>"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.
its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes.
i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.
Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? I don't personally see a way to verify someone's age which doesn't involve either credit card verification, photo id verification, or some sort of facial recognition. If you know enough about someone to verify their age—even to a relatively low degree of accuracy—you probably know enough to pinpoint who they are in general.
Heck—in most cases, we can't even tell the difference between humans and bots anymore! And it's true that we basically accept that some bots will slip through the cracks—but identifying bots also strikes me as significantly easier than identifying children.
The government issues an eID to your wallet. The ID is signed by the government and linked to the device to prevent transferring the credential. A public/private key-pair is generated by the secure enclave in your phone, the public key along with proof of possession of the private key is included in the request for the government eID. The government signs individual attributes combined with the public key with the government private key. The government certificate containing the public key is, well, public.
One of the attributes is ‘over_18’ (In the EU eID scheme countries can add other over_XX attributes if they want, but over_18 is mandatory).
When a website wants to requests attributes, in this case the over_18 attribute, they send a request to the user’s wallet app, including a challenge. The wallet sends back a package including the government-signed attribute, which contains the device public key and the over_18 attribute plus a response to the challenge (proving the credential didn’t get transferred).
The website only sees the ‘over_18’ attribute, which is backed by the government signature. They don’t see any other attributes (the wallet app shows in advance which attributes you are sharing). The government never sees which website wants to know if you’re 18+.
Of course this is all a bit simplified, check OIDC4VCI and OIDC4VP for details.
The only real issue is the wallet app and device binding. Because a compromised device could allow credentials to be transferred some form of attestation of device and wallet app is required. In practice this means no rooted/jailbroken phones.
> The website only sees the ‘over_18’ attribute, which is backed by the government signature
Not true. The device's public key is also sent, which functions as a stable device identifier.
We've spent years trying to get away from stable tracking IDs and fingerprinting. Returning to a system where devices are sending a stable ID to a website to prove ownership is a step backward.
There are proposed mitigations like issuing multiple sets of credentials or rotating them, but we're not going to get an infinite number of keypairs for every website or session in the secure enclave in practice.
Another reason why these proposals aren't getting much uptake is that they aren't addressing what the lawmakers are pursuing: They don't want anonymous authorization tied to the device. They want IDs tied to accounts and a way to discourage people from sharing IDs. In the anonymous systems it only takes one person a few minutes to put an over-18 identity into a device and there's no way to determine if someone is abusing the system by stealing IDs or if someone's 18 year old brother is setting up all of their younger brothers' phones for $5 each.
The situation gets stickier when you acknowledge that it's not possible to limit all of these websites to only mobile phone devices with secure enclaves that are not jailbroken. Once you open a door to desktop devices and other OSes accessing these sites, you open the door to replaying and proxying attacks, where someone will produce those `over_18` attestations on-demand for you, possibly for a minimal price. This brings us back to the public stable identifier to discourage fraud, which means governments won't be happy to issue as many keypairs as we want, which means we're back to semi-stable fingerprints.
> Not true. The device's public key is also sent, which functions as a stable device identifier.
This is covered by allowing for single-use credentials. IIRC the EU personal IDs will use this. Basically, the wallet requests a batch of single-use eIDs that all use different device key-pairs. Each credential is only used for one request and then deleted. The wallet will automatically request new credentials in batches when they run out. The old key-pairs are deleted along with the credential so you don’t run out of space in the secure enclave.
> Another reason why these proposals aren't getting much uptake
I’m not sure what you mean by not much uptake, EU countries are required to issue and accept them for official business by the end of 2026
> This is covered by allowing for single-use credentials.
They said There are proposed mitigations like issuing multiple sets of credentials or rotating them, but we're not going to get an infinite number of keypairs for every website or session in the secure enclave in practice.
> Basically, the wallet requests a batch of single-use eIDs that all use different device key-pairs.
The comments you replied to omitted mass surveillance. But the article and 1st comment included it. The government would know what wallet requested each single use identifier.
> This is covered by allowing for single-use credentials. IIRC the EU personal IDs will use this. Basically, the wallet requests a batch of single-use eIDs that all use different device key-pairs. Each credential is only used for one request and then deleted.
But this then means that the issuers and the verifiers can trivially collude to deanonymize holders/users.
There are schemes where you don't need key pairs for each user (assuming the government has some way of authenticating users). Private State Tokens use blinded tokens for this.
It doesn't prevent tokens from being stolen or sold, but the token issuer only accepts each token once and can limit the rate that tokens are issued and control how fast they expire, giving decent control over how practical using stolen or sold tokens are.
> In practice this means no rooted/jailbroken phones.
Personally - this is less acceptable to me than just having the site collect my image/id.
I'd support just putting the id in a dedicated device (ex - gov issues smart key) or just accepting that sometimes people will share id info (just like... physical ids).
It doesn't even close all the doors to transferring ids - since I can still just hand someone a phone (just like... physical ids).
My experience has been that absolutely no one cares, as long as they could be construed to be "somewhat similar".
Ex - People change hair color, lose a boat load of weight, wear eye-color changing contacts, drastically change hair styles (facial and normal) etc...
No one bats an eye at an ID that "only sorta vaguely resembles you" outside of a very limited subset of places (the only one I can actually think of is Customs while traveling).
---
So my take is that as long as the gender appears similar and the ethnicity seems "close enough"... the store is still going to sell you alcohol, the bar is going to let you in, and the movie theater is going to sell you tickets.
Yeah, but being able to share Id with someone who happens to look eerily like you is different from just handing people your ID and they are able to use it like it was implied. That’s not how IDs are used.
> The only real issue is the wallet app and device binding. Because a compromised device could allow credentials to be transferred some form of attestation of device and wallet app is required. In practice this means no rooted/jailbroken phones.
Yeah, and no Linux PCs, no custom builds of web browsers (which would effectively become open source in theory only)—basically the end of any kind of open platform. I would much rather just scan my ID!
If you are referring to EUID (not fully sure as you said EU eID, i dont know if you are referring the estonia of eID like system)
I have to mention that EUID is not private, since there's "provider" element which informs website if you are 18 or not. The flow is:
1) You scan QR code
2) Your EUDI wallet does verification, informs provider to tell you are 18+
3) Provider informs website you are 18+
The EUID draft doesnt mention tech like ohttp for anonymizing requests. So there's risk of provider keeping track of who you are. So while everybody claims its fully anonymous which is just false. Government could ask website/service for the token or account information then use timestamp or token then combining with "provider" logs, your identity will be exposed.
EUID has another problem which is letting all countries implement system, which is wasteful duplication effort so this probably will be outsourced and to same company to reduce duplication efforts. Then it'll be centralized and they happen be collecting telemetry data for "experience improvements" as everysite out there do.
I haven't even mentioned biggest problems like requiring attestation Apple/Google. While spec doesn't require it, but the likehood country's app requiring it will be very high.
The ID is signed by the government and linked to the device to prevent transferring the credential. A public/private key-pair is generated by the secure enclave in your phone, the public key along with proof of possession of the private key is included in the request for the government eID.
IMO, there are two other issues that need to be solved. The major one is that there should be some way to do attestation of devices that are not Google-certified Android or iOS. If this does not happen, the smartphone duopoly is permanently entrenched and not a fair/free market anymore. There is no way to use a smartphone without basically losing your privacy to Google/Apple and given the increasing importance of online services it's becoming increasingly impossible to live without a smartphone.
It was very disheartening that the EU reference implementation was rolled out with only Play Integrity and Apple's counterpart. IMO, this should have been solved before the reference implementation was rolled out to member countries, because many of them won't bother to go beyond that [1]. It is also completely counterproductive when it comes to EU tech sovereignty. There is a group of pioneers that are growing the sovereign ecosystems and then you cut them off.
The second, perhaps lesser, problem is that the security story is not super strong, because most Android phones do not even have a secure enclave (outside Pixel and Samsung flagships/A5x, there are very few). Instead they rely on TrustZone etc. which are regularly targeted by side-channel attacks, etc. Ironically, GrapheneOS is cut off from most of these systems (because Google Play Integrity), while it actually requires a secure enclave and is more secure than... well I guess every other smartphone.
[1] There is some hope, e.g. the developers of the Dutch identity wallet acknowledge the issue and are open to supporting alternative systems.
> The major one is that there should be some way to do attestation of devices that are not Google-certified Android or iOS.
IMO, just don't do the proof of possession. If I have the token that says I am an adult, I can use it to be considered an adult online. If someone requests millions of tokens and sells them, then punish that someone. It's not very hard to find them: they have to sell those tokens somewhere.
Also don't try to solve the VPN issue: I highly doubt most kids will use VPNs to access social media, and accessing porn isn't that hard if you are capable of running a VPN.
Again, I can consider age verification as some kind of "inconvenience for under age people". But the age verification that works 100% of the time is a problem, as you say it will lock people out with remote attestation and that is not acceptable.
> Which part of that is avoiding the distopian control?
Your ID is already controlled by your government, and we don't call that dystopian control. With privacy-preserving age verification online, the government doesn't learn what you do with the cryptographic token that proves that you are old enough, and the website doesn't learn who you are. So it's exactly the same situation as today, except that now there is age verification.
> how does this work on an open source operating system?
First, it can be open source and have DRM and attestation. Android is open source, for instance.
This said, I hate the idea of remote attestation. And for age verification, I strongly believe that it is not needed. We don't need to make it work everywhere all the time, it just needs to help. I can imagine a privacy-preserving age verification system that helps with some problems (e.g. make social media or porn less accessible to kids) without bringing dystopian control and without making it super hard for adults to access social media and porn.
But I absolutely hate the idea of remote attestation.
> Your ID is already controlled by your government, and we don't call that dystopian control.
The expression "papers, please", a classic exemplar of dystopian control, is referring to what?
> First, it can be open source and have DRM and attestation. Android is open source, for instance.
When people say "open source" in this context they mean that the user or third parties can make changes to the system, not that the source code is thrown over the wall from time to time. The situation with Android is exactly the thing that we don't want.
Nope they don't. That's the whole point of privacy-preserving age verification.
Technically it is possible. The complaint that people have is that they don't trust that any government will get it right. But it is technically possible with known cryptography.
Ah ok. I understand now. The website isn't making an additional request to the government to verify that the credentials you gave are real. The authenticity is built into the signature.
This would run into the same deal as VINs in the real world being tied to licenses, or serial numbers to guns. But the car equivalent of VMs/open hardware/custom firmware (imagine a $7 pi zero flashed with lineageOS “overage phone”) then becomes equivalent to a gun without a serial number, and suddenly open source/hardware people are felons and there is insane amount of control on hardware and software like it’s 1982.
This assumes that the government would be able to verify independently a phone serial number so that people’s IDs aren’t leaked. If not, then you’re back to the same thing as before since “drivers licenses” are stored by sites and shared around with advertisers
I feel the idea of public key encryption could be done without a phone but the device locking makes it harder to transfer the token off device. Like the parent comment said, I think 90% is all we can aim for. Nothing is going to be perfect.
It will go fine, because everything you want to do will require it. Even if you don't strictly have to, you will be effectively ostracized. Transit, entertainment, productivity tools. Haven't you noticed that things that have previously been easy to do are much harder now, even before this has rolled out? Like providing a government ID to visit a museum, for example. Or getting an email address. Using claude.
A lot of these age verifications things have to do with "protecting children". If that's the end goal we don't really need to verify anyone's age. Apple/Google, any smart phone maker, should be forced to add proper parental controls.
Parents should be able to control what apps can be used, what websites can be viewed, who the phone is able to contact.
That doesn't require knowing my age, or anyone else's.
Also, as an iOS developer, it's not my job to parent your child. The age ratings are clear on the app store, if you give your child unrestricted access to a phone that's on you, not me. If the OS doesn't have proper controls that's on Apple/Android, again, not my fault and not something I should be forced to police.
Thanks to Texas, I can see roughly how old your kid is. I'm not supposed to keep that information though. ;) I'm sure everyone who makes app will comply with that and not use that information for any other purposes and you can bet Texas has the means to audit every app on the app store to make sure that they're complying. lol
>Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining?
sure, i'll put my favorite two. though you'll find much more detailed and thought-out versions of these (and others) in the dozens of other giant threads on the same topic.
- buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time. most people are comfortable with flashing their ID at the clerk. the UUID card is non-identifying.
- websites issue content tags, browsers consume them, you enter your age into the OS during setup.
> buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time
Exactly, prepaid phone cards with point of sales activation (to eliminate large scale theft incentive) is nothing new. Once activated, the validity of the token can be like 6 months or one year, and at-most-once-per-domain schema can be managed by the issuing authority if they want.
Instead of a 100 phone minutes, 300 phone minutes card you just buy "I'm over 16", "I'm over 18" cards. It's simple UX.
> buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time. most people are comfortable with flashing their ID at the clerk. the UUID card is non-identifying.
It can be implemented in a privacy-preserving way online: your government gives you tokens that prove that you are above age and that they provably cannot track. That's the exact equivalent.
I believe that the other measures (remote attestation and such, the ones we hate) come when we try to make absolutely sure that you don't give/sell that UUID to someone else. But IMO we should just forget about doing that. Just like an adult can, today, buy cigarettes and porn and give them to a kid.
Any token given that way contains some amount of encrypted payload.
That secret payload may contain uniquely tracking numbers.
Even the encrypted payload itself, if treated as an opaque string, can be used for tracking if they decide to log it when they deliver it to you, and when the website where you use the token passes it back to the government auth service.
You need to replicate the UX of a stack of pile of cards at the grocery store, that's not really possible in digital space.
> buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time. most people are comfortable with flashing their ID at the clerk. the UUID card is non-identifying.
This could be a good system if it's set up right. There's still some risk of being tracked if it isn't though. IDs could be linked to the cards at the time of purchase if retailers scan the drivers license, then scan the card creating a record that card #XXXXX was purchased using driver's license # XXXXX
Even if retailers aren't scanning the drivers licenses and collecting data that way, the cards and codes on those cards can be tracked and traceable to a retailer. That's how things like calling cards have been tracked. Say for example someone uses the code on a card to access a website, the police can match the code that was used to the serial number of the card, look up which retailer that card was sold at, and can then access security camera footage at that retailer to identify who bought the card from that location. This would also let them passively generate lists of IP addresses/device IDs matched to websites and specific retail locations over time.
> buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time
Why should I pay continuously to prove I'm an adult? And those cards will be getting sold to kids faster than you can blink. I bet a lot of parents would buy them for their kids.
>What makes you think this will be close to 90%? Unless these cards are expensive I don't see that happening.
its obviously just an illustrative guess. but if the penalty of possessing the card is similar to underage possession of alcohol/tobacco, and larger penalties if a store/person is found providing a card to someone underage, i see no reason why it wouldnt have a similar success rate as alcohol/tobacco.
If they have access to the "dark web" they can already do anything that requires age verification there. In the same way you expect that the rule to "not sell UUIDs" wouldn't be respected there, I wouldn't expect other age-verification rules to be respected, no matter the verification method.
You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on. So there is an intrinsic cost to prove who you are where you are from and what your birthday is already.
You have to pay for all sorts of small things to participate in normal society. This isn't a serious criticism.
By definition this is not a life critical thing, it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.
>You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on.
I have a government ID and I didn't pay for it. I can use it to travel to nearby countries in lieu of a passport. The assumption that IDs are necessarily non-free (to the issuee) is pretty funny to me.
>it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.
The maintenance of the Internet is already paid for through ISP contracts.
I mean, if you really want to make the government subsidize an ID verification scheme or mandate that certain real-world locations provide age verification as a social service for everyone, that's fine.
It's orthogonal to the discussion, though, which is about whether we should do it or not, because the costs here aren't significant and don't change the terms of the debate.
I'm personally in favor of just banning children off the Internet, but I don't agree it's orthogonal to the discussion. What I replied to was the implication that someone should pay a recurring cost to prove they're an adult for the same reason that they pay to own a computer or to connect to the Internet. Don't disown the dumb thing you said.
I'm not disowning it at all. I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.
You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.
It just doesn't matter. It's not important. It's consistent with how we organize our society in general, which makes focusing on it in this one particular instance more understandable as an attempt to distract from the substantive merits of these arguments about age verification.
>I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.
Okay, but the person you replied to doesn't, and instead of providing an actual answer to their question, you posed a false equivalence between proving your age and buying a computer.
>You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.
You are purposefully muddying the waters by being lax with your use of language. The "cost" you "pay" by wearing appropriate attire in public is fundamentally different from the actual cost you actually pay when you engage in commerce; one is a trade of freedoms and the other is a trade of goods and/or services. If your argument is that the freedom you have to trade in exchange for the freedom to access the Internet, is that of not having to show an ID, that's one thing. If you also have to add a recurring monetary cost then that's another.
If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet beyond "*shrug* just 'cause, dude. Who cares?", then maybe you shouldn't have said anything.
> If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet
Of course I have an answer. To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.
There's literally nothing confusing about the "why" in this discussion.
The fact that bad people use the "what about the children" argument regularly for bad reasons doesn't mean that all such arguments are bogus.
In fact, it's an indication of exactly the opposite, it's so regularly used because there is a broad consensus that we need to protect children from harm which is why it's often effective as an arguing tool.
The relevant frame for this discussion is will it actually work, and what are the tradeoffs. A trivially small amount of money for a simple age verification scheme isn't a particularly meaningful tradeoff against a genuine social problem. The bigger, more genuine issues are around privacy and censorship and I do in fact concede those are real.
>To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.
See, you've answered a different question. The question you answered is, "why should children be protected from the Internet?" I'll give you for free that children should be protected from the Internet, for the reasons you've said, and now you get to convince me that I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet.
> I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet.
For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids.
Because we live in a society.
If you struggle to understand why that matters without reference to more direct personal stakes for yourself, just know that without a society, the children will grow up to rape you, kill you, and possibly consume you for your protein content.
>For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids.
But I have benefited from public education. Me paying for someone else's education in return is fair.
>Because we live in a society.
"Because we live in a society" is a phrase flexible enough that it can be used to justify anything, including outright theft: "we live in a society; us taking your stuff is the price you have been chosen to pay for your continued belonging". Want to try a little harder?
You have convinced me that there are in fact no differences between things, and that protecting children from adult content is indistinguishable from all other goals, and therefore I was foolish to advocate for it.
Well, they could trade identifying ones too or even stollen ID cards if you want to go this way.
They could also trade porn-filled thumb drive or old-school glossy paper magazine. There no way to prevent kid's exposure to stuff at a 100% success rate.
Indeed but you are the one who claimed it was not a hard problem.
I don't think any one of us pushing back here on those claims do so for the heck of NOT finding a "solution", rather genuinely asking because so far it seems nobody did find such a solution without compromises that is in the end not worth it due to the flaw in said solution.
The point isn't to be critical of your process, only of the claim that it's a trivial problem.
I'm just left wondering, how would that be different than buying a phone? Most kids also don't have money to spend on devices, that's all coming from adults, how would the UUID work any different? In my view it seems we'll just reach the current state as with phones.
And honestly, all these should ultimately just be done client side in the browser. After the browser has verified "User is x or user is over 21" there's no reason to then send that information to the website.
Let websites issue a "window.isUserOver(16)" call once and then move forward based on the response to that query.
No, no. Don’t give websites a way to check the user’s age.
Age restrictions are different across countries and cultures. Parents disagree on age ratings given by boards all the time.
Have apps and websites declare the objectionable content they have, and let the device decide if it will show it or not according to parental controls.
If you’re a parent that pays attention to age ratings, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The age is meaningless. It’s the type of content next to the rating that’s important.
Your only option as a parent now to let your 14 year old play a violent game rated M that you specifically allowed is to give them a fully unrestricted device. They can now use that device to access gore, porn and gambling as well. How does this make any sense?
Don't even bother having the website ask the browser anything at all. Just have the website TELL the browser the content is intended for adults via HTTP header and let the browser decide to display it or not depending on parental controls.
This would require browser attestation, wouldn't it? Otherwise kids are just going to download a custom build of Chromium where `window.isUserOver(16)` is always `True`.
The same system that blocks kids from downloading the Pornhub app would also block them from downloading the "Chrome but without parental controls" app.
No, it only "requires" browser attestation if we taken it as a given that the onus is on tech companies for verifying who they are talking to - ie identity verification that most of these schemes boil down to regardless of how cute they're dressed up.
To effectively keep adult content away from kids, it merely requires secure boot and closed app stores, which are already widespread. And they are only required on the devices actually given to kids, rather than every single computing device.
But this proposal has another problem: it's easy for a website to run isUserOver(n) in a loop to derive the exact age. And on a persistent account, it can be queried every day to derive an exact birthday! Which comes back to my main point that the only technical schemes we should be considering are ones where information strictly flows one way - the website/app supplies information to the browser/OS, which then [may] implement parental control policy. anything else fundamentally boils down to a mandate for identity verification.
> To effectively keep adult content away from kids, it merely requires secure boot and closed app stores
This is unacceptable. If I own a computer, I expect to be able to build and run any program, either written by myself or others, without asking anyone for permission.
Maybe I needed to say "it merely requires the existence ...". Because I then do go on to say:
> And they are only required on the devices actually given to kids
My whole point is that this limits the blast radius, compared to any solution involving "age" (read: identity) verification which has a blast radius of every computing device!
> To effectively keep adult content away from kids, it merely requires secure boot and closed app stores, which are already widespread. And they are only required on the devices actually given to kids, rather than every single computing device.
