This whole thing about scanning your face to prove tour age is making me remember, in 2018 while out in paris we got our wallet stolen during a particularly busy night at a lesbian bar. It was very late and with no money to buy metro tickets we were effectively stranded, but some people helped us and we ended up staying the night at a really sweet older man's place. His face was deeply scarred and he was missing an eye. We chatted on our way and he told me about his life, probably to help calm me down. He explained he had been stuck in a house fire 20 years ago and had had multiple rounds of facial reconstruction and a skin graft, but there's only so much surgery can do so he just learned to live with it. I remember he said he liked the queer bars because they're the only place people don't really stare at him.
At some point I took out my phone, and at the time I was using face unlock. This prompted him to tell me all the ways this technology doesn't work on him. How his phone selfie camera doesn't focus right because it's not detecting a face. How he had to update his ID the old fashioned way, because the website kept rejecting his photos. And how it was becoming more and more common, and how it was making his life way harder.
This was 7 years ago, and now whenever I see this sort of technology I think of how that guy can't use it. And how house fires are pretty common, and how anything from being born this way to a skin condition to heavy tattooing can probably cause the same issue. Can these people get age verified ? Will they just lose access to all social media, which are increasingly necessary in society, if this becomes the norm ? These are people who are already driven out of public spaces due to how they look, and they're getting pushed out online too all in the interest of companies wanting more money.
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