Tag Archives: Veriff

Speculative Tech Nonsense in California Paid for My Cat’s Surgery. Thoughts About Joe Biden and Vietnam, and What Kind of Country Americans Have.

Speculative Tech Nonsense in California Paid for My Cat’s Surgery.

My cat had her surgery yesterday, and they removed two masses and did a dental cleaning and extracted one bad tooth while she was under a general anesthetic anyway.

Recently, I had a bunch of class action settlements come in from various ways tech companies in California violated the law, usually the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, victimizing me and stealing my facial imagery data.

These settlements keep going out for years after you’ve actually used a thing, because you weren’t considering at the time how the thing used you.

Lemonade insurance had an app that required me to use a video statement during a renter’s insurance loss claim.

Veriff (which just had a huge layoff), verified my driver’s license data so I could use an account to trade some securities.

There were others.

It occurred to me that this is a life changing amount of money for me. I could get a car repair or save my cat’s life, but to them, they just go right on breaking laws and paying for it later. Why not? It’s all “venture capital” nonsense.

The point of running companies on VC and juicing the stock with press releases of things that may lead to a profit “someday”, but not now, is so that the people running it can pay themselves handsomely and then fire everyone and announce that the company is bankrupt.

With higher Fed rates seemingly here to stay for a while, and the focus is on making people unemployed and popping large bubbles, damn the human cost (yet again), we’re “closing the business cycle” and with almost no new products.

Essentially most of what tech workers do is throw their labor “into the sea” on things that never benefit anyone except the scammers at the very top who made a lot of money issuing press statements about imaginary future profits.

Then they get laid off and their visas lapse and they have to go home. Some people end their lives. It’s tragic.

This is the kind of economy that America has because it refuses to have a real economy that is sustainable and producing real goods and services.

Instead of using what happened in China as a lesson on why it was a bad idea to make your population unemployable and strung out on drugs, while the suicide rate doubled, Bonehead Biden was off in Vietnam, an enemy country that 68,000 Americans died trying to keep at least part of “Free” from horrific Communist oppression, and lost.

Although we did manage to evacuate some people that I know and give them a better life in this country, the Communists overran South Vietnam and raped, murdered, starved, and disappeared many thousands of people. Which is very typical in Communist revolutions.

Communists are brutes. You see that when people risk running across mine fields to get to South Korea and have bullets in their back and tapeworms in their guts, and haven’t eaten anything in weeks if they make it.

You see people agitating for Communism in the United States. Usually these are spoiled brats in their mommy and daddy’s house, in their 20s, never had a job, don’t know how Communism will treat them. Hint, it ain’t gonna be iPhones and Xboxes and laying around all day taking pictures of your food for Instagram.

Also, 50 or 70 years after the revolution, you still get “rich Communists”, however that happens. Theoretically impossible, but you do. These are usually people high up in the good graces of the government officials, who get to go to hot spring resorts and have Macs and Steam accounts while there are food shortages and dirt floors in the country for everyone else.

Essentially everything Americans complain about and worse happens in a Communist state. The social stratification.

North Korea has an economy the size of Indiana’s, but there are several times as many people. It also has to support a huge military, a nuclear weapons program, and some party officials and “rich Communists”, who have brought nothing but dire poverty to millions while they enjoy most of what there is, for themselves.

“Communism makes everyone equal!”. Let’s test that. Just have the other 26 million North Koreans show up to that hot spring resort and see how equally they all get shot for trying to use something that no more than a few hundred are supposed to have.

Now, according to Old Bonehead, who can’t even make it through a paragraph if it’s late enough in the day that he starts sundowning with the cameras on him, we’re “exporting AI”, whatever that is, to a regime that functionally isn’t a lot different than China or even North Korea.

Biden’s term in office has been yet another slap in the face to Americans. Instead of building a more prosperous future for America, in America, we get more of these deals with corrupt enemy nations to make sure that we get Happy Meal Toys.

It’s actually very sick and depressing to watch how the media spins this whole situation.

I was talking with my dad over email again, and some of what he thinks about Joe Biden and the Democrats is actually quite right and I would like to quote him.

In your article you said “What does amaze me is how a country that takes away everything from people and leaves them homeless or dying from lack of food or medical care, has been so good about suppressing revolt.”

What they do is watch all the time, and then do really evil and painful things to anyone that steps out of line.

Total control. Total suppression.

They monitor and restrict communication. They prevent group activity that can allow political activism. They get them watching and reporting on each other. Now, facial recognition, AI, and “social conformity scores” can bump that up a notch.