...I guess I don't really see the difference.
Closed app stores are widespread on some platforms but certainly not others, and I for one would really like them to not spread any further.
For starters here, the difference is that only devices that parents give to kids need to have secure boot and controlled software sources. The point is that every other device remains completely unaffected.
But in general there is a huge difference between the freedom-destroying properties of secure boot with closed app stores, and the next step of remote attestation. Remote attestation lets the server insist that you only run software fully of their choosing rather than your choosing, as a condition of interacting with them. This completely destroys the idea of protocols that mediate between two parties with diverging interests, and computationally disenfranchises users. Imagine the next generation of the Cloudflare nagwall that doesn't let you past unless you buy a new computer, and that new computer must be running MSWin/OSX and MSIE/Chrome.
(also note that my use of "secure boot" here includes systems like on Pixels where you can straightforwardly unlock the bootloader (erasing the data on the device), install whatever you want, and then relock. I still find these systems philosophically objectionable, as there is still a privileged key baked in and retained by the manufacturer - similar security properties could be provided without the backdoor. But pragmatically they've been working okay)
No, thank you. As a parent, I want to give a device to my child that they can hack, just like I had.
Why are we treating kids like adversarial threats? If my kid gets around parental controls, I’ll revoke their phone privileges. No need for invasive security.
Right now, they don't know. They're going to learn very quickly when they want to use some website and they can't.
We agree it doesn't need to be 100% perfect. But it needs to be at least, like, 60% perfect, right? And unless you make it at least a bit hard to bypass, it will stop virtually no one.
Installing a new browser is already a bit hard for most people. I think you are a little skewed in your thinking being online on HN.
You also aren't thinking about age. Certainly 16 and 18 year old probably can get a new browser installed. But a 14 year old? 12 year old? 10 year old? That barrier is a lot higher the younger a kid is.
I just finished my second year as a fifth grade teacher, so I have a lot of experience with ten year olds. I am confident a majority of my students would be able to install an alternative web browser if they needed to, and a majority of the remainder would ask a friend to do it.
To give you an example of the workarounds kids will find: Youtube was blocked on school laptops, so the kids all started embedding Youtube videos inside of Google Sheets in order to watch stuff. This isn't, like, something a few savvy kids did, it was a widespread and common practice.
Lol. I started building computers, installing operating systems and tinkering with Linux between ages 10-12. I also started watching porn not long after that, and guess what, I still became a more or less normal adult. There is absolutely no need to "protect the children."
This is how California is legislating it—requiring the OS to let an admin set the user's age, then let browsers and through them, websites, to query that setting.
> - websites issue content tags, browsers consume them, you enter your age into the OS during setup.
Why would that be acceptable though? What if a user does not trust the operating system? Even Linux may not be safe in the future, what with age sniffing coming by Red Hat integrating it into system already. And Red Hat plans more - xorg is abandoned on purpose, for instance.
The correct way to do this continues to be for sites to tag the content with some kind of rating and let the client device decide whether to show it based on how the user's account is configured.
This requires no ID of any kind because the child's parent or teacher knows their age, and kids buying a device on their own is no more or less of a problem than kids getting some high school senior or homeless adult to lend them their ID.
That's because you're treating AV as a system that must be 100% correct immediately. This isn't banking or an election.
As soon as you loosen off the requirements to "reasonable effort", you can start looking at account age, facial features, social attestation, and include retrospective tools to revisit someone's verification if they get in and start acting like a child. Heuristically messy but far from impossible to demand a stronger form of verification if their original might have been borderline.
The goal is broad coverage, not complete. Screening doesn't have to get 100% to have an effect.
I understand it doesn't need to be 100% correct. But I think what you're describing is either (A) going to be very privacy invasive, (B) going to create problems for lots of adults, or (C) going to be precisely as effective as a checkbox saying "I agree I am over 18 years old".
It's "social media". The whole thing is profiling for advertisers. The idea that there's privacy is laughable.
There is a network effect as a child's peers stop using social media though. Make it inconvenient enough for enough for kids and they'll read a book, take up slam poetry or whatever it was kids did before our attention became currency.
you generate a random number and send it to website you want to visit.
Website you want to visit generates a one-time private/public key for the purpose of this login attempt, hashes your random number, and sends the hash back to you.
You connect to the government auth platform, auth yourself to your government, and ask them to sign the hash you received.
You pass the signed hash as well as the original random number to the website you wanted to access (the original random number is used by the website to store the one-time key they generated for you). They can see it is signed by the government. They can see it is made with the hash they provided.
You get access to whatever content you wanted. The website doesn't know who you are. The government doesn't know where you logged in. Sure, it won't hold up against collusion between website and government, but nothing would.
the principles explained above are slight adaptations of PKCE authentication.
So now I have to get permission from the government to browse the web? And they can revoke that permission at any time? And we need a great firewall to block citizens from communicating with foreign websites that don't comply with this scheme?
This idea is worse than facial scanning, by a lot.
(Better idea is OS level parental controls combined with government-mandated content tags to let the OS know what content is child-safe.)
Not necessarily. Some sites have no interest in communicating your data to the government, unlike their 23019 affiliate ad programs.
If your government is paying private third parties to collect data on you (hello USA), the issue is much wider, and nothing would protect you from such a government. Even without age verification, if the government is interested in spying on you, and the sites are willing to sell, they would gladly trade your IP and connection log.
Sure here's one example of decentralizing it -- it's going to be overly simple just as a toy example to show how easy it could be:
Whenever you want to prove your adult you go to "am I an adult.gov" and you use your credit card or whatever to prove you are an adult. At which point you get a 1-time 5-digit code that is UNIVERSAL TO EVERY SINGLE HUMAN and good for 1 hour (everybody who uses the site gets the same code that hour).
Then when you want to look at porn or something, you use this code. Boom simple and done.
There are even much better much more private techniques that use cryptography, and AI is happy to explain these graduate-degree level topics to you at your own pace.
Of course there are situations where people steal things, and use deep-fakes, etc, but those exist in every model.
Headline news: children infiltrate the universal adult one time password scheme for porn, parents panic! Turns out the 18 year olds started selling access to their younger friends, who resold it to their younger friends.
My point is that the entire check is bypassed easily and instantly, and in the meantime the government gets data that someone _will_ figure out how to make personally identifying for adults, or will argue for changes to make it so. Alcohol age limits are a simple physical check for a vice that everyone accepts those who want it can get at. I’d rather demand that device manufacturers give parents effective controls before we try solving this problem by identifying internet users wholesale.
It does not reach headline news because everyone just accepts that the "filter" is imperfect.
But, for some reason, little twelve year old Jimmy obtaining access to porn evokes some kind of far more visceral reaction in Jimmy's parents (or if not Jimmy's parents, some "busybody" who wants to "protect all the children") than Jimmy managing to get himself a pack of Salem's or a Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboy.
right, that's exactly what i was getting at with my original comment. none of the laws we have are 100% effective. so i find it weird that this specific topic always devolves into "well some kid will be able to get access, so your proposal sucks".
> little twelve year old Jimmy obtaining access to porn evokes some kind of far more visceral reaction in Jimmy's parents
Because right now there's next to no barrier to access compared to Jimmy getting himself a beer. If you keep saying "Your proposal sucks because it isn't perfect and we should do nothing" then you're essentially surrendering to the people who really want facial scans.
Hopefully it would be less of a criticism of the system, and more spurring people to ask questions like "Wait, why did you leave a hunting knife on the coffee table?"
Design a scheme that equips parents with better tools to be better parents, rather than one that reduces the scope of parenting responsibilities.
I think the only thing I actually have any concern about is phones and social media use for kids, and I think that has a much easier solution than any sorting of tracking-BS.
I think the German Personalausweis has an electronic ID function that does this: age verification without giving out other information like name etc. But the application chooses which information is requested and could/will request more.
Unfortunately few know and use this information although the usage via NFC is not that complicated. Have used it successfully already a few times for banks, but including name information etc.
Using existing parental controls parents could set their kids age and that could be used for the age controls. Could the parents let the kids around the age gate? Sure but they could do that even if a government ID and camera was required. This actually might be more effective than a lot of these systems because other adults could not let the kids use their IDs
Yubikey tokens support attestation. You can sell Yubikey tokens at places inaccessible to minors, like liquor stores, and having a token proves that one is adult. Another way is implementing "parent mode" when OS allows only installing apps from a government-approved whitelist and access sites from a whitelist.
Perfect is the enemy of the good, right? I mean a page header or some other simple means to identify "adult" vs not is good for most cases? Just thinking about it.. obviously it can be bypassed but is there a good enough?
Make unrestricted devices like alcohol: you need ID to buy (but the box containing the device you’re sold is indistinguishable from any other, so the device may have a UUID but it can’t be traced to your ID); kids caught with unrestricted devices in school have them confiscated; maybe fine parents, but I think discouragement and banning in schools is enough. Kids can have restricted devices, distinguished from unrestricted by appearance in a way that’s hard to fake.
I don't know, treating general-purpose computers like alcohol seems a lot more dystopian to me. Does this extend to PC components? Can I build a machine and put Linux on it?
> I don't know, treating general-purpose computers like alcohol seems a lot more dystopian to me
Isn't this the logical end goal of basically every approach to "age verification", though? If you really want to control access to the internet, then you can't let people have a VPN or Tor, and if you don't want people to VPNs or Tor then you need to lock the device down.
Maybe for the next few years you'll be able to do that. Analogy: back in the day you could just build your own airplane and fly it around. There were no regulations.
Yes, that was my thought as well when i was visiting UK and reddit kept asking me to verify my age. It might be even more private and non-trackable than that - if "age.id.gov" central authority effectively "provides a new random user id" (implementation may vary and does not need to have a "literal username") every time you try to use it / log into a website that needs to verify your age - this way websites can not even track you across platforms.
It seems like all the tech stack is there to implement a very simple and privacy-persevering solution.
It does not even smell of state censorship because a website does not have to check your age if it decides to be "non compliant".
Why isn't it implemented like that? Based on the comments it seems more like a "free-for-all implement-your-own-PPI-handling-thon".
This will ofc make life harder for a some groups of people - like people without / limited access to IDs etc. And i do not even argue that the whole thing is necessary.
But there seem to be vastly superior technical means to implement that, aren't there?
Easy, when you buy the device, during first setup, you set up the date of birth of the user. If the user is underage, the parent/guardian sets a password to unlock the device if needed before the user is 18. That device then sends "is_below_18" flag to whatever service wants it.
just do what they did in Leisure suit Larry, ask some skill testing questions that only someone older than 18 would know. Give them a short time to answer so they can't look it up.
If you don't think a checkbox saying "I am 13 or older" is adequate, with all the behavioral tracking available to say Meta, they can tell well enough. OpenAI talks about this too: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-age-prediction/
Knowing who someone is in general is different from having a photo of their face or government ID confirmation.
This is a classic case for one time ZKPs. Sure, you can't get around attestation, but the party that needs to verify that you meet age criteria doesn't need to know your age or other private information.
I presume you're concerned by the attesting party's knowledge of both the signature and identify information. Yes, in principle these can be linked, but in practice, it may be difficult or made very difficult, and today, very little of our online activity is really anonymous anyway. It is generally not too difficult to infer identity based on the content someone generates and the bread crumbs they leave behind.
Of course, if the intent is to use age verification as a wedge to monitor everyone, then it will be difficult politically to secure the protections needed to prevent that sort of data fusion.
Where are these mythical sweet-spot solutions? Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset. Now that users have been conditioned to accept this, nobody seems very interested in figuring out how to collect less PII - only insulating themselves from liability by having the data processed by a third party.
But some of the easiest middle ground solutions that solve 90% of the problem are things like simple math problems. Get asked "3+7" and that will pretty quickly filter out almost anyone under the age of 6. If you can accept that there are some smart 4 or 5 year olds who can do simple math, congrats you recognize there's a 10%.
They don't exist because the organizations who lobbied governments were YOTI, Persona, K-ID and others who have a vested interest in collecting data and rent seek by latching through regulations like diseased ticks.
> half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset.
what kind of websites are you visiting to get age checked on half of the sites you visit? i've only been asked to verify for dating apps and "sexy stuff". and i definitely don't spend 50% of my total browsing time on those sites.
maybe this says more about the kind of content/sites you're accessing if it is really as high as 50%? UK age verification mostly only applies to sites which might end up hosting the content quoted below.
> pornographic images, and content that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for eating disorders, self-harm, or suicide.
or you're just being hyperbolic? 79% of statistics are made up, after all.
reddit.com, discord.app, google.com with safe-search off (This one works sometimes, they are A/B testing force-enabling safe-search for unauth'd sessions)
I don't use that; it's worse for your brain than any regulated substance. Kick your reddit habit while you can.
Google safe search: I've only seen this from my PAYG mobile phone, because I've never bothered to lift the adult content lock on that after more than a decade, and Google is the only place I've seen ask, actually. Even so it rarely happens.
Discord: the mere idea of being in an adult-content-related discord group is enough to make my skin crawl.
Worth noting that of these three, only one of them is a UK-only decision, as far as I am aware: Google Safe Search respects UK phone companies' default adult content block on PAYG. They are about the only company that does. Reddit and Discord have made this decision globally, have they not? Because there are US state laws too.
there are thousands of comments on these threads every time it comes up. there's tons of what i consider reasonable solutions proposed. there's examples below, too, which don't require face scans.
>Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents
Privacy-wise I think they're completely acceptable, but in terms of circumvention I don't think the politicians will be satisfied. It's barely a step up from the "I'm over 18" buttons on websites.
>It's barely a step up from the "I'm over 18" buttons on websites.
i think its a pretty decent step up from that, but i know what you mean.
>I don't think the politicians will be satisfied.
and that circles back to my original point. the politicians aren't satisfied with a "mostly effective" solution (e.g. OS-enforced age attestation) as they are with literally every other law, and instead are taking advantage of the issue to justify mass surveillance.
I believe kids will always find circumvention pathways.
There is a signaling function these laws serve: things are the products we consider acceptable in society. We have these rules for cigarettes, booze, and vapes.
That said, privacy being sacrificed for signals, is an unacceptable trade, especially when better solutions can be crafted.
I'd consider this a feature. I'd be proud if my kids find a way to circumvent the parental controls on the family computer or use their own money to build their own computer like I did growing up. At that point they've earned the right to the full internet.
(However, I would not be willing to use any solution that sacrifices my or my kid's privacy.)
Government builds a website where you can log in using any government issued ID or using one of the many many many available services that hold your details already(at least in the UK nearly everyone will have a DLVA account, HMRC account, HMPO account, NHS account.....all of these are government services which we can only assume hold our data securely already).
On that website, you can click "give me a verification code", it gives you a code that is single use and only valid 24 hours. You type that into whatever 18+ website you need to, they use a public API provided by the government to just check "yes this is a valid code and the user is 18" - bang, done, verified. The website knows nothing about you at all, except for the fact that you're 18.
In fact, the UK government ALREADY HAS THIS. For the EU settlement scheme, you can give your employeer(or anyone else who needs it) a special magic code that they type in on the government website, and it just says "yet his person has the right to reside in the UK" without spilling any of your personal information at all. The code is single use and valid a limited amount of time. And you can do the same with your driving licence, where anyone can verify you hold a valid licence without actually seeing it or any details on it.
Like, am I being stupid here? It seems like an almost trivial solution to the problem, especially given that it already exists for at least 2 services named above.
And yes, I know people will say "oh but that requires the government having this data on you, and that's bad" or "but then the government will know you've authenticated with pornhub!".
And yes, both of these are true - but on point 1 - like, I'd love some ideal situation where the government can simultaniously give me a passport or a driving licence AND not have any information about me at the same time, but that ain't happening, and on point 2 - yes, but that's still infinitely preferable to the current implementation, and it can be easily solved with legislation saying that the code authentication service doesn't log who requested verification, it just answers with yes/no and that's it.
Every time I search something, I open a fresh private tab and google it. If I want to turn safe-search off, I'd have to go through this code verification flow for every single search. Aside from just being annoying, they'd have to implement strict rate limiting to prevent automated code sharing, so I'd soon end up waiting for a rate limit to expire before I can search anything.
And "the government will know you've authenticated with pornhub" is extremely harmful, in my opinion.
I have personally had to remove NCII for teens and young adults. Grooming is a thing, self harm communities are a thing, as is sextortion.All of it at internet scale.
And this ignores the parts where the platforms released features they knew from their own tests, were harmful to teens.
It is convenient to dismiss them, because it makes it easier to hold positions that depend on them being minor harms.
> but then the government will know you've authenticated with pornhub!
If you do your cryptography right, the government will not know that you've authenticated with pornhub. That's the whole goddamn point of privacy-preserving age verification.
This means giving the government complete insight into your internet browsing. All they need to do is store a database table of handed out keys to ids.
>>This means giving the government complete insight into your internet browsing.
...how? All they know is you've authenticated with service X. And like I said, we can make legislation to say they are not allowed to keep the record of who authenticated.
Besides, let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good - in the UK all ISPs are required to keep a full year of your browsing history, and 17 government agencies can access this data(including DEFRA - the agriculture agency lol). So like....the "the government will have a full history of your browsing" is a ship that sailed a few years ago. Obviously I don't agree with it, and I think we should be on the streets of London and protesting this, but here we are as a country.
So like yeah, I get your point. But UK is particularily fucked on this point, let's not make it even more fucked with the way things currently are, the authentication can and should be done better.
Why does the government need to know what pages you visit? It could just encode a string representing the date and 'above 18' and sign it with its private key. PH then just needs to verify it using the public key.
Asking adults for beer doesn't scale, code sharing can. If you want to crack down on code sharing, you'd have to start surveilling who is signing up to what.
> If you want to crack down on code sharing, you'd have to start surveilling who is signing up to what.
Not at all. If you want to find who shares codes at scale, you just track that person. If someone sells hundreds of thousands of codes online, you can just buy one from them and you have proven that they do it.
Again, if age verification is honestly about helping the kids, I don't think it has to be 100% efficient.
> If you want to crack down on code sharing, you'd have to start surveilling who is signing up to what.
Why? One code for one user account per site. If you're paranoid about privacy rotate codes and accounts weekly. As long as you can purchase the codes with cash in IRL stores the privacy impact is minimal.
So this solution is fine for proving your immigration status, getting employment or renting a house, but it's not good enough for browsing porn(to be a tiny bit flippant)?
>>If you want to crack down on code sharing
Right now, all the kid has to do is grab their parents passport while they are not home or asleep, scan it on their phone and they are in. It takes 30 seconds.
With the codes they would either need to convince their parents to generate a code for them, or find someone online who will - which of these solutions seems less prone to abuse to you?
Again, let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
To be fair, I buy my beers on CC. If someone really wanted to know the best IPAs and session able beers they could get, they could audit my CC records and then cross check to the breweries and pubs to see what I was buying. Just depends how much someone wants to learns bout good beer.
It doesn't even need 'age verification'. Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see. That means all that's needed is a standard way for parents to make sure that websites know their children are children. They don't need identity, they don't need actual age, we don't even need a complicated cryptographic solution.
California had the right idea - establish a standard way for a client to identify that the user isn't an adult (or you could do it the other way around, but that's less permissive), mandate that websites obey the flag, mandate that OSes include the feature and that browsers use it. In the end, anyone who owns a device can set their age group flag however they want it - it would be up to parents to make sure their children only use devices set the way they want. The parents could set their 8 year old's age group to whatever age group they want, and rest assured that websites would respect it.
Based on the surveys from the wikipedia page it appears that 15-20% of parents used the v-chip feature on their TV. For an optional feature that has to be manually configured that seems like an incredible success. I would have guessed that fewer than 20% of users configure any optional setting on their TV.
This is already possible. There's not enough people doing it, so instead we get age verification schemes.
The benefit of an age attestation scheme is that it makes it easy for parents, while also diffusing future attempts to use children as an excuse for control.
The age verification that doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording is called parental controls and it already exists in most systems. It doesn't require any proof of ID, internet connection, complex distributed systems, and so on. And it has near 100% success rate.
What's the point in making this distinction? This is HN, 99% of the users here are aware of what zero knowledge proof is and that it's possible to implement it that way.
The general consensus and what the article is alluding to is that it will be probably implemented in a way that allows individual tracking and identification.
I don’t know? Maybe its the little give and take that helps build a solution that is mature and limits the kind of harms kid are facing, without sacrificing privacy?
It’s also the very cool, nuanced and technical tooling that people here tend to enjoy figuring out, and building.
It side steps the thought terminating tar pits of “privacy at all costs” or “save the children”.
This isn’t about kids at all. The ID requirement is the WHOLE POINT.
That it is technically possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving way is thus entirely irrelevant.
They want all online activity tied to ID so they can violently, illegally retaliate in the dark of night against protected expression online that they don’t like.
That’s all this is. Privacy-preserving techniques are irrelevant because they do not accomplish this goal.
You must have skipped reading Project 2025. Most of the editors/contributors have been appointed/hired/added to the administration/cabinet. More than half of the goals of Project 2025 had already been implemented.
Getting children to not grow up into idiots requires intense parental interactions, healthy environments, and the ability to explore and get hurt. Identification isn't even on the list.
They already failed to do that by steadily eroding the educational system and its standards over the last 50-70 years. We’re already there. The electorate can’t locate the countries on a map in which the US is fighting multiple wars in their name.
So let's see some of the champions of these systems acknowledge this downside and make the case that they should be built in a way that avoids it and not back down on that when it becomes inconvenient.
