there's just so much to unpack here Okay, so let's talk about this.

what's the point of this post? The "point" is that I found it interesting, and wanted to be able to quickly reference it in the future. Which, you know, is the point of quoteposting, no?

why are we normalizing and naturalizing men neglecting their families? You can't "normalize" something that is, sadly, already normal. That being said, if you are accusing me of thinking this state of affairs is a good thing, you are reading quite a lot into a simple statement of fact. If you are accusing me of thinking this state of affairs is a good thing, you are assuming I have an agenda I don't have, when you are the only one out of us three (e.g.: you, me, and the author) to interpret this statement of a fact this way. This is a datapoint; and a lone datapoint, at that. And data can be interpreted many ways. The author certainly isn't interpreting this as a good or natural thing; she is mad that heterosexual couples who espouse egalitarian beliefs before marriage end up in situations where women are performing 65% or more of the childcare. The whole book is about investigating why this is the case.

"more involved" is incredibly subjective and non specific Lockman cites Marc Bornstein's "Parenting X Gender X Culture X Time" in Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives for this information. If you want to dispute how she came to this conclusion, feel free to look into what she is citing - it should be on page 100.

There is actually no known human society in which men are responsible for the bulk of all childrearing. Cross-cultural anthropologists report that in every part of the world, across a wide range of subsistence activities and social ideologies, mothers are more involved than fathers with the care of their young.

Darcy Lockman (All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, page 30)