The US leftist Democrat stranglehold on the government is taking the steps you would have to succeed at to turn this government into that kind of state. Subversion of the DOJ and FBI. Control of the courts and DAs. Domination and control of the voting system, including at-will manipulation and unaccountability. Vicious attacks on any opposition. Reinterpretation and substitution of social values. Manipulation of culture. Redefinition of ethical behavior. Control of news and reporting. Control and subversion of the education system for youth – mind control. They are building all this in plain view.

-My Dad

Veriff BIPA Lawsuit Settlement Checks Will Arrive Shortly (Uphold Crypto Exchange and Brave Browser Users Victimized)

Veriff BIPA Lawsuit Settlement Checks Will Arrive Shortly (Uphold Crypto Exchange and Brave Browser Users Victimized)

I got an email yesterday morning from the administrator of the Class Action Lawsuit against Veriff saying that my settlement check should arrive tomorrow.

The Illinois Biometric Privacy Information Act has been scoring some large settlements.

Companies including Facebook, Google, and ClearView AI have made settlements totaling sometimes almost a billion dollars each, and the law has resulted in many of them being too afraid of another one to continue using a particular privacy-invading “feature” in the future.

Facebook, for example, agreed to delete all facial recognition data and delete the “face tagging” “feature”, which is why it disappeared for everyone in the world.

Richard Stallman has repeatedly asked people not to upload pictures of him to Facebook, and he was not wrong. Thanks to an Illinois law, they had to stop doing it. It cost them a fortune and had they persisted, they would have accidentally ensnared more Illinois residents and been back in court losing hundreds of millions more.

Anyway, so what did Veriff do?

They provided a “verification” service to companies like the Uphold crypto exchange, which would demand to see your face and your government-issued photo ID.

With the settlement, they’ve pretty much agreed to change their shady business practices, but only in Illinois where the BIPA applies.

Why does this have anything to do with Brave, the Web browser?

The Brave Web browser has an optional “rewards” program. By default, Brave’s built-in ad blocker blocks ads, and then if users have “Rewards” on, Brave displays its own ads in various ways and says they are “privacy preserving”.

As the user accumulates ad views through this system, Brave pays them in a token called “Basic Attention Token”. The user is free to either keep them and trade them for money using a crypto exchange, or to donate them out of a browser wallet outside an exchange, or save them in the exchange and donate them out of the exchange.

If the user signs up for the exchange, the default is Uphold, which is extremely dodgy (most crypto exchanges are), and has been accused of things like freezing people’s accounts and stealing their crypto, and not responding to emails (which is the only way to contact “support”).

In an attempt to comply with US tax and Bank Secrecy Act regulations, Uphold verifies people in accordance with “Know Your Customer” and reports them to the IRS with 1099-B tax forms.

Quite often, Uphold will screw up the tax form AND issue it late, then issue corrected forms late, causing the user to have to file 1040-X or a tax extension.

In addition, Uphold partnered with Veriff to “verify” users and this is why many Brave Web browser users qualified for the BIPA settlement.

If you used Brave, and verified your wallet with Uphold (their exchange partner), and then got kicked out to verify your identity with Veriff, and live in the US State of Illinois, then Veriff violated the BIPA by taking your facial biometrics.

As part of the settlement, this qualifies for some money, and Veriff agreed to delete your biometrics and comply with BIPA next time.

Brave Software should immediately cancel their agreement with Uphold if they take their “privacy” claims seriously. I am willing to accept that they had no idea that a vendor of a partner was doing something massively illegal, but they need to stop telling people to use Uphold immediately.

I have started calling Uphold “Hold Up” because they delay your tax filing with incompetence and illegal delays on their 1099s and they also steal people’s money.

Practically every time you deal with a California tech company, there’s a BIPA settlement if you are an Illinois resident.

Why? Because tech companies are nasty and little care they for the law.

As nasty lawbreaking California tech companies continue to lose these cases, they continue to push for a repeal or watering down of the BIPA, but they’re about to have a bigger problem on their hands, as 11 other US states have laws pending modeled on Illinois BIPA.

They went to court trying to gut it and actually ended up making things so much worse on themselves, as the court ruling came down saying that the damages actually treble the longer they remain in violation.

It would be better if instead of focusing on defeating BIPA, they invested in compliance, or else it will continue to cost them.

If they want to invest money into my mechanic’s bills on the Buick, have at it.

The loss to these companies is great.

Imagine how Facebook alone could hurt people further with the money if it hadn’t lost over a billion dollars on class action settlements.