> there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes.
I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours.
> i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.
Well there's plenty of idiots in power and I'm sure they have no idea. But there absolutely are evil ones who simply want more power and don't care what happens after they have it.
If this were actually about protecting children, maybe you could get something passed that wasn't just ground work for a panopticon hellscape. But it's not about children at all - the people truly worried about that are just useful idiots - it's about power, and so you can't pass anything without having the surveillance infrastructure forced in.
My assumption (made admittedly with no evidence whatsoever) that you believe it's possible for someone to verify their age without giving up any anonymity or privacy, even temporarily.
one of the reasonable solutions i allude to is an over/under 18 age attestation at time of account creation on your OS. websites say "18+ content" and the OS either displays or doesn't display the content. there is ~0 privacy or anonymity concerns as 3rd parties don't get any communication about whether the content was shown.
> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia
But I feel there's not a lot of trust that whatever implementation we could end up with wouldn't be such a dystopia. The real world equivalent would be checkpoints at every intersection verifying the driver's age, the cashier who carded the 20 yo with a beer now does it for everyone, makes a copy of your ID and stores it in a big folder shared with their 427 "business partners".
Imo we should scrap the whole idea of age verification. Kids get a kidPhone with kidOS, whitelist of age-appropriate resources & capabilities. You wouldn't let an 8 yo drive on the highway, yet they can have a supercar to drive unsupervised on the information highway, no biggie. Internet is full of adults doing all sort of stuff while kids need supervision and education: design safe spaces for children, not checkpoints at every corner.
The so-called "social media" companies in the past have bragged to advertisers and the public about how much they know about their targets, also known as "users". Statements like, "We know more about you than your friends and family."
Now, is this really true. Probably not. It's exaggeration. It's hype
But these companies have learned that a 100% correct is not necessary to make money. For example, if they are correct 80% of the time, then maybe that's good enough
A law that achieves an 80% reduction in youth ad targets might also be "good enough"
The toes getting stepped on belong to the companies
The kids who will still access these companies' websites come hell or high water, the 20%, are unlikely to complain
Complaints come from the companies and those who rely on these companies to make money. Like the author of this blog post, they keep calling a handful of Big Tech websites/app endpoints "the internet"
This would be great and all, but all parties who are in a position to choose to implement this kind of system or to keep the status quo are already motivated to keep (and expand) the existing systems, for any number of reasons. Everybody (except the end users) loves to keep that juicy metadata and incidental logs of everything.
there are laws against underage drinking and buying alcohol. some kids still get access to alcohol. the law is mostly successful, with an acceptable amount of failure rate.
Gating is not just for porn, they are talking about using for social media and various other things. You can imagine that many things end up age gated if this becomes legislation, as a preventative measure.
Then your 10% becomes problematic because you are either restricting or granting access based on invalid information. So in your world here we then need ways for people who were incorrectly gated to reach out and be corrected somehow.
You're mixing up false positives and false negatives. Nobody is going to be incorrectly blocked under this system unless they lost their ID, and the fix there is getting a new ID.
Some kids skipping the block sometimes isn't catastrophic, especially because there won't be all this peer pressure to join adult social media when 90% or more are blocked.
You know this? My guess is that companies will be held responsible for anyone accessing there content that is not supposed to. In that light they will feel the need to block any unknowns that come through rather than potentially face issues if someone who is technically banned from accessing gets in.
I'm not sure how you confidently can say that every company is going to allow the people we can't verify have access?
Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing? To me, the entire problem is framing the issue as "age verification" in the first place - this implies the web company is responsible for knowing and controlling who uses their service. Whether this is a full-on demand for drivers' license / face scan / verification can, or whether there can be a technical process that obscures some details doesn't change this underlying dynamic!
The other problem you're up against is in the low-friction online environment, 90% easily turns into a much lower percentage. Which will actually manifest itself as the initial methods that achieved "90%" being declared insufficient in favor of stronger methods of identity verification.
I say this as a parent staring down having to deal with the dumpster fire that is the modern web in the next short year or two - the only sane way to address this problem is through client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc. There is indeed a market failure here, so the sensible regulation is to make websites over a certain size publish labels about the suitability of their content for age brackets, whether a site is social media, contains user generated content, has algorithmic feeds, and so on - affirmative assertions about the content that carry legal weight and liability for them not being true. Device manufacturers over a certain size would need to include parental control software that can be enabled during the setup process.
If parental controls are enabled and a website has not published tags (too small, foreign jurisdiction, misconfiguration, etc), then it simply fails closed and refuses to display the site. This keeps decisions about content suitability in the hands of parents where it belongs, rather than putting it in the hands of corporate attorneys who will often make decisions directly contrary to what parents want! Remember this whole topic is being pushed by big tech to absolve themselves of liability for pushing harmful products!
>Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing?
well, i mean, you put a decently reasonable one in your own comment: "client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc."
another sibling comment mentions alcohol sales. government could issue a scratch card with UUID that's valid for some time, sold at anywhere alcohol/tobacco is already sold. most people are already comfortable with flashing an id at the beer store.
read any other the other dozen similar threads with hundreds of comments, and there are a handful of other neat ideas usually voted pretty high up.
Isn't getting around showing ID for alcohol about as easy as clicking "Yes I'm above 18"? All you need is to know someone that would buy it. Or know someone that knows someone that would buy it. Or know someone that had it bought for them.
Or I guess in the case of the US... maybe even just steal it considering how lax people seem to be with theft.
>Isn't getting around showing ID for alcohol about as easy as clicking "Yes I'm above 18"? All you need is to know someone that would buy it.
and yet, most kids aren't walking around hammered. the penalties of underage possession and supplying to underage kids deters most people.
i will reemphasize that literally no law is 100% effective, so its silly to talk about age verification as if it has to be the first one to be 100% effective.
Note that what I outlined is decidedly not "age verification" or "identity verification" - rather it relies on on-device parental controls, where the decision process is still completely under the control of the end users (ie parents). The main point of the legislation would be to prime the network effects to overcome the current market failure.
The details of the setup are very important as they lay out which way the situation will be pushed as the calls invariably continue. There are many other neat ideas that are voted high up, that still fundamentally still just boil down to identity verification! This why we need to talk specifics - even most programmers are bad at designing secure systems, as it requires the additional skill of adversarial thinking.
For instance, the scratch card idea you bring up fails with the same problem - it still puts the onus for yes/no decisions on the companies, meaning when the scratch cards are declared not good enough, those companies will then move on to additional methods - and it would be a tall order to craft legislation that prohibited companies from employing any other identity verification methods beyond the scratch cards. And in case it's not obvious, the scratch cards will readily be seen as not good enough - if they're truly private, it's easy for anyone to make a couple extra bucks by buying some (up to the limit), and then selling the tokens online.
(never mind that many beer stores have moved to online verification of licenses where they scan your ID# and it gets backhauled to some centralized database, so even buying beer isn't appropriately described as "flash your ID" any more)
(also note that any "age verification" or "identity verification" scheme does not merely absolve big tech of liability, rather it moves that legal liability on to parents themselves! )
> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking
Personally I don't care how much age sniffing is mandatory in that I think it is inacceptable on any level. Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok? Because I can not buy into that premise. To me the whole assumption is wrong from the get go.
> Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok?
Everything is going to contribute to tracking, though. It's really hard to ensure that data doesn't leak.
Example proposal: sites attach an X-AGE-RATING header to pages and browsers only render the page if X-AGE-RATING < USER_AGE.
Exploitable Issue: Send multiple requests from one page for various style sheets with different X-AGE-RATING headers. The ones that get loaded give you all you need to find the user's age cohort.
But, the unique combination of things like your screen dimensions, number of threads, charge percentage, default languages, available fonts, etc already makes tracking possible. I don't know if adding one more - carefully chosen feature - would really make the situation that much worse.
I am convinced that no one will make any progress on this issue so long as they refuse to understand that their aren't a group of shadowy figures pushing for this but rather a sizeable chunk of the general population, buoyed on by various moral outrage interest groups including a great many HNers who have been happily stoking the narrative that social media is the cause of every negative statistical ill.
Who wants this? God damn everyone. And in so much as Facebook might do something with the data, what they really want is a legal moat of sufficient depth to drown possible competitors.
In fairness (i.e. looking at the data with an open mind), social media does seem to be the cause of (or at least strongly correlated with) a bunch of ills.
That's true but has anyone studied the good things that have happened from younger people being able to find community or other positive aspects?
Either way the solution again is not age gating, it's real meaningful data privacy laws that if enacted would have a huge effect on many companies today.
How do data privacy laws address the significant number of voters who are being told and believe that social media use is causing issues for children and want something done about it?
This is exactly what I mean: you've rocked up and started talking about something else entirely.
I think you misunderstood me, I'm saying strong (very strong) data privacy laws make age gating unnecessary. This solution has far reaching benefits across all age groups.
> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate
I believe you are missing the point. "To protect kids" is just a cover, the nightmare dystopia is the real goal. So age verification have to be a nightmare dystopia or it would be useless for those, who push for it.
Ah, well, no. Sorry, didn't read to the end of it. It is just I see no point at all to discuss other options, so sorta become bored reading about them.
You can't spy on kids without spying on everyone, and in any case they're interested in the everyone part. Ultimately they want 24x7, realtime facial & biometric monitoring of everyone using any "approved" device, and be sure that only approved devices will be able to join networks and do stuff upon them, so for those brave nerds thinking they can survive on GhostBSD from their basement, yes you can, but as Gandalf said, you can only fence yourself in, but not fence the world out. Sooner or later they'll come for everyone.
Parents largely control what their kids have access to, whether it requires a device, a data plan, home Wi-Fi, whatever. Where parents don't/can't control their kids' access, no amount of regulation and technology will fix it.
This applies not just to social media, but drugs, alcohol, porn, etc. Yes, laws and IDs add friction and that's good, but if a kid really wants those things they are going to find a way.
Social media already had built in friction without needing new regulations and ID requirements. To access social media you need a relatively expensive (for kids) device and some way to connect that device to the Internet, which is also not free.
The biggest problem I see is that unlike alcohol, drugs, and porn, there are seemingly benign reasons for kids to use social media. Sports teams, dance classes, youth groups, etc. all want to keep in touch and allow group communication. Too often the adults in charge turn to Instagram or whatever social media app for the group communication. Now, unfortunately, your kid needs an IG account.
Even as an adult who doesn't use social media, I find the use of Facebook as a company home page, or using it as a forum for group communication, to be problematic. Especially as Meta makes it more and more difficult to see content without an account.
Glad that absolutely nothing in my life uses social media for communication like this. What a shitty way to reach people too. Your post is going to be served days late whenever its churned by the algorithm to the intended user, if at all. Meanwhile, email always works. There are even services that will mass text people.
> Too often the adults in charge turn to Instagram or whatever social media app for the group communication.
This was always the problem going way back. Lots of responsible parents pushed back hard and advocated for doing everything in person during the scheduled times. Even before that there were already concerns that kids were stuck indoors and addicted to entertainment.
They ultimately lost out to the lazy majority who kept mindlessly repeating "who cares?" and "oh every generation says that when they get old!". Organizers also saw it as a way to do less work.
Well here we are now. Even the younger people agree this is dumb.
My main concern is transparency. How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?
If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair. However, if some people are exempt from monitoring because of their connections, relations, etc. then that would be unfair.
And if some people are allowed to harass and stalk others based on some attribute (race, religion, nationality, etc.) because they are in a monitoring position (while others are not) then that would be unfair as well.
Well there can be no consequences at T=0, but thanks to transparency, consequences can happen, by a collective decision, at T=1. Therefore having transparency is important on its own, it facilitates change towards fairness.
And that's what I am saying - we should still ask for transparency even in the environment of no consequences.
It's also possible that people are not sure about the lack of consequences, and again, transparency then prevents them doing bad thing even if actually there are no consequences.
But of course tautology is tautological by definition. (I am almost 50 and kinda tired of these eristic games on the Internet.)
If we're in a position to ask for something, I would rather ask for consequences. We already know what bad stuff is being done: more transparency has marginal utility, under the circumstances.
> How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?
It's not even just about the current people in charge or with access. Who's next? The "trust us" approach doesn't work when trust has already been broken with the people, or in a scenario where the data will change hands to an unknown future administration.
The best way to win my trust is to not even want the data in the first place.
A couple years ago I would have tended to agree with you, transparency would be a good first step. But then I have recently seen demonstrated that transparency just proves that you do not need to hide corruption as long as a powerful bloc of voters actually agrees with your corrupt position. I think what we really are going to need is consequences defined ahead of time, along with an enforcement mechanism not easily corrupted itself. This is hard. But it is a topic we will hopefully be spending quality time working out over the next few years anyway.
>How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?
Ah, so except for THE ENTIRE FUCKING PROBLEM, this is fine.
>And if some people are allowed to harass and stalk others based on some attribute (race, religion, nationality, etc.) because they are in a monitoring position (while others are not) then that would be unfair as well.
Yes, we wouldn't want racial profiling in our Orwellian hellscape. That would truly put it over the edge.
> If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair.
It might be fair, by some definition, but it would still be wrong. The government shouldn't be monitoring us to the extent required to implement age verification on the 'net.
In Canada the approach is going to be that social media and AI companies will need to figure out a system where those under 16 can’t access content. The government will be able to grant exemptions if the company can satisfy regulators that they have built and maintained adequate, alternative structural safeguards to protect children on their platform.
Further to that, companies are required to do this in a strict data minimization approach, results need to be anonymized and destroyed immediately after the check is complete.
The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media. If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.
> The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media.
You have a flair for understatement.
> If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.
Same. I joke that when I retire I'm throwing out every computer in my house. Turns out the gov't may effectively do that for me, because I will not be handing out my ID to web sites. That is a hard line for me.
I don’t think saving them from spying is the main concern. Instead it’s the direct negative effects of the usage upon the kids that’s the concern. Not that age verification isn’t problematic
The possibly too subtle point of this article is that the spying is what makes the negative effects so powerful. Social media spies on what you are viewing and then sends you more of that, and send the info to other people so they can send you more of that too
Then ban underage smartphones altogether, that would probably make the single biggest improvement in child safety and mental health. Trying to police content is an utter waste of time.
We're cooked. The young kids I teach are unfortunately completely accustomed to go guardian spying on them at school. The admin constantly reinforce the need to dissect the internet, treat Chromebooks as media consumption devices, not computers. I hear it will be even worse here next year. Not sure how.
These people are obsessed with risk mitigation that it's not even worth having tech class anymore. No risk. 100% control all the time.
This reminds me of being refused entry to a nightclub in the US because I’d forgotten my passport, even though I had a European ID card and I’m over 40. Offline, age checks already often become rigid “approved identity document” checks. Online, that problem seems even worse, because the check can become a persistent identity layer across the web.
Maybe it is just a lax west coast thing but they hardly ID here. Bartenders straight up don't ever card at all. Only place you'd get carded is if they put a bouncer out front, which only happens when it is getting really busy, and even then they are mostly there to keep out teenagers and break up fights, only give you a 1 second glance at your card to not chance a liquor license violation.
Certain night clubs (haven't seen these antics in CA but have in NYC and Miami) often do stupid stuff to guys though. If you show up with a group of guys they will probably not let you in. You need an even ratio of men and women. They will let in a group of all women with hardly any check.
> The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum
The US is an instructive example in real time. Roughly everyone worries about what happens when their opponent gains control of the government and then promptly forgets how much they worried when their side has it.
> The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum
If that was considered the real problem, we would be fighting against surveillance capitalism. Instead we cheer for LLM companies who made it an order of magnitude worse.
Let's be honest, the only time we care about being tracked is to access porn, for some reason. And if we're being honest, we are already tracked when doing it.
This idea sounds like the death of social media. Remove anyone under 18 ensures they won't signup after. Forcing id verification means 70-80% of adult accounts will be dead. Network effects disappear. Those who remain will be businesses pushing something, hackers/spammers and some die hard group.
The slippery slope argument is hugely valid, but having kids not have access to alcohol, porn and guns is very normal. We don't even discuss it in the 'physical world' because it's absolutely normative.
Even in 'Europe' kids aren't going into the liquor store stocking up obviously - there are always age and responsibility-related conventions.
The 'online' nature of this piques our anti-authoritarian triggers and tends to err our judgment a bit.
There are valid reasons to do this, and there is 'a right way' - maybe we should have some hope and promote that.
I'm not hugely optimistic that they'll get it right, but we should aspire for to build the world we want. There's enough momentum that it's plausible.
In europe drinking age is what 16? By the time you want to regularly drink you are already legally allowed to. Meanwhile in the US you get screwed by both the law and your university for drinking in a dorm at 20 years old.
Age Verification is not about “saving kids from spying/social media”.
Same as Regulatory Encryption Backdoors are not about “protecting kids from child predators”
This is framing.
Abusing kids is bad. But that is not what this about. Let’s keep the discussion on topic: the goal is 1984-level oversight… not just of the kids
[Edit: I guess HN agrees: meanwhile the title changed from “saving kids from spying” to “is actually mass-surveillance” - good]
There are at least two methods to verify age without disclosing identity:
1) Yubikey-like tokens supporting attestation and sold at places not accessible to minors like liquor stores
2) "parent mode" on desktop and mobile devices - the device would refuse to load any inappropriate sites and install inappropriate apps like Telegram, Omegle or Facebook.
Not that I am in favour of age verification, but I find it interesting how many people complain about age verification for being "mass surveillance", but just don't give a shit about AI and TooBigTech and surveillance capitalism.
Could we step back a little and maybe revisit the premise that we need the gov't to be protecting children to begin with? That's what parents are supposed to be doing.
There are still places in the world where you and your family can literally fend for yourself against nature and rival gangs and so on if you're just super attached to the concept though, it's not like this option has been foreclosed.
This discussion is about the Internet. I.e. that we already have police and regulate in-person things like selling alcohol to minors, etc, is not a great argument in support of policing information.
If you call pornograpy and violence delivery to children "providing them with information" then sure but most normal people just consider that a bad thing that we'd like to avoid and definitely would like to stop sociopathic tech CEO's from exploiting for profit.
But back to your original point, it's a pretty well-established function of government to protect the children within its borders from being harmed.
Every time I see stuff about age verification (which I do admit is likely just a justification for control and surveillance over the internet) I can't help but wonder if there's some way to coordinate a large enough number of internet users to adopt a parallel internet that inherently cannot be regulated, or at least one in which no law can be reasonably enforced. For instance a fully encrypted p2p internet. I guess ultimately the problem is banks and other tie-ins to the real world like businesses with public reputations. And so I guess since endless content streams (including porn and other child-unfriendly media) follow the money primarily, any non-monetized / volunteer parallel internet would likely contain mostly unmonetized content like information (eg: wikipedia, Q&A sites, etc) and slow, un-gameable social media
In a perfect world, I'd prefer law and regulation minimization, but obviously that's just not reasonable in our actual world. As much as I have libertarian tendencies, I just can't argue that regulation is necessary. The really interesting part is which regulations are the ones you actually need, which do more harm than good, and which should be refactored -- all as measured (probably) by something like counterfactual real world preference (in the best case, at least). My sense (which isn't worth much; only should act on empirical evidence and falsification-resistant modelling) is such a parallel internet, plus an analogous parallel economy (like bitcoin), would be a net positive
In most of the developed world, you need to register with a government to operate a communications device, whether it's radio, land line, mobile phone, whatever. If you're theorizing some kind of peer-to-peer system, where you let someone use your service to bypass mandatory registration, you're going to be liable. There will be very limited takers.
If the users chooses what they are shown and the order they are shown in, then it's fine. If the platform chooses, then it's not, because they will always choose what creates the most engagement.
Not necessarily. Just fix the algorithm. Showing all submissions by time should be ok, showing all submissions by number of upvotes should be ok if the user chooses that.
I think I would be fine with a positive enumeration. Some ideas for serving content:
- purely random
- sponsored but without user tracking (like old school TV ads)
- sponsored for user selected geographical area feed
- sponsored for user current location geographical area feed
- follow "friends" or influencers
- purely timeline
- discussion boards
- timeline (IRC like)
- threaded
- user votes (not magic platform votes)
- follow keywords
It's clear by now that the societal impact is significant. I can banish all the social networks from my life and they'll still be corrupting the political process, promoting divisive content, etc.
I was replying specifically to someone who insinuated that all social media (or, at least, all supposedly addictive social media) should be banned for everyone, including adults. To me, it's a matter of personal freedom that they shouldn't be banned for adults.
No, but I'm not against selling alcohol and fast sports cars to adults, for example. I'm not very fond of a nanny state that prohibits almost everything to adults "for their sake" and because the government knows so much better.
Your extreme example of a policy regarding distribution of heroin is far from perfect, but also far better than prohibition, which has visited upon the world more death, disease, crime, and cartel enrichment than perhaps any other policy in history.
But surely we can do better than either of these extremes.
>"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.
Hilarious that the author doesn't think that this isn't already happening.
You can always have more of it. Currently, you can use some technical tools like Tor Browser to protect yourself. Age verification makes it easier to block them.
We're already been protecting children from printed porn, alcohol, drugs (legal or illegal), guns, etc. Children don't even have to buy those items, sometimes they can get them from friends or even find at home. It's always been parents responsibility to protect from that, and the Internet doesn't change that.
What the Internet does change is granularity of controls. With physical goods, parents can choose to give children travel magazines but not porn magazines. With Internet, parents don't always have a choice to give children a device to read travel websites but not porn websites.
Solving that granularity is all we need! And the good news - it's already largely solved: just give your kids one of the locked down phones/tables with parental controls (i.e., almost any phone/tablet today).
The law can and should make a few things better:
- introduce minimal requirements for parental controls, certify devices as kids safe (i.e., implementing these requirements)
- ideally, require websites to tag content - same way we tag it on TV for ages; this one is harder to enforce in practice (what about offshore websites?) but also not really needed - AI can tag content pretty well as part of parental controls
I know all of this was said before many times, but somehow it feels not enough people understand it.
Am I the only one who looked at NSFW websites at 10 years old and played games with voice chat with players of all ages too, and I turned out to be well adjusted productive member of society?
People need to chill.
Same, I care little about NSFW. We used to all live in caves together where kids saw adults having sex, in conflict, and cleaning game.
But I also grew with a different internet than we have now. There’s a level of targeted manipulation that’s novel. I’m not sure the cat goes back in the bag no matter what we do.
Same here. Every time a thread like this comes up it brings out that a surprising number of paranoid helicopter parents browse HN, which is a contradiction in perspective that I can't really emphasize with.
Seconded. The amount of time and characters spent here trying to coax someone into trying to help these damn layers materialize just tells me the point isn't the kids. It's trying to preserve business model in spite of negative externalities.
The new laws in the US don't require any real verification. Parents who care will just select a flag on device/OS setup that gets passed to websites. They can also just lie if they really want to. In the EU, they are trying to verify age with zero knowledge proofs.
It would be nice if the author actually spelled out the specific weaknesses of those approaches or even just referenced those laws instead of fear-mongering about "spying on kids", but I suppose that would be to much to ask of someone who made a career out of vibes based rage. Ironic that Doctorow is so eager to capitalize on the enshittification of journalism.
The specific weakness of these systems is that the governments cannot be trusted with this. They have demonstrated this - Snowden leaks for the US and several EU states, and the general monitoring clause in the Data Retention Directive for the EU as a whole.
Even if these governments come up with a zero knowledge system, it's only one click away from being replaced with a full-knowledge system, because the user is already used to it. These governments have already tried spying on everyone (and they almost certainly still do).
In general I'm opposed to this kind of regulation, but as a thought exercise, we do have the primitives needed to do age (or any other attribute) verification in a privacy-preserving and decentralized way.
You could imagine a hierarchy of organizations (governments, financial institutions, schools, etc) that a website trusts to verify some attribute (minimum age, citizenship, etc). Those organizations can attest that some identifier like an email address has been verified to belong to a real individual with that attribute, and that organization belongs to the hierarchy the website trusts, without revealing anything else about the user, the exact verifying organization, or the requesting website.
If the website sees (and possibly stores) the e-mail address, and the government or another party knows who it belongs to, the scheme is anything but privacy-preserving.
I grew up during the 90s/2000s and I used the internet, first social media platforms, messengers, etc. – a lot. My parents had no idea of computers, how to use them, how to use the internet, what is out there etc. Yet I am convinced that the way my parents dealt with it is still the gold standard.
Their parenting equipped me well to deal with weird, dangerous or otherwise harmful things I encountered. They were the kind of parents who would let us play in the woods till 9 in the evening, no questions asked if there were scratched knees or dirty cloths. If there was something they thought might be problematic, they talked to us in a way that left the ultimate decision how to deal with a situation with us, displaying a high level of trust into our ability to make good decisions ourselves (and sometimes letting us make bad ones just to talk about it after the fact).
Turns out if you want your kid to be able to deal with unexpected situations you need them to deal with situations, period. And the opposite of that is what I even back then saw with many of my friends parents: trying to shield their kid from every encountering (and mastering!) even the tiniest of dangers themselves, alone. You think you tell your kid about the dangers of the world, so they know, but the actual lesson you teach is that only their parent knows what is and isn't dangerous and that they themselves can't be trusted to judge it. That is a bad lesson.
Don't get me wrong, we did stupid stuff, like jumping of bridges into rivers and so on. But we were very careful about how we did it, diving beforehand, etc. The real stupid stuff in my youth was all done by other kids that had never learned to judge risks themselves and who in one brazen attempt of rebellion bit off more than they could chew in one go. That landed them in the hospital. My brother and I were the only kids in our friends circle who made it to 18 without having broken a single bone in our bodies, despite being regular skateboarders, snowboarders, climbers, cliff jumpers and all other kinds of borderline insane past-times, some of which don't even have a name.
One aspect: Since my parents had no idea what was on the internet and how to protect against specific dangers lurking within it an educational method that didn't have to rely on them knowing and enumerating every danger in the world proved to be a really smart choice in hindsight. Since the landscapes of social media especially for kids and young teenagers is shifting constantly at a high pace, any parenting ideas would need to keep track of all this as well. I can't even imagine how that would work.
The alternative is to ban everything. But how do they build a healthy immune system if they are never even exposed to the mild dangers first?
I think the best thing most parents could do is ban the Internet from their own life. I grew up in the 80s and I have watched the evolution of parenting since then. The world is measurably safer today than it was then. Stranger danger is vanishingly rare. What the hell happened? Fear happened. Things like 24 hour cable news accelerated it, and the Internet turbocharged it. We cannot untangle the horrors we are exposed to on the Internet with what real life dangers face us, we conflate them to the detriment of our children.
Maybe our children will figure it out as they become parents. I hope so.
When the dangers consist of invisible targeted manipulation of thought processes it's a whole different category of risks that kids (and most adults) are not equipped to handle. The effects are playing out around the world as we speak.
I don't know that universal tracking is the answer. I also don't think unrestricted access to children by manipulative predators (companies in this case) is the right answer. But then, I don't think they should have unrestricted access to adults either.
This is the only insightful comment in this entire thread but it will be ignored because people love a good moral panic.
Millennials having kids has turned them into their boomer parents, bringing out the pitchfork for whatever braindead hysteria was featured in CAPITAL LETTERS on the 6 oclock news that day.
The kids are going to be fine. None of the moral panics of previous generations are even talked about anymore, because it's all irrational kneejerk reactions to change ("this new music is different, it's destroying our kids!"). Social media doesn't even exist anymore, its just short form cable TV.
The adults on the other hand...that's the actual group we need to be worried about. They don't adapt like kids do.
The boomers mismanaged the entire developed world into a giant debt spiral and are collapsing every social welfare system their parents generation created.
The real question is: What institutions and assets the boomers created (like the internet) will the the millennials ruin with their poor governance?
Our lives are being thoroughly surveilled by a combination of phone tech, financial records tracking, pervasive internet user tracking, smart appliances, data brokerages, and our cars. That this is what triggers an avalanche of pushback while the rest of it is ignored wholesale reeks to high hell of either an overt astroturf campaign or industrial grade hypocrisy.
I offer no opinion on the concept of age verification beyond noting it's detractors consistently refuse to advance alternatives that address any of problems it's proponents claim it's intended to address.
The bigger threat to kids is all the browsers now bypassing domain filtering by default, even if you specify a DNS server. There was a time when multiple vendors sold protection software, but apparently some unsavory elements wanted all the browsers to build in DNS bypassing to go around it. The best protection for children is blocking the bad stuff at the DNS level.
As time goes on the opportunities for human persons to interact directly with each other, without some corporation mediating it, become fewer and fewer. Sometimes it's not even possible to buy food without having a third party corporation promise to pay some days in the future; there are places that literally don't take your order unless you have a credit card. This is how they get around the "cash must be accepted for all debts" law.
Online it is happening too. No human persons will be allowed to open accounts or even communicat with other human people unless a corporate entity does it for them. This mass surveillence is just a smaller part of the greater attack on human autonomy. Only corporate persons have rights these days.
The total fertility rate in basically all western countries is below replacement level fertility. Without immigration we are shrinking. There are fewer and fewer children around. And now protecting children on the internet got top priority. For real? We point to Russia for controlling the internet more and more. Yet the EU does the same and will probably even overtake Russia on this thanks to more resources / competencies.
This is a manipulation tactic not an argument. Almost nobody wants to prevent spying on kids. Main goal is to prevent harmful content like porn, gore and gambling.
here's alternative legislation that should be at least as effective without the mass surveillance aspect:
* as your kid's legal guardian you're legally liable for whatever the fuck your kid does, including but not limited to harming themselves: Parents should care for their kids
* platforms will do their best to not be available to minors unless minors are actually their core audience, will inform monthly how they did that, and the bottom 10% of achievers will pay an escalating percentual of their valuation as fine for each instance where they're found lacking: Platforms should care about kids as a category of people
* posession of personally identifiable information about an unrelated minor by any unrelated person/company without a clear and preapproved reason is grounds for a child abuse investigation on every person anywhere in the chain of custody of said data: Children's PII should be such a hassle to manage it's not worth taking
> What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance
Thank you.
It has never been about "protecting the children" either. That was
always a lie - the red herring. Many pointed that out from the get
go too.
The much more fascinating thing is how legislation is still being
actively changed to sustain that narrative. This is like a pre-scripted
event what we are seeing here. I find it quite fascinating. It shows
how real lobbyism actually works.
My prediction is that mandatory age sniffing will come, they will continue
to claim it is all for children, and the openness of the world wide web
will factually be transformed into a two-class apartheid system. The latter
has already happened actually - you have walled gardens e. g. discord rather
than oldschool phpBB webforums (aka privately controlled access to information),
Google already ruined its search engine, AI slop continues to ruin more here.
These are all not isolated. This is a deliberate mega-slop attack, combined with
payments to key lobbyists. We see a degradation of services here. That they attack
VPNs is very logical - after all VPNs allow people to break out of the global
ghetto system they are building here. They want to know who is who.
Interestingly I see this attack also related to them trying to abolish the right to repair movement. Now, there is no direct connection here, but right to repair also
attempts to put people at the center - you purchased something, you should be able to freely change it to your own liking, without some random private company being able to proxy-deny any change to that. With mandatory age sniffing coming, it also means that people will lose the ability to change software. Recently a university here in Europe started to demand that students must own a smartphone AND must install an app from a private company (via google store) in order to be able to read email sent to them via a webmail account. I also found this fascinating, because now people need to submit to Google, in order to study in a small european country, if they study at that university (which is paid for by taxpayers by the way). These interdependencies will keep on increasing here. Even Linux will fall victim - systemd already added data fields to track your age. More to come in the future despite Poettering's claim that it is all very, very harmless. Until it is not. And then it is too late.
I dreamt about this. In my dream it was very clear. Like ray dalio says we are in the last inning of the current great debt cycle. The end of the NWO or the great reset or what it is named, brings about great losses to the west. We attemt to save our economies with mass immigration. Along side the downfall of our industries and currencies the middle-class falters and the crime and violent facfions in society becomes stronger. Parallel societies become financed by outer geopolitical entities to escalate the wests downfall. In desperation the western governments try to get in control of their populations before real civil war erupts. One attempt to avoid complete chaos is total surveillance... Just; if ray dalio is right this is not a nightmare but our current trajectory. The leaders know and are preparing...
My solution is simple: Fine companies that allow minors. How you implement that is not my problem! Something that is severely lacking in tech is liability!
What's with the "we can't do that" helplessness that pervades this topic?
This whole shitshow thread is a bunch of techies coming up with more inane and erudite ways to implement spying on every web activity, but 'technically better'.
And people here are NOT asking why its even needed at all. This is what those ethics classes are for - not asking HOW to make, but whether we should at all.
And invasive country identity level online personas is NEVER something we should ever go for. This is basically "FLOCK ONLINE". And we see how devastating Flock is, even when pigs only have access.
No ID scans. No eyeball scans. No face scans. Im done with all of it.
I'm just gonna say here that all of this, whatever solution whatever unaccountable political group decides is the one, can only be built by tech workers. All of these require fingers hitting keys to produce code to function.
If we unified and refused, it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. I am begging my fellow developers in this space to remember that you are WORKERS. The owning class will throw you into the meat grinder with every other worker the second it's convenient to their wealth extraction.
Throw down your tools and say no.
If you find yourself tasked with implementing age verification shit you think is profoundly unethical, don't build it.
If you find yourself building products you know to be harmful, refuse.
If you find yourself put against a wall to ship garbage you know doesn't work to check boxes for some fucking CEO, stop.
We are the tip of the spear in the global effort to make the world more surveilled, more dangerous, less free, and more expensive. We have a CHOICE and we have to start making it.
And yes, it may cost you your job. It'll certainly cost you status. Your boss will hate you. But the last year or so has made it abundantly clear that whatever professional "safety" we feel is not warranted. We are just as replaceable as the delivery drivers who get caught pissing in bottles.
That's cute. About half my coworkers are socialists and the other half fire breathing MAGA. The only thing we have united on was that we don't talk politics at work. But I assure you, there is not universal agreement at all that authoritarian technology is bad. Some people, including many developers, absolutely support it.
What you propose requires agreeing on the definition of harmful. And immediately it fails.
I also dislike how confident people are in children's technical skills. It's really not hard at all to block VPN's. It's actually relatively easy to block certain content on your internet devices. I get it, kids are smart, but why do we think everyone is a malicious person who also has the ability to bypass all the restrictions?
Perhaps it's the parents who are too dumb to understand how to configure a network?
Perhaps save kids from peter file gangsters first? If local police protects child molesters, and government supports it... Very difficult to take this child internet protection seriously!!!
What an exceptionally bad faith way to put this whole thing. A five year old watching hours of the most depraved porn available is harmful to that child. Even if you disagree with that statement, you surely must acknowledge that it is an entirely reasonable opinion to hold and one our societies have generally held to this sort of thing for ages.
I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented.
There is also a reasonable debate to be had about the merits of various technical and legal schemes being implemented to achieve these goals.
But this take is neither of those. For one, surveillance isn't the number one harm being prevented (even though, a number of legal codes attempt to make this the case).
As has been pointed out previously, there absolutely can be age verification that is without surveillance. The fact that these solutions aren't always legally mandated and therefore age verification can be used to increase surveillance is a reasonable thing to attempt to amend to the implementations of these laws.
Your example is in bad faith as your example assumes that the only thing blocking a child of 5 from porn is age verification of some type. There are lots of blockers today for 5 year olds to get access to porn.
> I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented
Nobody on the "we need age verification" side wants a debate. They want to run face first in to dumb legislation giving governments and companies even more power to track every movement and know exactly who you are.
The blockers generally don’t work (I’ve tried). A big part of the problem is that it is in the interest of the providers to subvert them. The main benefit of age verification is changing that responsibility by making it the business of providers to ensure it works, not consumers.
You can make the same argument with alcohol: surely it’s sufficient that parents supervise their children not to drink. But it’s prove to be more effective to distribute that responsibility to the providers as well.
Disclaimer: I do not agree this take was made in bad faith. I think that raising a kid comes with its own set of expectations around caring and curating experiences of said kid. Therefore, I do think that offloading that responsibility to the state (and by extension, businesses that offer age-gating tech to that state...) is not the right way to do it. And even in the absence of that, my experience taught me it is entirely possible to grow up with unsupervised internet access and turn out an OK adult. The internet is not only "depraved porn". It is also a lifeline for that weird kid who has been bullied and effectively barred from social experiences.
Of course, YMMV.
That said, if such a nanny state is inevitable: zero-knowledge-proof-based age verification would not only be possible, it would further protect these kids from a bad state actor. In that spirit, I agree with your last point. The fact that any other alternatives are even being considered makes it on principle a non-starter to me, because it betrays the actual goals of the political actors involved.
California's proposal is better than the one you're proposing, so Californian legislators goals are actually to solve GP's problem. Articles like this one that don't consider other proposals like California's are idiotic because voters actually want to solve GP's problem, and pretending they don't exist does not convince voters.
You can't use the words "reasonable debate" in your post after you've immediately jumped straight to some mythical worst case scenario of a 5 year old being given a device with no supervision and somehow managing to immediately find their way to some sort of super duper snuff porn that will scar them for life.
I agree going to the worst-case is a weak technique, and this is what the OP does:
> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.
This comment should not be downvoted. The original article lost me in the first sentence with this:
"The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet"
Sorry, but a firehose of unlimited pornography, violence, racist, misogynist, and divisive content for developing children is bad. You can "well actually..." me all day I don't care at all.
I agree that there's no good solutions here, and I think this is a genuinely complicated and difficult issue for exactly the reasons people often state. But every argument that pretends that it's a one-sided discussion should be dismissed out of hand. There are two sides to this, both thorny.
>"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.
its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes.
i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.
Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? I don't personally see a way to verify someone's age which doesn't involve either credit card verification, photo id verification, or some sort of facial recognition. If you know enough about someone to verify their age—even to a relatively low degree of accuracy—you probably know enough to pinpoint who they are in general.
Heck—in most cases, we can't even tell the difference between humans and bots anymore! And it's true that we basically accept that some bots will slip through the cracks—but identifying bots also strikes me as significantly easier than identifying children.
The way identity wallets work:
The government issues an eID to your wallet. The ID is signed by the government and linked to the device to prevent transferring the credential. A public/private key-pair is generated by the secure enclave in your phone, the public key along with proof of possession of the private key is included in the request for the government eID. The government signs individual attributes combined with the public key with the government private key. The government certificate containing the public key is, well, public.
One of the attributes is ‘over_18’ (In the EU eID scheme countries can add other over_XX attributes if they want, but over_18 is mandatory).
When a website wants to requests attributes, in this case the over_18 attribute, they send a request to the user’s wallet app, including a challenge. The wallet sends back a package including the government-signed attribute, which contains the device public key and the over_18 attribute plus a response to the challenge (proving the credential didn’t get transferred).
The website only sees the ‘over_18’ attribute, which is backed by the government signature. They don’t see any other attributes (the wallet app shows in advance which attributes you are sharing). The government never sees which website wants to know if you’re 18+.
Of course this is all a bit simplified, check OIDC4VCI and OIDC4VP for details.
The only real issue is the wallet app and device binding. Because a compromised device could allow credentials to be transferred some form of attestation of device and wallet app is required. In practice this means no rooted/jailbroken phones.
> The website only sees the ‘over_18’ attribute, which is backed by the government signature
Not true. The device's public key is also sent, which functions as a stable device identifier.
We've spent years trying to get away from stable tracking IDs and fingerprinting. Returning to a system where devices are sending a stable ID to a website to prove ownership is a step backward.
There are proposed mitigations like issuing multiple sets of credentials or rotating them, but we're not going to get an infinite number of keypairs for every website or session in the secure enclave in practice.
Another reason why these proposals aren't getting much uptake is that they aren't addressing what the lawmakers are pursuing: They don't want anonymous authorization tied to the device. They want IDs tied to accounts and a way to discourage people from sharing IDs. In the anonymous systems it only takes one person a few minutes to put an over-18 identity into a device and there's no way to determine if someone is abusing the system by stealing IDs or if someone's 18 year old brother is setting up all of their younger brothers' phones for $5 each.
The situation gets stickier when you acknowledge that it's not possible to limit all of these websites to only mobile phone devices with secure enclaves that are not jailbroken. Once you open a door to desktop devices and other OSes accessing these sites, you open the door to replaying and proxying attacks, where someone will produce those `over_18` attestations on-demand for you, possibly for a minimal price. This brings us back to the public stable identifier to discourage fraud, which means governments won't be happy to issue as many keypairs as we want, which means we're back to semi-stable fingerprints.
> Not true. The device's public key is also sent, which functions as a stable device identifier.
This is covered by allowing for single-use credentials. IIRC the EU personal IDs will use this. Basically, the wallet requests a batch of single-use eIDs that all use different device key-pairs. Each credential is only used for one request and then deleted. The wallet will automatically request new credentials in batches when they run out. The old key-pairs are deleted along with the credential so you don’t run out of space in the secure enclave.
> Another reason why these proposals aren't getting much uptake
I’m not sure what you mean by not much uptake, EU countries are required to issue and accept them for official business by the end of 2026
> This is covered by allowing for single-use credentials.
They said There are proposed mitigations like issuing multiple sets of credentials or rotating them, but we're not going to get an infinite number of keypairs for every website or session in the secure enclave in practice.
> Basically, the wallet requests a batch of single-use eIDs that all use different device key-pairs.
The comments you replied to omitted mass surveillance. But the article and 1st comment included it. The government would know what wallet requested each single use identifier.
> This is covered by allowing for single-use credentials. IIRC the EU personal IDs will use this. Basically, the wallet requests a batch of single-use eIDs that all use different device key-pairs. Each credential is only used for one request and then deleted.
But this then means that the issuers and the verifiers can trivially collude to deanonymize holders/users.
There are schemes where you don't need key pairs for each user (assuming the government has some way of authenticating users). Private State Tokens use blinded tokens for this.
It doesn't prevent tokens from being stolen or sold, but the token issuer only accepts each token once and can limit the rate that tokens are issued and control how fast they expire, giving decent control over how practical using stolen or sold tokens are.
> In practice this means no rooted/jailbroken phones.
Personally - this is less acceptable to me than just having the site collect my image/id.
I'd support just putting the id in a dedicated device (ex - gov issues smart key) or just accepting that sometimes people will share id info (just like... physical ids).
It doesn't even close all the doors to transferring ids - since I can still just hand someone a phone (just like... physical ids).
If you use physical ids to verify your identity, they normally verify that your face matches the image on the id, no? That’s not possible for web id.
My experience has been that absolutely no one cares, as long as they could be construed to be "somewhat similar".
Ex - People change hair color, lose a boat load of weight, wear eye-color changing contacts, drastically change hair styles (facial and normal) etc...
No one bats an eye at an ID that "only sorta vaguely resembles you" outside of a very limited subset of places (the only one I can actually think of is Customs while traveling).
---
So my take is that as long as the gender appears similar and the ethnicity seems "close enough"... the store is still going to sell you alcohol, the bar is going to let you in, and the movie theater is going to sell you tickets.
Doppelgängers Don’t Just Look Alike—They Also Share DNA
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/doppelgangers-dont...
Yeah, but being able to share Id with someone who happens to look eerily like you is different from just handing people your ID and they are able to use it like it was implied. That’s not how IDs are used.
> The only real issue is the wallet app and device binding. Because a compromised device could allow credentials to be transferred some form of attestation of device and wallet app is required. In practice this means no rooted/jailbroken phones.
Yeah, and no Linux PCs, no custom builds of web browsers (which would effectively become open source in theory only)—basically the end of any kind of open platform. I would much rather just scan my ID!
Oh you know it would be both not either.
If you are referring to EUID (not fully sure as you said EU eID, i dont know if you are referring the estonia of eID like system)
I have to mention that EUID is not private, since there's "provider" element which informs website if you are 18 or not. The flow is:
1) You scan QR code 2) Your EUDI wallet does verification, informs provider to tell you are 18+ 3) Provider informs website you are 18+
The EUID draft doesnt mention tech like ohttp for anonymizing requests. So there's risk of provider keeping track of who you are. So while everybody claims its fully anonymous which is just false. Government could ask website/service for the token or account information then use timestamp or token then combining with "provider" logs, your identity will be exposed.
EUID has another problem which is letting all countries implement system, which is wasteful duplication effort so this probably will be outsourced and to same company to reduce duplication efforts. Then it'll be centralized and they happen be collecting telemetry data for "experience improvements" as everysite out there do.
I haven't even mentioned biggest problems like requiring attestation Apple/Google. While spec doesn't require it, but the likehood country's app requiring it will be very high.
The beauty of the EU is that you only need one county of upstanding people to get a permissible good implementation.
It will probably be a small country, one that is known to give no fucks about big tech.
> A public/private key-pair is generated by the secure enclave in your phone
This is completely unacceptable. In practice, this solution means a locked down device, probably controlled by Google or Apple.
The Internet has existed without identity or age verification for more than 30 years, and there is no reason to change that.
The ID is signed by the government and linked to the device to prevent transferring the credential. A public/private key-pair is generated by the secure enclave in your phone, the public key along with proof of possession of the private key is included in the request for the government eID.
IMO, there are two other issues that need to be solved. The major one is that there should be some way to do attestation of devices that are not Google-certified Android or iOS. If this does not happen, the smartphone duopoly is permanently entrenched and not a fair/free market anymore. There is no way to use a smartphone without basically losing your privacy to Google/Apple and given the increasing importance of online services it's becoming increasingly impossible to live without a smartphone.
It was very disheartening that the EU reference implementation was rolled out with only Play Integrity and Apple's counterpart. IMO, this should have been solved before the reference implementation was rolled out to member countries, because many of them won't bother to go beyond that [1]. It is also completely counterproductive when it comes to EU tech sovereignty. There is a group of pioneers that are growing the sovereign ecosystems and then you cut them off.
The second, perhaps lesser, problem is that the security story is not super strong, because most Android phones do not even have a secure enclave (outside Pixel and Samsung flagships/A5x, there are very few). Instead they rely on TrustZone etc. which are regularly targeted by side-channel attacks, etc. Ironically, GrapheneOS is cut off from most of these systems (because Google Play Integrity), while it actually requires a secure enclave and is more secure than... well I guess every other smartphone.
[1] There is some hope, e.g. the developers of the Dutch identity wallet acknowledge the issue and are open to supporting alternative systems.
> The major one is that there should be some way to do attestation of devices that are not Google-certified Android or iOS.
IMO, just don't do the proof of possession. If I have the token that says I am an adult, I can use it to be considered an adult online. If someone requests millions of tokens and sells them, then punish that someone. It's not very hard to find them: they have to sell those tokens somewhere.
Also don't try to solve the VPN issue: I highly doubt most kids will use VPNs to access social media, and accessing porn isn't that hard if you are capable of running a VPN.
Again, I can consider age verification as some kind of "inconvenience for under age people". But the age verification that works 100% of the time is a problem, as you say it will lock people out with remote attestation and that is not acceptable.
Which part of that is avoiding the distopian control?
the very first line, government issued digital id - we have been avoiding that for a very long time
how does this work on an open source operating system?
> Which part of that is avoiding the distopian control?
Your ID is already controlled by your government, and we don't call that dystopian control. With privacy-preserving age verification online, the government doesn't learn what you do with the cryptographic token that proves that you are old enough, and the website doesn't learn who you are. So it's exactly the same situation as today, except that now there is age verification.
> how does this work on an open source operating system?
First, it can be open source and have DRM and attestation. Android is open source, for instance.
This said, I hate the idea of remote attestation. And for age verification, I strongly believe that it is not needed. We don't need to make it work everywhere all the time, it just needs to help. I can imagine a privacy-preserving age verification system that helps with some problems (e.g. make social media or porn less accessible to kids) without bringing dystopian control and without making it super hard for adults to access social media and porn.
But I absolutely hate the idea of remote attestation.
> Your ID is already controlled by your government, and we don't call that dystopian control.
The expression "papers, please", a classic exemplar of dystopian control, is referring to what?
> First, it can be open source and have DRM and attestation. Android is open source, for instance.
When people say "open source" in this context they mean that the user or third parties can make changes to the system, not that the source code is thrown over the wall from time to time. The situation with Android is exactly the thing that we don't want.
Couldn't the public key be used as an identifier for tracking?
The government still gets to know what you're doing online. How is that privacy?
Nope they don't. That's the whole point of privacy-preserving age verification.
Technically it is possible. The complaint that people have is that they don't trust that any government will get it right. But it is technically possible with known cryptography.
Ah ok. I understand now. The website isn't making an additional request to the government to verify that the credentials you gave are real. The authenticity is built into the signature.
How does this work without a phone? I do 99% of my computer work, like now, not on a phone.
Do regular desktop and laptop computers have the same secure enclave feature?
>The government issues an eID to your wallet
So people in dubious legal circumstances are locked out the internet?
What about at the device level?
“You must be this tall to ride this ride”
“ you must be 18 to own an iPhone 18+ “
I apologize for the drive-by question, and I appreciate your takes!
This would run into the same deal as VINs in the real world being tied to licenses, or serial numbers to guns. But the car equivalent of VMs/open hardware/custom firmware (imagine a $7 pi zero flashed with lineageOS “overage phone”) then becomes equivalent to a gun without a serial number, and suddenly open source/hardware people are felons and there is insane amount of control on hardware and software like it’s 1982.
This assumes that the government would be able to verify independently a phone serial number so that people’s IDs aren’t leaked. If not, then you’re back to the same thing as before since “drivers licenses” are stored by sites and shared around with advertisers
> The website only sees the ‘over_18’ attribute
I don't believe this.
There is no real practical difference between ‘attested devices’ and scanning ID…
> which contains the device public key
And there it is.
So now I have to have a mobile phone?
And one you don't fully own/control. Fully owned devices will be unsupported, obviously.
Sounds like what a government issued card should be used for, which seems fine
I feel the idea of public key encryption could be done without a phone but the device locking makes it harder to transfer the token off device. Like the parent comment said, I think 90% is all we can aim for. Nothing is going to be perfect.
Could probably be implemented by a smartcard or yubikey-like device as well. Shoot, just build it into my state issued ID card.
Do you know how hard it was to get RealID rolled out?
And now you're going to tell every state to do it again, but this time it's got a chip in it so "just trust the government, man".
This will go well.
It will go fine, because everything you want to do will require it. Even if you don't strictly have to, you will be effectively ostracized. Transit, entertainment, productivity tools. Haven't you noticed that things that have previously been easy to do are much harder now, even before this has rolled out? Like providing a government ID to visit a museum, for example. Or getting an email address. Using claude.
Identity wallets can be made to work anywhere.
You can have an ID card. Just like for buying alcohol and cigarettes.
Secure Enclave on a mobile phone, or an NFC smart card both work fine. It could be your passport, drivers license, national ID, whatever.
A lot of these age verifications things have to do with "protecting children". If that's the end goal we don't really need to verify anyone's age. Apple/Google, any smart phone maker, should be forced to add proper parental controls.
Parents should be able to control what apps can be used, what websites can be viewed, who the phone is able to contact.
That doesn't require knowing my age, or anyone else's.
Also, as an iOS developer, it's not my job to parent your child. The age ratings are clear on the app store, if you give your child unrestricted access to a phone that's on you, not me. If the OS doesn't have proper controls that's on Apple/Android, again, not my fault and not something I should be forced to police.
Thanks to Texas, I can see roughly how old your kid is. I'm not supposed to keep that information though. ;) I'm sure everyone who makes app will comply with that and not use that information for any other purposes and you can bet Texas has the means to audit every app on the app store to make sure that they're complying. lol
>Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining?
sure, i'll put my favorite two. though you'll find much more detailed and thought-out versions of these (and others) in the dozens of other giant threads on the same topic.
- buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time. most people are comfortable with flashing their ID at the clerk. the UUID card is non-identifying.
- websites issue content tags, browsers consume them, you enter your age into the OS during setup.
> buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time
Exactly, prepaid phone cards with point of sales activation (to eliminate large scale theft incentive) is nothing new. Once activated, the validity of the token can be like 6 months or one year, and at-most-once-per-domain schema can be managed by the issuing authority if they want.
Instead of a 100 phone minutes, 300 phone minutes card you just buy "I'm over 16", "I'm over 18" cards. It's simple UX.
> buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time. most people are comfortable with flashing their ID at the clerk. the UUID card is non-identifying.
It can be implemented in a privacy-preserving way online: your government gives you tokens that prove that you are above age and that they provably cannot track. That's the exact equivalent.
I believe that the other measures (remote attestation and such, the ones we hate) come when we try to make absolutely sure that you don't give/sell that UUID to someone else. But IMO we should just forget about doing that. Just like an adult can, today, buy cigarettes and porn and give them to a kid.
> and that they provably cannot track.
That's not easily provable though.
Any token given that way contains some amount of encrypted payload.
That secret payload may contain uniquely tracking numbers.
Even the encrypted payload itself, if treated as an opaque string, can be used for tracking if they decide to log it when they deliver it to you, and when the website where you use the token passes it back to the government auth service.
You need to replicate the UX of a stack of pile of cards at the grocery store, that's not really possible in digital space.
> buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time. most people are comfortable with flashing their ID at the clerk. the UUID card is non-identifying.
This could be a good system if it's set up right. There's still some risk of being tracked if it isn't though. IDs could be linked to the cards at the time of purchase if retailers scan the drivers license, then scan the card creating a record that card #XXXXX was purchased using driver's license # XXXXX
Even if retailers aren't scanning the drivers licenses and collecting data that way, the cards and codes on those cards can be tracked and traceable to a retailer. That's how things like calling cards have been tracked. Say for example someone uses the code on a card to access a website, the police can match the code that was used to the serial number of the card, look up which retailer that card was sold at, and can then access security camera footage at that retailer to identify who bought the card from that location. This would also let them passively generate lists of IP addresses/device IDs matched to websites and specific retail locations over time.
> buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time
Why should I pay continuously to prove I'm an adult? And those cards will be getting sold to kids faster than you can blink. I bet a lot of parents would buy them for their kids.
>And those cards will be getting sold to kids faster than you can blink.
there's a reason i said 90% and not 100% effective. alcohol and tobacco get resold to kids, too.
What makes you think this will be close to 90%? Unless these cards are expensive I don't see that happening.
>What makes you think this will be close to 90%? Unless these cards are expensive I don't see that happening.
its obviously just an illustrative guess. but if the penalty of possessing the card is similar to underage possession of alcohol/tobacco, and larger penalties if a store/person is found providing a card to someone underage, i see no reason why it wouldnt have a similar success rate as alcohol/tobacco.
Why possess the card when you can just buy the UUID on the dark web
If they have access to the "dark web" they can already do anything that requires age verification there. In the same way you expect that the rule to "not sell UUIDs" wouldn't be respected there, I wouldn't expect other age-verification rules to be respected, no matter the verification method.
Well, it's rather harder to sell bottles of beer on the dark web than short text strings.
That is true, it is harder, although AFAIK people do sell all kinds of illegal things there.
sure? i feel like i need to reemphasize the "not going for 100% effectiveness" thing again.
hopefully some parent steps in if their kid is on the dark web trying to make purchases with their parent's credit card.
Well, yeah, I would just give them my code.
Why buy a UUID when you can just get porn on the dark web
Kids can buy drugs on the dark web too.
Let's try it. If it doesn't help the kids, we can remove it I guess.
Anything that doesn't accept this limitation becomes dystopian. The only viable age verification system is one that cannot be 100% effective, period.
> I bet a lot of parents would buy them for their kids.
Good. I should be able to make judgement calls about what my children can or can’t access outside of school.
It’s better if they do it under my supervision than against my back, aided by a predator whose only moat is lending their ID, or their face.
> I bet a lot of parents would buy them for their kids.
That changes the default from "anyone can do anything" to "gotta ask parents". Defaults matter at scale. It adds friction.
Why should you pay for an internet connection, or a computing device with a screen? This isn't a serious counterargument.
Because those things cost money to make and to maintain, whereas there's no intrinsic cost to prove one is an adult.
Yes there is.
You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on. So there is an intrinsic cost to prove who you are where you are from and what your birthday is already.
You have to pay for all sorts of small things to participate in normal society. This isn't a serious criticism.
By definition this is not a life critical thing, it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.
>You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on.
I have a government ID and I didn't pay for it. I can use it to travel to nearby countries in lieu of a passport. The assumption that IDs are necessarily non-free (to the issuee) is pretty funny to me.
>it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.
The maintenance of the Internet is already paid for through ISP contracts.
I mean, if you really want to make the government subsidize an ID verification scheme or mandate that certain real-world locations provide age verification as a social service for everyone, that's fine.
It's orthogonal to the discussion, though, which is about whether we should do it or not, because the costs here aren't significant and don't change the terms of the debate.
I'm personally in favor of just banning children off the Internet, but I don't agree it's orthogonal to the discussion. What I replied to was the implication that someone should pay a recurring cost to prove they're an adult for the same reason that they pay to own a computer or to connect to the Internet. Don't disown the dumb thing you said.
I'm not disowning it at all. I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.
You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.
It just doesn't matter. It's not important. It's consistent with how we organize our society in general, which makes focusing on it in this one particular instance more understandable as an attempt to distract from the substantive merits of these arguments about age verification.
>I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.
Okay, but the person you replied to doesn't, and instead of providing an actual answer to their question, you posed a false equivalence between proving your age and buying a computer.
>You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.
You are purposefully muddying the waters by being lax with your use of language. The "cost" you "pay" by wearing appropriate attire in public is fundamentally different from the actual cost you actually pay when you engage in commerce; one is a trade of freedoms and the other is a trade of goods and/or services. If your argument is that the freedom you have to trade in exchange for the freedom to access the Internet, is that of not having to show an ID, that's one thing. If you also have to add a recurring monetary cost then that's another.
If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet beyond "*shrug* just 'cause, dude. Who cares?", then maybe you shouldn't have said anything.
> If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet
Of course I have an answer. To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.
There's literally nothing confusing about the "why" in this discussion.
The fact that bad people use the "what about the children" argument regularly for bad reasons doesn't mean that all such arguments are bogus.
In fact, it's an indication of exactly the opposite, it's so regularly used because there is a broad consensus that we need to protect children from harm which is why it's often effective as an arguing tool.
The relevant frame for this discussion is will it actually work, and what are the tradeoffs. A trivially small amount of money for a simple age verification scheme isn't a particularly meaningful tradeoff against a genuine social problem. The bigger, more genuine issues are around privacy and censorship and I do in fact concede those are real.
>To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.
See, you've answered a different question. The question you answered is, "why should children be protected from the Internet?" I'll give you for free that children should be protected from the Internet, for the reasons you've said, and now you get to convince me that I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet.
> I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet.
For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids.
Because we live in a society.
If you struggle to understand why that matters without reference to more direct personal stakes for yourself, just know that without a society, the children will grow up to rape you, kill you, and possibly consume you for your protein content.
>For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids.
But I have benefited from public education. Me paying for someone else's education in return is fair.
>Because we live in a society.
"Because we live in a society" is a phrase flexible enough that it can be used to justify anything, including outright theft: "we live in a society; us taking your stuff is the price you have been chosen to pay for your continued belonging". Want to try a little harder?
You have convinced me that there are in fact no differences between things, and that protecting children from adult content is indistinguishable from all other goals, and therefore I was foolish to advocate for it.
I stand humbly corrected.
> UUID card is non-identifying.
Kids aren't going to trade Pokemon cards in the playground anymore...
Well, they could trade identifying ones too or even stollen ID cards if you want to go this way.
They could also trade porn-filled thumb drive or old-school glossy paper magazine. There no way to prevent kid's exposure to stuff at a 100% success rate.
There no way to avoid exposure completely
Indeed but you are the one who claimed it was not a hard problem.
I don't think any one of us pushing back here on those claims do so for the heck of NOT finding a "solution", rather genuinely asking because so far it seems nobody did find such a solution without compromises that is in the end not worth it due to the flaw in said solution.
The point isn't to be critical of your process, only of the claim that it's a trivial problem.
> Indeed but you are the one who claimed it was not a hard problem.
Am I ?
I'm just left wondering, how would that be different than buying a phone? Most kids also don't have money to spend on devices, that's all coming from adults, how would the UUID work any different? In my view it seems we'll just reach the current state as with phones.
And honestly, all these should ultimately just be done client side in the browser. After the browser has verified "User is x or user is over 21" there's no reason to then send that information to the website.
Let websites issue a "window.isUserOver(16)" call once and then move forward based on the response to that query.
No, no. Don’t give websites a way to check the user’s age.
Age restrictions are different across countries and cultures. Parents disagree on age ratings given by boards all the time.
Have apps and websites declare the objectionable content they have, and let the device decide if it will show it or not according to parental controls.
If you’re a parent that pays attention to age ratings, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The age is meaningless. It’s the type of content next to the rating that’s important.
Your only option as a parent now to let your 14 year old play a violent game rated M that you specifically allowed is to give them a fully unrestricted device. They can now use that device to access gore, porn and gambling as well. How does this make any sense?
Don't even bother having the website ask the browser anything at all. Just have the website TELL the browser the content is intended for adults via HTTP header and let the browser decide to display it or not depending on parental controls.
Yeah, that's even better.
Multiple proposal for this exist for decades[1][2]
The RTA one was even pushed by the porn industry and is already in place in majors websites[3]
[1]:https://www.rtalabel.org/
[2]:https://icra.org/webmasters/
[3]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...
This would require browser attestation, wouldn't it? Otherwise kids are just going to download a custom build of Chromium where `window.isUserOver(16)` is always `True`.
The same system that blocks kids from downloading the Pornhub app would also block them from downloading the "Chrome but without parental controls" app.
No, it only "requires" browser attestation if we taken it as a given that the onus is on tech companies for verifying who they are talking to - ie identity verification that most of these schemes boil down to regardless of how cute they're dressed up.
To effectively keep adult content away from kids, it merely requires secure boot and closed app stores, which are already widespread. And they are only required on the devices actually given to kids, rather than every single computing device.
But this proposal has another problem: it's easy for a website to run isUserOver(n) in a loop to derive the exact age. And on a persistent account, it can be queried every day to derive an exact birthday! Which comes back to my main point that the only technical schemes we should be considering are ones where information strictly flows one way - the website/app supplies information to the browser/OS, which then [may] implement parental control policy. anything else fundamentally boils down to a mandate for identity verification.
> To effectively keep adult content away from kids, it merely requires secure boot and closed app stores
This is unacceptable. If I own a computer, I expect to be able to build and run any program, either written by myself or others, without asking anyone for permission.
Maybe I needed to say "it merely requires the existence ...". Because I then do go on to say:
> And they are only required on the devices actually given to kids
My whole point is that this limits the blast radius, compared to any solution involving "age" (read: identity) verification which has a blast radius of every computing device!
Perhaps my other comment will show you where I'm coming from better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645646
> To effectively keep adult content away from kids, it merely requires secure boot and closed app stores, which are already widespread. And they are only required on the devices actually given to kids, rather than every single computing device.
...I guess I don't really see the difference.
Closed app stores are widespread on some platforms but certainly not others, and I for one would really like them to not spread any further.
For starters here, the difference is that only devices that parents give to kids need to have secure boot and controlled software sources. The point is that every other device remains completely unaffected.
But in general there is a huge difference between the freedom-destroying properties of secure boot with closed app stores, and the next step of remote attestation. Remote attestation lets the server insist that you only run software fully of their choosing rather than your choosing, as a condition of interacting with them. This completely destroys the idea of protocols that mediate between two parties with diverging interests, and computationally disenfranchises users. Imagine the next generation of the Cloudflare nagwall that doesn't let you past unless you buy a new computer, and that new computer must be running MSWin/OSX and MSIE/Chrome.
(also note that my use of "secure boot" here includes systems like on Pixels where you can straightforwardly unlock the bootloader (erasing the data on the device), install whatever you want, and then relock. I still find these systems philosophically objectionable, as there is still a privileged key baked in and retained by the manufacturer - similar security properties could be provided without the backdoor. But pragmatically they've been working okay)
No, thank you. As a parent, I want to give a device to my child that they can hack, just like I had.
Why are we treating kids like adversarial threats? If my kid gets around parental controls, I’ll revoke their phone privileges. No need for invasive security.
Some probably will. 99% of them don't even know what "Chromium" is.
This doesn't have to be perfect.
Right now, they don't know. They're going to learn very quickly when they want to use some website and they can't.
We agree it doesn't need to be 100% perfect. But it needs to be at least, like, 60% perfect, right? And unless you make it at least a bit hard to bypass, it will stop virtually no one.
Some undoubtedly will.
Installing a new browser is already a bit hard for most people. I think you are a little skewed in your thinking being online on HN.
You also aren't thinking about age. Certainly 16 and 18 year old probably can get a new browser installed. But a 14 year old? 12 year old? 10 year old? That barrier is a lot higher the younger a kid is.
I just finished my second year as a fifth grade teacher, so I have a lot of experience with ten year olds. I am confident a majority of my students would be able to install an alternative web browser if they needed to, and a majority of the remainder would ask a friend to do it.
To give you an example of the workarounds kids will find: Youtube was blocked on school laptops, so the kids all started embedding Youtube videos inside of Google Sheets in order to watch stuff. This isn't, like, something a few savvy kids did, it was a widespread and common practice.
And, in my opinion, a healthy thing for the kids to learn and do.
Lol. I started building computers, installing operating systems and tinkering with Linux between ages 10-12. I also started watching porn not long after that, and guess what, I still became a more or less normal adult. There is absolutely no need to "protect the children."
This is how California is legislating it—requiring the OS to let an admin set the user's age, then let browsers and through them, websites, to query that setting.
You can get their exact age by binary search.
Typically these APIs are designed so you can't make arbitrary queries, but rather there are fixed age brackets.
Then it can't be bool isOver(int age)
> - websites issue content tags, browsers consume them, you enter your age into the OS during setup.
Why would that be acceptable though? What if a user does not trust the operating system? Even Linux may not be safe in the future, what with age sniffing coming by Red Hat integrating it into system already. And Red Hat plans more - xorg is abandoned on purpose, for instance.
The correct way to do this continues to be for sites to tag the content with some kind of rating and let the client device decide whether to show it based on how the user's account is configured.
This requires no ID of any kind because the child's parent or teacher knows their age, and kids buying a device on their own is no more or less of a problem than kids getting some high school senior or homeless adult to lend them their ID.
That's because you're treating AV as a system that must be 100% correct immediately. This isn't banking or an election.
As soon as you loosen off the requirements to "reasonable effort", you can start looking at account age, facial features, social attestation, and include retrospective tools to revisit someone's verification if they get in and start acting like a child. Heuristically messy but far from impossible to demand a stronger form of verification if their original might have been borderline.
The goal is broad coverage, not complete. Screening doesn't have to get 100% to have an effect.
I understand it doesn't need to be 100% correct. But I think what you're describing is either (A) going to be very privacy invasive, (B) going to create problems for lots of adults, or (C) going to be precisely as effective as a checkbox saying "I agree I am over 18 years old".
It's "social media". The whole thing is profiling for advertisers. The idea that there's privacy is laughable.
There is a network effect as a child's peers stop using social media though. Make it inconvenient enough for enough for kids and they'll read a book, take up slam poetry or whatever it was kids did before our attention became currency.
you generate a random number and send it to website you want to visit.
Website you want to visit generates a one-time private/public key for the purpose of this login attempt, hashes your random number, and sends the hash back to you.
You connect to the government auth platform, auth yourself to your government, and ask them to sign the hash you received.
You pass the signed hash as well as the original random number to the website you wanted to access (the original random number is used by the website to store the one-time key they generated for you). They can see it is signed by the government. They can see it is made with the hash they provided.
You get access to whatever content you wanted. The website doesn't know who you are. The government doesn't know where you logged in. Sure, it won't hold up against collusion between website and government, but nothing would.
the principles explained above are slight adaptations of PKCE authentication.
So now I have to get permission from the government to browse the web? And they can revoke that permission at any time? And we need a great firewall to block citizens from communicating with foreign websites that don't comply with this scheme?
This idea is worse than facial scanning, by a lot.
(Better idea is OS level parental controls combined with government-mandated content tags to let the OS know what content is child-safe.)
> Sure, it won't hold up against collusion between website and government, but nothing would.
Right, so it's just privacy theatre.
Not necessarily. Some sites have no interest in communicating your data to the government, unlike their 23019 affiliate ad programs.
If your government is paying private third parties to collect data on you (hello USA), the issue is much wider, and nothing would protect you from such a government. Even without age verification, if the government is interested in spying on you, and the sites are willing to sell, they would gladly trade your IP and connection log.
Sure here's one example of decentralizing it -- it's going to be overly simple just as a toy example to show how easy it could be:
Whenever you want to prove your adult you go to "am I an adult.gov" and you use your credit card or whatever to prove you are an adult. At which point you get a 1-time 5-digit code that is UNIVERSAL TO EVERY SINGLE HUMAN and good for 1 hour (everybody who uses the site gets the same code that hour).
Then when you want to look at porn or something, you use this code. Boom simple and done.
There are even much better much more private techniques that use cryptography, and AI is happy to explain these graduate-degree level topics to you at your own pace.
Of course there are situations where people steal things, and use deep-fakes, etc, but those exist in every model.
Headline news: children infiltrate the universal adult one time password scheme for porn, parents panic! Turns out the 18 year olds started selling access to their younger friends, who resold it to their younger friends.
this happens with alcohol and tobacco every day. i cant think of the last time it reached headline news.
My point is that the entire check is bypassed easily and instantly, and in the meantime the government gets data that someone _will_ figure out how to make personally identifying for adults, or will argue for changes to make it so. Alcohol age limits are a simple physical check for a vice that everyone accepts those who want it can get at. I’d rather demand that device manufacturers give parents effective controls before we try solving this problem by identifying internet users wholesale.
It does not reach headline news because everyone just accepts that the "filter" is imperfect.
But, for some reason, little twelve year old Jimmy obtaining access to porn evokes some kind of far more visceral reaction in Jimmy's parents (or if not Jimmy's parents, some "busybody" who wants to "protect all the children") than Jimmy managing to get himself a pack of Salem's or a Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboy.
right, that's exactly what i was getting at with my original comment. none of the laws we have are 100% effective. so i find it weird that this specific topic always devolves into "well some kid will be able to get access, so your proposal sucks".
> little twelve year old Jimmy obtaining access to porn evokes some kind of far more visceral reaction in Jimmy's parents
Because right now there's next to no barrier to access compared to Jimmy getting himself a beer. If you keep saying "Your proposal sucks because it isn't perfect and we should do nothing" then you're essentially surrendering to the people who really want facial scans.
are you kidding? there will always be a million porn sites not hosted in the US that everybody will have access too.
This sort of pedantry is really just supporting the opposition.
Hopefully it would be less of a criticism of the system, and more spurring people to ask questions like "Wait, why did you leave a hunting knife on the coffee table?"
Design a scheme that equips parents with better tools to be better parents, rather than one that reduces the scope of parenting responsibilities.
Same code for all people for 1 hour and you don't think we'd immediately have rotating codes to pass the gate?
I'd setup the .onion in a heartbeat. Take crypto donations, cash out in Monero
I sure hope so.
I think the only thing I actually have any concern about is phones and social media use for kids, and I think that has a much easier solution than any sorting of tracking-BS.
I think the German Personalausweis has an electronic ID function that does this: age verification without giving out other information like name etc. But the application chooses which information is requested and could/will request more.
Unfortunately few know and use this information although the usage via NFC is not that complicated. Have used it successfully already a few times for banks, but including name information etc.
Using existing parental controls parents could set their kids age and that could be used for the age controls. Could the parents let the kids around the age gate? Sure but they could do that even if a government ID and camera was required. This actually might be more effective than a lot of these systems because other adults could not let the kids use their IDs
Existing parental controls don't work - new ones would have to be created.
One approach is for parents to establish certain devices as “under 18” (or 16 or 13), leaving it up to the judgment of parents.
Yubikey tokens support attestation. You can sell Yubikey tokens at places inaccessible to minors, like liquor stores, and having a token proves that one is adult. Another way is implementing "parent mode" when OS allows only installing apps from a government-approved whitelist and access sites from a whitelist.
Cryptographically blinded age verification with a government signed digital ID
Perfect is the enemy of the good, right? I mean a page header or some other simple means to identify "adult" vs not is good for most cases? Just thinking about it.. obviously it can be bypassed but is there a good enough?
Make unrestricted devices like alcohol: you need ID to buy (but the box containing the device you’re sold is indistinguishable from any other, so the device may have a UUID but it can’t be traced to your ID); kids caught with unrestricted devices in school have them confiscated; maybe fine parents, but I think discouragement and banning in schools is enough. Kids can have restricted devices, distinguished from unrestricted by appearance in a way that’s hard to fake.
I don't know, treating general-purpose computers like alcohol seems a lot more dystopian to me. Does this extend to PC components? Can I build a machine and put Linux on it?
> I don't know, treating general-purpose computers like alcohol seems a lot more dystopian to me
Isn't this the logical end goal of basically every approach to "age verification", though? If you really want to control access to the internet, then you can't let people have a VPN or Tor, and if you don't want people to VPNs or Tor then you need to lock the device down.
> Can I build a machine and put Linux on it?
Maybe for the next few years you'll be able to do that. Analogy: back in the day you could just build your own airplane and fly it around. There were no regulations.
Do most kids have the ability and motivation to build their own machines?
AFAIK you don’t need ID to buy juice, sugar, and yeast to make your own alcohol, so I think it should be the same for computer parts.
> Do most kids have the ability and motivation to build their own machines?
I and pretty much everyone else in my childhood TeamSpeak server did at roughly 14 years of age.
Did the people in your Teamspeak server have issues with concentration and socialization like most social media addicts today?
Info-minimized oidc handshakes with certified identity providers could verify age-category of a user with no other information shared.
Consider "log in with apple" as it is today. Depending on what you share, a relying website might not even get your name or email.
Yes, that was my thought as well when i was visiting UK and reddit kept asking me to verify my age. It might be even more private and non-trackable than that - if "age.id.gov" central authority effectively "provides a new random user id" (implementation may vary and does not need to have a "literal username") every time you try to use it / log into a website that needs to verify your age - this way websites can not even track you across platforms.
It seems like all the tech stack is there to implement a very simple and privacy-persevering solution.
It does not even smell of state censorship because a website does not have to check your age if it decides to be "non compliant".
Why isn't it implemented like that? Based on the comments it seems more like a "free-for-all implement-your-own-PPI-handling-thon".
This will ofc make life harder for a some groups of people - like people without / limited access to IDs etc. And i do not even argue that the whole thing is necessary.
But there seem to be vastly superior technical means to implement that, aren't there?
The only way to know that is to trust Apple.
Easy, when you buy the device, during first setup, you set up the date of birth of the user. If the user is underage, the parent/guardian sets a password to unlock the device if needed before the user is 18. That device then sends "is_below_18" flag to whatever service wants it.
just do what they did in Leisure suit Larry, ask some skill testing questions that only someone older than 18 would know. Give them a short time to answer so they can't look it up.
If you don't think a checkbox saying "I am 13 or older" is adequate, with all the behavioral tracking available to say Meta, they can tell well enough. OpenAI talks about this too: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-age-prediction/
Knowing who someone is in general is different from having a photo of their face or government ID confirmation.
This is a classic case for one time ZKPs. Sure, you can't get around attestation, but the party that needs to verify that you meet age criteria doesn't need to know your age or other private information.
I presume you're concerned by the attesting party's knowledge of both the signature and identify information. Yes, in principle these can be linked, but in practice, it may be difficult or made very difficult, and today, very little of our online activity is really anonymous anyway. It is generally not too difficult to infer identity based on the content someone generates and the bread crumbs they leave behind.
Of course, if the intent is to use age verification as a wedge to monitor everyone, then it will be difficult politically to secure the protections needed to prevent that sort of data fusion.
Where are these mythical sweet-spot solutions? Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset. Now that users have been conditioned to accept this, nobody seems very interested in figuring out how to collect less PII - only insulating themselves from liability by having the data processed by a third party.
The UK has draconian laws.
But some of the easiest middle ground solutions that solve 90% of the problem are things like simple math problems. Get asked "3+7" and that will pretty quickly filter out almost anyone under the age of 6. If you can accept that there are some smart 4 or 5 year olds who can do simple math, congrats you recognize there's a 10%.
They are indeed draconian, and the rest of the world is now eyeing up adopting similar legislation.
They don't exist because the organizations who lobbied governments were YOTI, Persona, K-ID and others who have a vested interest in collecting data and rent seek by latching through regulations like diseased ticks.
> half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset.
what kind of websites are you visiting to get age checked on half of the sites you visit? i've only been asked to verify for dating apps and "sexy stuff". and i definitely don't spend 50% of my total browsing time on those sites.
maybe this says more about the kind of content/sites you're accessing if it is really as high as 50%? UK age verification mostly only applies to sites which might end up hosting the content quoted below.
> pornographic images, and content that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for eating disorders, self-harm, or suicide.
or you're just being hyperbolic? 79% of statistics are made up, after all.
reddit.com, discord.app, google.com with safe-search off (This one works sometimes, they are A/B testing force-enabling safe-search for unauth'd sessions)
Oh, reddit, yes. Good point.
I don't use that; it's worse for your brain than any regulated substance. Kick your reddit habit while you can.
Google safe search: I've only seen this from my PAYG mobile phone, because I've never bothered to lift the adult content lock on that after more than a decade, and Google is the only place I've seen ask, actually. Even so it rarely happens.
Discord: the mere idea of being in an adult-content-related discord group is enough to make my skin crawl.
Worth noting that of these three, only one of them is a UK-only decision, as far as I am aware: Google Safe Search respects UK phone companies' default adult content block on PAYG. They are about the only company that does. Reddit and Discord have made this decision globally, have they not? Because there are US state laws too.
>mythical sweet-spot solutions?
there are thousands of comments on these threads every time it comes up. there's tons of what i consider reasonable solutions proposed. there's examples below, too, which don't require face scans.
>Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents
yeah, i agree that really sucks.
I've yet to see one I consider reasonable.
if you think even the client-side "yes im 18" on OS setup proposals are unreasonable, i dont know what to say.
Privacy-wise I think they're completely acceptable, but in terms of circumvention I don't think the politicians will be satisfied. It's barely a step up from the "I'm over 18" buttons on websites.
>It's barely a step up from the "I'm over 18" buttons on websites.
i think its a pretty decent step up from that, but i know what you mean.
>I don't think the politicians will be satisfied.
and that circles back to my original point. the politicians aren't satisfied with a "mostly effective" solution (e.g. OS-enforced age attestation) as they are with literally every other law, and instead are taking advantage of the issue to justify mass surveillance.
I believe kids will always find circumvention pathways.
There is a signaling function these laws serve: things are the products we consider acceptable in society. We have these rules for cigarettes, booze, and vapes.
That said, privacy being sacrificed for signals, is an unacceptable trade, especially when better solutions can be crafted.
> kids will always find circumvention pathways
I'd consider this a feature. I'd be proud if my kids find a way to circumvent the parental controls on the family computer or use their own money to build their own computer like I did growing up. At that point they've earned the right to the full internet.
(However, I would not be willing to use any solution that sacrifices my or my kid's privacy.)
Government builds a website where you can log in using any government issued ID or using one of the many many many available services that hold your details already(at least in the UK nearly everyone will have a DLVA account, HMRC account, HMPO account, NHS account.....all of these are government services which we can only assume hold our data securely already).
On that website, you can click "give me a verification code", it gives you a code that is single use and only valid 24 hours. You type that into whatever 18+ website you need to, they use a public API provided by the government to just check "yes this is a valid code and the user is 18" - bang, done, verified. The website knows nothing about you at all, except for the fact that you're 18.
In fact, the UK government ALREADY HAS THIS. For the EU settlement scheme, you can give your employeer(or anyone else who needs it) a special magic code that they type in on the government website, and it just says "yet his person has the right to reside in the UK" without spilling any of your personal information at all. The code is single use and valid a limited amount of time. And you can do the same with your driving licence, where anyone can verify you hold a valid licence without actually seeing it or any details on it.
Like, am I being stupid here? It seems like an almost trivial solution to the problem, especially given that it already exists for at least 2 services named above.
And yes, I know people will say "oh but that requires the government having this data on you, and that's bad" or "but then the government will know you've authenticated with pornhub!".
And yes, both of these are true - but on point 1 - like, I'd love some ideal situation where the government can simultaniously give me a passport or a driving licence AND not have any information about me at the same time, but that ain't happening, and on point 2 - yes, but that's still infinitely preferable to the current implementation, and it can be easily solved with legislation saying that the code authentication service doesn't log who requested verification, it just answers with yes/no and that's it.
Every time I search something, I open a fresh private tab and google it. If I want to turn safe-search off, I'd have to go through this code verification flow for every single search. Aside from just being annoying, they'd have to implement strict rate limiting to prevent automated code sharing, so I'd soon end up waiting for a rate limit to expire before I can search anything.
And "the government will know you've authenticated with pornhub" is extremely harmful, in my opinion.
Sadly we got to this place because there are other harms that are occurring and those are forcing this conversation.
The "other harms" are made up fearmongering by rightwing cowards and incompetent parents.
Hah. I wish.
I have personally had to remove NCII for teens and young adults. Grooming is a thing, self harm communities are a thing, as is sextortion.All of it at internet scale.
And this ignores the parts where the platforms released features they knew from their own tests, were harmful to teens.
It is convenient to dismiss them, because it makes it easier to hold positions that depend on them being minor harms.
> but then the government will know you've authenticated with pornhub!
If you do your cryptography right, the government will not know that you've authenticated with pornhub. That's the whole goddamn point of privacy-preserving age verification.
This means giving the government complete insight into your internet browsing. All they need to do is store a database table of handed out keys to ids.
This is unacceptable tyranny on its face.
>>This means giving the government complete insight into your internet browsing.
...how? All they know is you've authenticated with service X. And like I said, we can make legislation to say they are not allowed to keep the record of who authenticated.
Besides, let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good - in the UK all ISPs are required to keep a full year of your browsing history, and 17 government agencies can access this data(including DEFRA - the agriculture agency lol). So like....the "the government will have a full history of your browsing" is a ship that sailed a few years ago. Obviously I don't agree with it, and I think we should be on the streets of London and protesting this, but here we are as a country.
So like yeah, I get your point. But UK is particularily fucked on this point, let's not make it even more fucked with the way things currently are, the authentication can and should be done better.
Why does the government need to know what pages you visit? It could just encode a string representing the date and 'above 18' and sign it with its private key. PH then just needs to verify it using the public key.
Even better solution then.
>>Why does the government need to know what pages you visit?
In the UK the government already knows, but that's beside the point. It's another bad law that should have been fought against much more than it was.
The codes can trivially be shared in this case
...and? Just like a child can "trivially" ask an adult to buy them a beer.
Who are these adults giving children their verification codes for adult websites?
Asking adults for beer doesn't scale, code sharing can. If you want to crack down on code sharing, you'd have to start surveilling who is signing up to what.
> If you want to crack down on code sharing, you'd have to start surveilling who is signing up to what.
Not at all. If you want to find who shares codes at scale, you just track that person. If someone sells hundreds of thousands of codes online, you can just buy one from them and you have proven that they do it.
Again, if age verification is honestly about helping the kids, I don't think it has to be 100% efficient.
> If you want to crack down on code sharing, you'd have to start surveilling who is signing up to what.
Why? One code for one user account per site. If you're paranoid about privacy rotate codes and accounts weekly. As long as you can purchase the codes with cash in IRL stores the privacy impact is minimal.
So this solution is fine for proving your immigration status, getting employment or renting a house, but it's not good enough for browsing porn(to be a tiny bit flippant)?
>>If you want to crack down on code sharing
Right now, all the kid has to do is grab their parents passport while they are not home or asleep, scan it on their phone and they are in. It takes 30 seconds.
With the codes they would either need to convince their parents to generate a code for them, or find someone online who will - which of these solutions seems less prone to abuse to you?
Again, let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
Exactly. The same way that selling alcohol doesn’t require a paper trail of every beer I’ve bought.
I don't know about this, stores around me are scanning people's IDs to verify their age.
I guess I could make an ID (not a counterfeit government ID) that uses the same encoding for the birthday.
Stores collect not required customer information often.
They are scanning the PDF 417 barcode on the back.
Here are the specs for what appears on the driving license/ID and how to read the barcode:
https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/99ac7057-0f4d-4461-b0a2-3a553...
They issue a new spec every 4 years.
Not anymore, at least. In these parts your alcohol purchases did require a paper trail once upon a time.
To be fair, I buy my beers on CC. If someone really wanted to know the best IPAs and session able beers they could get, they could audit my CC records and then cross check to the breweries and pubs to see what I was buying. Just depends how much someone wants to learns bout good beer.
Your point was what? No one should be allowed more privacy than you wanted?
Anything under 4% should be sessionable IME.
And yet in practice they do.
Well, not every beer but when you shop at Beers-R-Us they know.
It doesn't even need 'age verification'. Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see. That means all that's needed is a standard way for parents to make sure that websites know their children are children. They don't need identity, they don't need actual age, we don't even need a complicated cryptographic solution.
California had the right idea - establish a standard way for a client to identify that the user isn't an adult (or you could do it the other way around, but that's less permissive), mandate that websites obey the flag, mandate that OSes include the feature and that browsers use it. In the end, anyone who owns a device can set their age group flag however they want it - it would be up to parents to make sure their children only use devices set the way they want. The parents could set their 8 year old's age group to whatever age group they want, and rest assured that websites would respect it.
> the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see
This has been mandated in TVs sold in the US. No one sets the thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip
> No one sets the thing.
Based on the surveys from the wikipedia page it appears that 15-20% of parents used the v-chip feature on their TV. For an optional feature that has to be manually configured that seems like an incredible success. I would have guessed that fewer than 20% of users configure any optional setting on their TV.
> Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see
This is not even ostensibly the goal. Ostensibly, the goal is that the government controls what a child can do.
or don't put the burden on the website at all, but let the parent choose whitelists of child-appropriate sites based on whatever criteria they want.
This is already possible. There's not enough people doing it, so instead we get age verification schemes.
The benefit of an age attestation scheme is that it makes it easy for parents, while also diffusing future attempts to use children as an excuse for control.
The age verification that doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording is called parental controls and it already exists in most systems. It doesn't require any proof of ID, internet connection, complex distributed systems, and so on. And it has near 100% success rate.
What's the point in making this distinction? This is HN, 99% of the users here are aware of what zero knowledge proof is and that it's possible to implement it that way.
The general consensus and what the article is alluding to is that it will be probably implemented in a way that allows individual tracking and identification.
>What's the point in making this distinction?
we're on a discussion board, so i started a discussion. that was the point.
I also only learned about Zero-Knowledge Proofs from links to articles, blogs, and discussions here so someone has to bring it up.
I don’t know? Maybe its the little give and take that helps build a solution that is mature and limits the kind of harms kid are facing, without sacrificing privacy?
It’s also the very cool, nuanced and technical tooling that people here tend to enjoy figuring out, and building.
It side steps the thought terminating tar pits of “privacy at all costs” or “save the children”.
They can track you with cookies , now they have age and identity signals .
This isn’t about kids at all. The ID requirement is the WHOLE POINT.
That it is technically possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving way is thus entirely irrelevant.
They want all online activity tied to ID so they can violently, illegally retaliate in the dark of night against protected expression online that they don’t like.
That’s all this is. Privacy-preserving techniques are irrelevant because they do not accomplish this goal.
My government shouldn't decide what content I'm viewing or providing, and that's the end of it.
>muh kids
That's the parents problem, not mine.
Any system the government comes up with will be insecure, inconvenient, invasive and cost the taxpayers billions, and you all know it's true.
You must have skipped reading Project 2025. Most of the editors/contributors have been appointed/hired/added to the administration/cabinet. More than half of the goals of Project 2025 had already been implemented.
There is also, separately from that, a need to protect kids from growing up into the people in Idiocracy.
Getting children to not grow up into idiots requires intense parental interactions, healthy environments, and the ability to explore and get hurt. Identification isn't even on the list.
Is that an argument for or against letting known pedophiles have direct messages with children?
They already failed to do that by steadily eroding the educational system and its standards over the last 50-70 years. We’re already there. The electorate can’t locate the countries on a map in which the US is fighting multiple wars in their name.
Banning Instagram ain’t gonna fix that.
This is not in any way whatsoever about children.
Is it possible that two or more things both harm children?
Let's ban books and skateboards too
I think they already did that.
So let's see some of the champions of these systems acknowledge this downside and make the case that they should be built in a way that avoids it and not back down on that when it becomes inconvenient.
Why would they ever do that? The spying is the point.
Yeah, and once you have the non-intrusive system in place you can just switch it out for the tracking one without the user knowing.
Or there's probably some kind of correlation trail possible that will track you even with the anonymous systems.
> there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes.
I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours.
> i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.
Well there's plenty of idiots in power and I'm sure they have no idea. But there absolutely are evil ones who simply want more power and don't care what happens after they have it.
If this were actually about protecting children, maybe you could get something passed that wasn't just ground work for a panopticon hellscape. But it's not about children at all - the people truly worried about that are just useful idiots - it's about power, and so you can't pass anything without having the surveillance infrastructure forced in.
>I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours.
based on what?
My assumption (made admittedly with no evidence whatsoever) that you believe it's possible for someone to verify their age without giving up any anonymity or privacy, even temporarily.
one of the reasonable solutions i allude to is an over/under 18 age attestation at time of account creation on your OS. websites say "18+ content" and the OS either displays or doesn't display the content. there is ~0 privacy or anonymity concerns as 3rd parties don't get any communication about whether the content was shown.
> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia
But I feel there's not a lot of trust that whatever implementation we could end up with wouldn't be such a dystopia. The real world equivalent would be checkpoints at every intersection verifying the driver's age, the cashier who carded the 20 yo with a beer now does it for everyone, makes a copy of your ID and stores it in a big folder shared with their 427 "business partners".
Imo we should scrap the whole idea of age verification. Kids get a kidPhone with kidOS, whitelist of age-appropriate resources & capabilities. You wouldn't let an 8 yo drive on the highway, yet they can have a supercar to drive unsupervised on the information highway, no biggie. Internet is full of adults doing all sort of stuff while kids need supervision and education: design safe spaces for children, not checkpoints at every corner.
The so-called "social media" companies in the past have bragged to advertisers and the public about how much they know about their targets, also known as "users". Statements like, "We know more about you than your friends and family."
Now, is this really true. Probably not. It's exaggeration. It's hype
But these companies have learned that a 100% correct is not necessary to make money. For example, if they are correct 80% of the time, then maybe that's good enough
A law that achieves an 80% reduction in youth ad targets might also be "good enough"
The toes getting stepped on belong to the companies
The kids who will still access these companies' websites come hell or high water, the 20%, are unlikely to complain
Complaints come from the companies and those who rely on these companies to make money. Like the author of this blog post, they keep calling a handful of Big Tech websites/app endpoints "the internet"
Their toes are going to get crushed
"Social media" is not "the internet"
This would be great and all, but all parties who are in a position to choose to implement this kind of system or to keep the status quo are already motivated to keep (and expand) the existing systems, for any number of reasons. Everybody (except the end users) loves to keep that juicy metadata and incidental logs of everything.
(Repost from 2021: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560821>)
Doesn't _have_ to be except not enough voters can tell the difference which is exactly the goal.
Doesn't 90% successful mean you are stepping on 10% toes???
>Doesn't 90% successful mean you are stepping on 10% toes???
no, it means that <10% of kids under 16 or whatever age will still make it onto instagram
Wouldn't this mean we don't know what age these 10% are in?
i dont know what point you are trying to make.
there are laws against underage drinking and buying alcohol. some kids still get access to alcohol. the law is mostly successful, with an acceptable amount of failure rate.
same concept.
Gating is not just for porn, they are talking about using for social media and various other things. You can imagine that many things end up age gated if this becomes legislation, as a preventative measure.
Then your 10% becomes problematic because you are either restricting or granting access based on invalid information. So in your world here we then need ways for people who were incorrectly gated to reach out and be corrected somehow.
You're mixing up false positives and false negatives. Nobody is going to be incorrectly blocked under this system unless they lost their ID, and the fix there is getting a new ID.
Some kids skipping the block sometimes isn't catastrophic, especially because there won't be all this peer pressure to join adult social media when 90% or more are blocked.
You know this? My guess is that companies will be held responsible for anyone accessing there content that is not supposed to. In that light they will feel the need to block any unknowns that come through rather than potentially face issues if someone who is technically banned from accessing gets in.
I'm not sure how you confidently can say that every company is going to allow the people we can't verify have access?
No, it means Instagram doesn't know.
It was never about the children. They are rolling this out, so online comments can be tracked to names and addresses.
It's to suppress free speech and arrest people that post anything against the government's narrative.
Many people have already been arrested in the UK for this. This is the next logical step.
i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.
Correct. The goal here isn't "to save kids". That's just one of the Horsemen of the Infocalypse [0] used to market taking away our freedom.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing? To me, the entire problem is framing the issue as "age verification" in the first place - this implies the web company is responsible for knowing and controlling who uses their service. Whether this is a full-on demand for drivers' license / face scan / verification can, or whether there can be a technical process that obscures some details doesn't change this underlying dynamic!
The other problem you're up against is in the low-friction online environment, 90% easily turns into a much lower percentage. Which will actually manifest itself as the initial methods that achieved "90%" being declared insufficient in favor of stronger methods of identity verification.
I say this as a parent staring down having to deal with the dumpster fire that is the modern web in the next short year or two - the only sane way to address this problem is through client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc. There is indeed a market failure here, so the sensible regulation is to make websites over a certain size publish labels about the suitability of their content for age brackets, whether a site is social media, contains user generated content, has algorithmic feeds, and so on - affirmative assertions about the content that carry legal weight and liability for them not being true. Device manufacturers over a certain size would need to include parental control software that can be enabled during the setup process.
If parental controls are enabled and a website has not published tags (too small, foreign jurisdiction, misconfiguration, etc), then it simply fails closed and refuses to display the site. This keeps decisions about content suitability in the hands of parents where it belongs, rather than putting it in the hands of corporate attorneys who will often make decisions directly contrary to what parents want! Remember this whole topic is being pushed by big tech to absolve themselves of liability for pushing harmful products!
>Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing?
well, i mean, you put a decently reasonable one in your own comment: "client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc."
another sibling comment mentions alcohol sales. government could issue a scratch card with UUID that's valid for some time, sold at anywhere alcohol/tobacco is already sold. most people are already comfortable with flashing an id at the beer store.
read any other the other dozen similar threads with hundreds of comments, and there are a handful of other neat ideas usually voted pretty high up.
Isn't getting around showing ID for alcohol about as easy as clicking "Yes I'm above 18"? All you need is to know someone that would buy it. Or know someone that knows someone that would buy it. Or know someone that had it bought for them.
Or I guess in the case of the US... maybe even just steal it considering how lax people seem to be with theft.
>Isn't getting around showing ID for alcohol about as easy as clicking "Yes I'm above 18"? All you need is to know someone that would buy it.
and yet, most kids aren't walking around hammered. the penalties of underage possession and supplying to underage kids deters most people.
i will reemphasize that literally no law is 100% effective, so its silly to talk about age verification as if it has to be the first one to be 100% effective.
Note that what I outlined is decidedly not "age verification" or "identity verification" - rather it relies on on-device parental controls, where the decision process is still completely under the control of the end users (ie parents). The main point of the legislation would be to prime the network effects to overcome the current market failure.
The details of the setup are very important as they lay out which way the situation will be pushed as the calls invariably continue. There are many other neat ideas that are voted high up, that still fundamentally still just boil down to identity verification! This why we need to talk specifics - even most programmers are bad at designing secure systems, as it requires the additional skill of adversarial thinking.
For instance, the scratch card idea you bring up fails with the same problem - it still puts the onus for yes/no decisions on the companies, meaning when the scratch cards are declared not good enough, those companies will then move on to additional methods - and it would be a tall order to craft legislation that prohibited companies from employing any other identity verification methods beyond the scratch cards. And in case it's not obvious, the scratch cards will readily be seen as not good enough - if they're truly private, it's easy for anyone to make a couple extra bucks by buying some (up to the limit), and then selling the tokens online.
(never mind that many beer stores have moved to online verification of licenses where they scan your ID# and it gets backhauled to some centralized database, so even buying beer isn't appropriately described as "flash your ID" any more)
(also note that any "age verification" or "identity verification" scheme does not merely absolve big tech of liability, rather it moves that legal liability on to parents themselves! )
In tech, 10% unsuccessful today is 100% unsuccessful next week, when everyone learns how to join that 10% who got around it.
The shit is horrible if 100% successful, and yet not worth doing if it isn't.
> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking
Personally I don't care how much age sniffing is mandatory in that I think it is inacceptable on any level. Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok? Because I can not buy into that premise. To me the whole assumption is wrong from the get go.
> Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok?
Everything is going to contribute to tracking, though. It's really hard to ensure that data doesn't leak.
Example proposal: sites attach an X-AGE-RATING header to pages and browsers only render the page if X-AGE-RATING < USER_AGE.
Exploitable Issue: Send multiple requests from one page for various style sheets with different X-AGE-RATING headers. The ones that get loaded give you all you need to find the user's age cohort.
But, the unique combination of things like your screen dimensions, number of threads, charge percentage, default languages, available fonts, etc already makes tracking possible. I don't know if adding one more - carefully chosen feature - would really make the situation that much worse.
>Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok?
no, and you can read through other comments here and on the many threads of the same topic for proposals which have no tracking.
I am convinced that no one will make any progress on this issue so long as they refuse to understand that their aren't a group of shadowy figures pushing for this but rather a sizeable chunk of the general population, buoyed on by various moral outrage interest groups including a great many HNers who have been happily stoking the narrative that social media is the cause of every negative statistical ill.
Who wants this? God damn everyone. And in so much as Facebook might do something with the data, what they really want is a legal moat of sufficient depth to drown possible competitors.
In fairness (i.e. looking at the data with an open mind), social media does seem to be the cause of (or at least strongly correlated with) a bunch of ills.
That's true but has anyone studied the good things that have happened from younger people being able to find community or other positive aspects?
Either way the solution again is not age gating, it's real meaningful data privacy laws that if enacted would have a huge effect on many companies today.
How do data privacy laws address the significant number of voters who are being told and believe that social media use is causing issues for children and want something done about it?
This is exactly what I mean: you've rocked up and started talking about something else entirely.
I think you misunderstood me, I'm saying strong (very strong) data privacy laws make age gating unnecessary. This solution has far reaching benefits across all age groups.
Sweet summer child. This is not about age verification.
>Sweet summer child.
my comment is only 81 words long, yet it seems that multiple people fail to make it to the end for some reason.
("full dystopia" should be a hint that i recognize the ulterior motive)
> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate
I believe you are missing the point. "To protect kids" is just a cover, the nightmare dystopia is the real goal. So age verification have to be a nightmare dystopia or it would be useless for those, who push for it.
>I believe you are missing the point. "To protect kids" is just a cover, the nightmare dystopia is the real goal.
did i miss the point? because my last sentence literally says this.
Ah, well, no. Sorry, didn't read to the end of it. It is just I see no point at all to discuss other options, so sorta become bored reading about them.
Well, some who push it anyway. There is another group whose motive is to get rid of all porn.
You can't spy on kids without spying on everyone, and in any case they're interested in the everyone part. Ultimately they want 24x7, realtime facial & biometric monitoring of everyone using any "approved" device, and be sure that only approved devices will be able to join networks and do stuff upon them, so for those brave nerds thinking they can survive on GhostBSD from their basement, yes you can, but as Gandalf said, you can only fence yourself in, but not fence the world out. Sooner or later they'll come for everyone.
Parents largely control what their kids have access to, whether it requires a device, a data plan, home Wi-Fi, whatever. Where parents don't/can't control their kids' access, no amount of regulation and technology will fix it.
This applies not just to social media, but drugs, alcohol, porn, etc. Yes, laws and IDs add friction and that's good, but if a kid really wants those things they are going to find a way.
Social media already had built in friction without needing new regulations and ID requirements. To access social media you need a relatively expensive (for kids) device and some way to connect that device to the Internet, which is also not free.
The biggest problem I see is that unlike alcohol, drugs, and porn, there are seemingly benign reasons for kids to use social media. Sports teams, dance classes, youth groups, etc. all want to keep in touch and allow group communication. Too often the adults in charge turn to Instagram or whatever social media app for the group communication. Now, unfortunately, your kid needs an IG account.
Even as an adult who doesn't use social media, I find the use of Facebook as a company home page, or using it as a forum for group communication, to be problematic. Especially as Meta makes it more and more difficult to see content without an account.
Glad that absolutely nothing in my life uses social media for communication like this. What a shitty way to reach people too. Your post is going to be served days late whenever its churned by the algorithm to the intended user, if at all. Meanwhile, email always works. There are even services that will mass text people.
> Too often the adults in charge turn to Instagram or whatever social media app for the group communication.
This was always the problem going way back. Lots of responsible parents pushed back hard and advocated for doing everything in person during the scheduled times. Even before that there were already concerns that kids were stuck indoors and addicted to entertainment.
They ultimately lost out to the lazy majority who kept mindlessly repeating "who cares?" and "oh every generation says that when they get old!". Organizers also saw it as a way to do less work.
Well here we are now. Even the younger people agree this is dumb.
My main concern is transparency. How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?
If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair. However, if some people are exempt from monitoring because of their connections, relations, etc. then that would be unfair.
And if some people are allowed to harass and stalk others based on some attribute (race, religion, nationality, etc.) because they are in a monitoring position (while others are not) then that would be unfair as well.
We need full transparency.
Transparency doesn't matter without consequences. Many of the currently ruling governments have demonstrated that already.
You're wrong, it still matters. It's the first step, and it's an important step in maintaining fairness.
>You're wrong
As a rhetorical trick this is generally ineffective.
Unfortunately not when convincing a large populace..
> it's an important step in maintaining fairness.
When there are no consequences, it by definition isn't.
Well there can be no consequences at T=0, but thanks to transparency, consequences can happen, by a collective decision, at T=1. Therefore having transparency is important on its own, it facilitates change towards fairness.
And that's what I am saying - we should still ask for transparency even in the environment of no consequences.
It's also possible that people are not sure about the lack of consequences, and again, transparency then prevents them doing bad thing even if actually there are no consequences.
But of course tautology is tautological by definition. (I am almost 50 and kinda tired of these eristic games on the Internet.)
If we're in a position to ask for something, I would rather ask for consequences. We already know what bad stuff is being done: more transparency has marginal utility, under the circumstances.
What are you going to seek consequences for, if there isn't sufficient transparency to know violations are occurring?
We already know what bad stuff is being done
This is a witch-finding mentality: witchcraft exists, I suspect this person of being a witch, therefore burning them at the stake is justified.
transparency is knowledge, and is a prerequisite for accountability
> How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?
It's not even just about the current people in charge or with access. Who's next? The "trust us" approach doesn't work when trust has already been broken with the people, or in a scenario where the data will change hands to an unknown future administration.
The best way to win my trust is to not even want the data in the first place.
> exempting themselves from monitoring
Wasn’t that in the Chat Control proposal? i.e. politicians and other important individuals are exempt
Of course. The lobbyists don't want to be called bribed people, so they only want to monitor the peons. Slavery 2.0.
>Slavery 2.0.
Chat control is a lot of things, but Slavery 2.0 is not one of them. The hyperbole only hurts your position.
Slavery isn't a single mechanism, rather a system of many things that keep it all running smoothly
> If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair.
Not everyone is an exhibitionist. Some people thrive when they are very public about their life. Some prefer a much more private life.
"Fair" doesn't always mean according to everyone's preferences. I might want to have a full cake but getting a slice is fair.
some people need "more calories" than others
fair != equal
> We need full transparency.
A couple years ago I would have tended to agree with you, transparency would be a good first step. But then I have recently seen demonstrated that transparency just proves that you do not need to hide corruption as long as a powerful bloc of voters actually agrees with your corrupt position. I think what we really are going to need is consequences defined ahead of time, along with an enforcement mechanism not easily corrupted itself. This is hard. But it is a topic we will hopefully be spending quality time working out over the next few years anyway.
>How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?
Ah, so except for THE ENTIRE FUCKING PROBLEM, this is fine.
>And if some people are allowed to harass and stalk others based on some attribute (race, religion, nationality, etc.) because they are in a monitoring position (while others are not) then that would be unfair as well.
Yes, we wouldn't want racial profiling in our Orwellian hellscape. That would truly put it over the edge.
They are 100% abusing until proven otherwise. Naive to think otherwise.
> If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair.
It might be fair, by some definition, but it would still be wrong. The government shouldn't be monitoring us to the extent required to implement age verification on the 'net.
In Canada the approach is going to be that social media and AI companies will need to figure out a system where those under 16 can’t access content. The government will be able to grant exemptions if the company can satisfy regulators that they have built and maintained adequate, alternative structural safeguards to protect children on their platform.
Further to that, companies are required to do this in a strict data minimization approach, results need to be anonymized and destroyed immediately after the check is complete.
The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media. If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.
> The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media.
You have a flair for understatement.
> If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.
Same. I joke that when I retire I'm throwing out every computer in my house. Turns out the gov't may effectively do that for me, because I will not be handing out my ID to web sites. That is a hard line for me.
I don’t think saving them from spying is the main concern. Instead it’s the direct negative effects of the usage upon the kids that’s the concern. Not that age verification isn’t problematic
The possibly too subtle point of this article is that the spying is what makes the negative effects so powerful. Social media spies on what you are viewing and then sends you more of that, and send the info to other people so they can send you more of that too
Then ban underage smartphones altogether, that would probably make the single biggest improvement in child safety and mental health. Trying to police content is an utter waste of time.
I keep reading about freedom and democracy on Fox News and New York Times. What is that all about?
We're cooked. The young kids I teach are unfortunately completely accustomed to go guardian spying on them at school. The admin constantly reinforce the need to dissect the internet, treat Chromebooks as media consumption devices, not computers. I hear it will be even worse here next year. Not sure how.
These people are obsessed with risk mitigation that it's not even worth having tech class anymore. No risk. 100% control all the time.
This reminds me of being refused entry to a nightclub in the US because I’d forgotten my passport, even though I had a European ID card and I’m over 40. Offline, age checks already often become rigid “approved identity document” checks. Online, that problem seems even worse, because the check can become a persistent identity layer across the web.
Maybe it is just a lax west coast thing but they hardly ID here. Bartenders straight up don't ever card at all. Only place you'd get carded is if they put a bouncer out front, which only happens when it is getting really busy, and even then they are mostly there to keep out teenagers and break up fights, only give you a 1 second glance at your card to not chance a liquor license violation.
Certain night clubs (haven't seen these antics in CA but have in NYC and Miami) often do stupid stuff to guys though. If you show up with a group of guys they will probably not let you in. You need an even ratio of men and women. They will let in a group of all women with hardly any check.
No one in politics is going to listen unless solutions are provided.
Government research departments like DoD and CSIRO could commission work to solve this problem, that’s how we used to do this.
Relying on private boffins to complain creates too much noise in the room and the bureaucracy can’t tune into the signal.
It used to be done via gov sci. What changed?
The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum
Just for example Russia build infrastructure for blocks website for child safety, but it started to used much further
> The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum
The US is an instructive example in real time. Roughly everyone worries about what happens when their opponent gains control of the government and then promptly forgets how much they worried when their side has it.
> The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum
If that was considered the real problem, we would be fighting against surveillance capitalism. Instead we cheer for LLM companies who made it an order of magnitude worse.
Let's be honest, the only time we care about being tracked is to access porn, for some reason. And if we're being honest, we are already tracked when doing it.
> If that was considered the real problem, we would be fighting against surveillance capitalism.
You don't?
> Instead we cheer for LLM companies who made it an order of magnitude worse.
You do?
> Let's be honest, the only time we care about being tracked is to access porn, for some reason.
You do?
> And if we're being honest, we are already tracked when doing it.
You are?
I see that one point of criticism of the EUId is that people think it will lead to bad things because people will need iOS or android.
Ok, we are an international collective of wealthy nerds obsessed with privacy:
How much money do we need to collect to get /e/OS to be suitable?
A few million? I’d pledge 500€.
If you're obsessed with privacy, I suggest you look at GrapheneOS instead of /e/OS, though.
This idea sounds like the death of social media. Remove anyone under 18 ensures they won't signup after. Forcing id verification means 70-80% of adult accounts will be dead. Network effects disappear. Those who remain will be businesses pushing something, hackers/spammers and some die hard group.
yay?
Have you been on instagram lately? We're already there.
The slippery slope argument is hugely valid, but having kids not have access to alcohol, porn and guns is very normal. We don't even discuss it in the 'physical world' because it's absolutely normative.
Even in 'Europe' kids aren't going into the liquor store stocking up obviously - there are always age and responsibility-related conventions.
The 'online' nature of this piques our anti-authoritarian triggers and tends to err our judgment a bit.
There are valid reasons to do this, and there is 'a right way' - maybe we should have some hope and promote that.
I'm not hugely optimistic that they'll get it right, but we should aspire for to build the world we want. There's enough momentum that it's plausible.
In europe drinking age is what 16? By the time you want to regularly drink you are already legally allowed to. Meanwhile in the US you get screwed by both the law and your university for drinking in a dorm at 20 years old.
We discuss age requirements in the physical world not much because the physical world allows age checks without mass surveillance.
Age Verification is not about “saving kids from spying/social media”.
Same as Regulatory Encryption Backdoors are not about “protecting kids from child predators”
This is framing. Abusing kids is bad. But that is not what this about. Let’s keep the discussion on topic: the goal is 1984-level oversight… not just of the kids
[Edit: I guess HN agrees: meanwhile the title changed from “saving kids from spying” to “is actually mass-surveillance” - good]
The headline already summarizes the premise of the article in fewer words.
Yeah, the headline changed while I wrote my comment
There are at least two methods to verify age without disclosing identity:
1) Yubikey-like tokens supporting attestation and sold at places not accessible to minors like liquor stores
2) "parent mode" on desktop and mobile devices - the device would refuse to load any inappropriate sites and install inappropriate apps like Telegram, Omegle or Facebook.
Not that I am in favour of age verification, but I find it interesting how many people complain about age verification for being "mass surveillance", but just don't give a shit about AI and TooBigTech and surveillance capitalism.
Let's be honest: "they" already know our age.
Could we step back a little and maybe revisit the premise that we need the gov't to be protecting children to begin with? That's what parents are supposed to be doing.
No let's not.
Let's actually create and maintain a society.
There are still places in the world where you and your family can literally fend for yourself against nature and rival gangs and so on if you're just super attached to the concept though, it's not like this option has been foreclosed.
This discussion is about the Internet. I.e. that we already have police and regulate in-person things like selling alcohol to minors, etc, is not a great argument in support of policing information.
If you call pornograpy and violence delivery to children "providing them with information" then sure but most normal people just consider that a bad thing that we'd like to avoid and definitely would like to stop sociopathic tech CEO's from exploiting for profit.
But back to your original point, it's a pretty well-established function of government to protect the children within its borders from being harmed.
Every time I see stuff about age verification (which I do admit is likely just a justification for control and surveillance over the internet) I can't help but wonder if there's some way to coordinate a large enough number of internet users to adopt a parallel internet that inherently cannot be regulated, or at least one in which no law can be reasonably enforced. For instance a fully encrypted p2p internet. I guess ultimately the problem is banks and other tie-ins to the real world like businesses with public reputations. And so I guess since endless content streams (including porn and other child-unfriendly media) follow the money primarily, any non-monetized / volunteer parallel internet would likely contain mostly unmonetized content like information (eg: wikipedia, Q&A sites, etc) and slow, un-gameable social media
In a perfect world, I'd prefer law and regulation minimization, but obviously that's just not reasonable in our actual world. As much as I have libertarian tendencies, I just can't argue that regulation is necessary. The really interesting part is which regulations are the ones you actually need, which do more harm than good, and which should be refactored -- all as measured (probably) by something like counterfactual real world preference (in the best case, at least). My sense (which isn't worth much; only should act on empirical evidence and falsification-resistant modelling) is such a parallel internet, plus an analogous parallel economy (like bitcoin), would be a net positive
In most of the developed world, you need to register with a government to operate a communications device, whether it's radio, land line, mobile phone, whatever. If you're theorizing some kind of peer-to-peer system, where you let someone use your service to bypass mandatory registration, you're going to be liable. There will be very limited takers.
Could we instead disallow algorithmic skinner-box addiction machines for everyone?
How can you tell what one is? Reddit in 2010? Facebook in 2005? IRC in 1999?
If the users chooses what they are shown and the order they are shown in, then it's fine. If the platform chooses, then it's not, because they will always choose what creates the most engagement.
So HN should be banned
Not necessarily. Just fix the algorithm. Showing all submissions by time should be ok, showing all submissions by number of upvotes should be ok if the user chooses that.
The platform can also add ghost upvotes and downvotes and censor upvotes and downvotes.
That could be penalized, ultimately by breaking up the company and selling it in parts.
Is heroin the same as beer? Who even knows.
That's the problem, recommendation algorithms on networks beyond a certain scale should be publicly auditable.
If they're not, I should be able to opt-out of them.
I think I would be fine with a positive enumeration. Some ideas for serving content:
So Hacker News wouldn't be allowed?
I think it should be, maybe I'm missing some aspect, I just cooked up a simple list of rules on the spot, sheesh :-D
Edit: huh, I'm probably stupid, but can you explain more?
HN uses magical platform votes.
And it should be transparent about it. When Dan uses a magic lever, it should be visible.
Would Facebook be okay if all the Nazi propaganda posts were tagged "Facebook boosted this post"?
If they did boost it, why shouldn't they tell us?
Exactly. Fix the addiction machine, not just who gets checked at the door.
I think this is really the only serious alternative.
How about taking some personal responsibility for your life?
This shouldn't even be a consideration concerning adults.
It's clear by now that the societal impact is significant. I can banish all the social networks from my life and they'll still be corrupting the political process, promoting divisive content, etc.
> This shouldn't even be a consideration concerning adults.
Ban the boxes for kids
I was replying specifically to someone who insinuated that all social media (or, at least, all supposedly addictive social media) should be banned for everyone, including adults. To me, it's a matter of personal freedom that they shouldn't be banned for adults.
I assume you are also for heroin vending machines at every school corner if you watch a 30 second ad slot. You don't have to use them, you know.
No, but I'm not against selling alcohol and fast sports cars to adults, for example. I'm not very fond of a nanny state that prohibits almost everything to adults "for their sake" and because the government knows so much better.
It is somewhat more challenging for the vendor selling alcohol or sports cars to manipulate your thinking, so the analogy is strained.
[citation needed]
Your extreme example of a policy regarding distribution of heroin is far from perfect, but also far better than prohibition, which has visited upon the world more death, disease, crime, and cartel enrichment than perhaps any other policy in history.
But surely we can do better than either of these extremes.
Actual title, original title: Spying on kids to protect kids from spying is very, very stupid
>"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.
Hilarious that the author doesn't think that this isn't already happening.
You can always have more of it. Currently, you can use some technical tools like Tor Browser to protect yourself. Age verification makes it easier to block them.
We're already been protecting children from printed porn, alcohol, drugs (legal or illegal), guns, etc. Children don't even have to buy those items, sometimes they can get them from friends or even find at home. It's always been parents responsibility to protect from that, and the Internet doesn't change that.
What the Internet does change is granularity of controls. With physical goods, parents can choose to give children travel magazines but not porn magazines. With Internet, parents don't always have a choice to give children a device to read travel websites but not porn websites.
Solving that granularity is all we need! And the good news - it's already largely solved: just give your kids one of the locked down phones/tables with parental controls (i.e., almost any phone/tablet today).
The law can and should make a few things better: - introduce minimal requirements for parental controls, certify devices as kids safe (i.e., implementing these requirements) - ideally, require websites to tag content - same way we tag it on TV for ages; this one is harder to enforce in practice (what about offshore websites?) but also not really needed - AI can tag content pretty well as part of parental controls
I know all of this was said before many times, but somehow it feels not enough people understand it.
I'm against mass surveillance, but gambling sites managed for years.... Can't addictive social media algoshit be thrown in the same bucket?
Am I the only one who looked at NSFW websites at 10 years old and played games with voice chat with players of all ages too, and I turned out to be well adjusted productive member of society? People need to chill.
Same, I care little about NSFW. We used to all live in caves together where kids saw adults having sex, in conflict, and cleaning game.
But I also grew with a different internet than we have now. There’s a level of targeted manipulation that’s novel. I’m not sure the cat goes back in the bag no matter what we do.
Same here. Every time a thread like this comes up it brings out that a surprising number of paranoid helicopter parents browse HN, which is a contradiction in perspective that I can't really emphasize with.
Seconded. The amount of time and characters spent here trying to coax someone into trying to help these damn layers materialize just tells me the point isn't the kids. It's trying to preserve business model in spite of negative externalities.
The new laws in the US don't require any real verification. Parents who care will just select a flag on device/OS setup that gets passed to websites. They can also just lie if they really want to. In the EU, they are trying to verify age with zero knowledge proofs.
It would be nice if the author actually spelled out the specific weaknesses of those approaches or even just referenced those laws instead of fear-mongering about "spying on kids", but I suppose that would be to much to ask of someone who made a career out of vibes based rage. Ironic that Doctorow is so eager to capitalize on the enshittification of journalism.
The specific weakness of these systems is that the governments cannot be trusted with this. They have demonstrated this - Snowden leaks for the US and several EU states, and the general monitoring clause in the Data Retention Directive for the EU as a whole.
Even if these governments come up with a zero knowledge system, it's only one click away from being replaced with a full-knowledge system, because the user is already used to it. These governments have already tried spying on everyone (and they almost certainly still do).
In general I'm opposed to this kind of regulation, but as a thought exercise, we do have the primitives needed to do age (or any other attribute) verification in a privacy-preserving and decentralized way.
You could imagine a hierarchy of organizations (governments, financial institutions, schools, etc) that a website trusts to verify some attribute (minimum age, citizenship, etc). Those organizations can attest that some identifier like an email address has been verified to belong to a real individual with that attribute, and that organization belongs to the hierarchy the website trusts, without revealing anything else about the user, the exact verifying organization, or the requesting website.
If the website sees (and possibly stores) the e-mail address, and the government or another party knows who it belongs to, the scheme is anything but privacy-preserving.
I grew up during the 90s/2000s and I used the internet, first social media platforms, messengers, etc. – a lot. My parents had no idea of computers, how to use them, how to use the internet, what is out there etc. Yet I am convinced that the way my parents dealt with it is still the gold standard.
Their parenting equipped me well to deal with weird, dangerous or otherwise harmful things I encountered. They were the kind of parents who would let us play in the woods till 9 in the evening, no questions asked if there were scratched knees or dirty cloths. If there was something they thought might be problematic, they talked to us in a way that left the ultimate decision how to deal with a situation with us, displaying a high level of trust into our ability to make good decisions ourselves (and sometimes letting us make bad ones just to talk about it after the fact).
Turns out if you want your kid to be able to deal with unexpected situations you need them to deal with situations, period. And the opposite of that is what I even back then saw with many of my friends parents: trying to shield their kid from every encountering (and mastering!) even the tiniest of dangers themselves, alone. You think you tell your kid about the dangers of the world, so they know, but the actual lesson you teach is that only their parent knows what is and isn't dangerous and that they themselves can't be trusted to judge it. That is a bad lesson.
Don't get me wrong, we did stupid stuff, like jumping of bridges into rivers and so on. But we were very careful about how we did it, diving beforehand, etc. The real stupid stuff in my youth was all done by other kids that had never learned to judge risks themselves and who in one brazen attempt of rebellion bit off more than they could chew in one go. That landed them in the hospital. My brother and I were the only kids in our friends circle who made it to 18 without having broken a single bone in our bodies, despite being regular skateboarders, snowboarders, climbers, cliff jumpers and all other kinds of borderline insane past-times, some of which don't even have a name.
One aspect: Since my parents had no idea what was on the internet and how to protect against specific dangers lurking within it an educational method that didn't have to rely on them knowing and enumerating every danger in the world proved to be a really smart choice in hindsight. Since the landscapes of social media especially for kids and young teenagers is shifting constantly at a high pace, any parenting ideas would need to keep track of all this as well. I can't even imagine how that would work.
The alternative is to ban everything. But how do they build a healthy immune system if they are never even exposed to the mild dangers first?
I think the best thing most parents could do is ban the Internet from their own life. I grew up in the 80s and I have watched the evolution of parenting since then. The world is measurably safer today than it was then. Stranger danger is vanishingly rare. What the hell happened? Fear happened. Things like 24 hour cable news accelerated it, and the Internet turbocharged it. We cannot untangle the horrors we are exposed to on the Internet with what real life dangers face us, we conflate them to the detriment of our children.
Maybe our children will figure it out as they become parents. I hope so.
Stranger danger was always rare. It was a media hype-cycle. Child abductions have always predominantly been by family or other close persons.
When the dangers consist of invisible targeted manipulation of thought processes it's a whole different category of risks that kids (and most adults) are not equipped to handle. The effects are playing out around the world as we speak.
I don't know that universal tracking is the answer. I also don't think unrestricted access to children by manipulative predators (companies in this case) is the right answer. But then, I don't think they should have unrestricted access to adults either.
This is the only insightful comment in this entire thread but it will be ignored because people love a good moral panic.
Millennials having kids has turned them into their boomer parents, bringing out the pitchfork for whatever braindead hysteria was featured in CAPITAL LETTERS on the 6 oclock news that day.
The kids are going to be fine. None of the moral panics of previous generations are even talked about anymore, because it's all irrational kneejerk reactions to change ("this new music is different, it's destroying our kids!"). Social media doesn't even exist anymore, its just short form cable TV.
The adults on the other hand...that's the actual group we need to be worried about. They don't adapt like kids do.
The boomers mismanaged the entire developed world into a giant debt spiral and are collapsing every social welfare system their parents generation created.
The real question is: What institutions and assets the boomers created (like the internet) will the the millennials ruin with their poor governance?
Our lives are being thoroughly surveilled by a combination of phone tech, financial records tracking, pervasive internet user tracking, smart appliances, data brokerages, and our cars. That this is what triggers an avalanche of pushback while the rest of it is ignored wholesale reeks to high hell of either an overt astroturf campaign or industrial grade hypocrisy.
I offer no opinion on the concept of age verification beyond noting it's detractors consistently refuse to advance alternatives that address any of problems it's proponents claim it's intended to address.
The bigger threat to kids is all the browsers now bypassing domain filtering by default, even if you specify a DNS server. There was a time when multiple vendors sold protection software, but apparently some unsavory elements wanted all the browsers to build in DNS bypassing to go around it. The best protection for children is blocking the bad stuff at the DNS level.
As time goes on the opportunities for human persons to interact directly with each other, without some corporation mediating it, become fewer and fewer. Sometimes it's not even possible to buy food without having a third party corporation promise to pay some days in the future; there are places that literally don't take your order unless you have a credit card. This is how they get around the "cash must be accepted for all debts" law.
Online it is happening too. No human persons will be allowed to open accounts or even communicat with other human people unless a corporate entity does it for them. This mass surveillence is just a smaller part of the greater attack on human autonomy. Only corporate persons have rights these days.
The total fertility rate in basically all western countries is below replacement level fertility. Without immigration we are shrinking. There are fewer and fewer children around. And now protecting children on the internet got top priority. For real? We point to Russia for controlling the internet more and more. Yet the EU does the same and will probably even overtake Russia on this thanks to more resources / competencies.
This is a very strong argument simply put
This is a manipulation tactic not an argument. Almost nobody wants to prevent spying on kids. Main goal is to prevent harmful content like porn, gore and gambling.
Those digital surveillance rules passed in Brazil under the Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents law.
Protection of kids is definitely the most common arguments for them.
Sorry but this isn't a strong argument at all. Nobody who thinks age verification laws are a good idea will be remotely persuaded by any of this.
here's alternative legislation that should be at least as effective without the mass surveillance aspect:
* as your kid's legal guardian you're legally liable for whatever the fuck your kid does, including but not limited to harming themselves: Parents should care for their kids
* platforms will do their best to not be available to minors unless minors are actually their core audience, will inform monthly how they did that, and the bottom 10% of achievers will pay an escalating percentual of their valuation as fine for each instance where they're found lacking: Platforms should care about kids as a category of people
* posession of personally identifiable information about an unrelated minor by any unrelated person/company without a clear and preapproved reason is grounds for a child abuse investigation on every person anywhere in the chain of custody of said data: Children's PII should be such a hassle to manage it's not worth taking
> What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance
Thank you.
It has never been about "protecting the children" either. That was always a lie - the red herring. Many pointed that out from the get go too.
The much more fascinating thing is how legislation is still being actively changed to sustain that narrative. This is like a pre-scripted event what we are seeing here. I find it quite fascinating. It shows how real lobbyism actually works.
My prediction is that mandatory age sniffing will come, they will continue to claim it is all for children, and the openness of the world wide web will factually be transformed into a two-class apartheid system. The latter has already happened actually - you have walled gardens e. g. discord rather than oldschool phpBB webforums (aka privately controlled access to information), Google already ruined its search engine, AI slop continues to ruin more here. These are all not isolated. This is a deliberate mega-slop attack, combined with payments to key lobbyists. We see a degradation of services here. That they attack VPNs is very logical - after all VPNs allow people to break out of the global ghetto system they are building here. They want to know who is who.
Interestingly I see this attack also related to them trying to abolish the right to repair movement. Now, there is no direct connection here, but right to repair also attempts to put people at the center - you purchased something, you should be able to freely change it to your own liking, without some random private company being able to proxy-deny any change to that. With mandatory age sniffing coming, it also means that people will lose the ability to change software. Recently a university here in Europe started to demand that students must own a smartphone AND must install an app from a private company (via google store) in order to be able to read email sent to them via a webmail account. I also found this fascinating, because now people need to submit to Google, in order to study in a small european country, if they study at that university (which is paid for by taxpayers by the way). These interdependencies will keep on increasing here. Even Linux will fall victim - systemd already added data fields to track your age. More to come in the future despite Poettering's claim that it is all very, very harmless. Until it is not. And then it is too late.
I dreamt about this. In my dream it was very clear. Like ray dalio says we are in the last inning of the current great debt cycle. The end of the NWO or the great reset or what it is named, brings about great losses to the west. We attemt to save our economies with mass immigration. Along side the downfall of our industries and currencies the middle-class falters and the crime and violent facfions in society becomes stronger. Parallel societies become financed by outer geopolitical entities to escalate the wests downfall. In desperation the western governments try to get in control of their populations before real civil war erupts. One attempt to avoid complete chaos is total surveillance... Just; if ray dalio is right this is not a nightmare but our current trajectory. The leaders know and are preparing...
i was thinking of having a mobile/tablet with kiosk mode and full restrictions on the content.
If it's stupid but it works it ain't stupid.
Assume that saying "X is stupid" is pejorative shorthand for "I strongly disagree with the other side's criteria judging whether or not X works".
My solution is simple: Fine companies that allow minors. How you implement that is not my problem! Something that is severely lacking in tech is liability!
What's with the "we can't do that" helplessness that pervades this topic?
This whole shitshow thread is a bunch of techies coming up with more inane and erudite ways to implement spying on every web activity, but 'technically better'.
And people here are NOT asking why its even needed at all. This is what those ethics classes are for - not asking HOW to make, but whether we should at all.
And invasive country identity level online personas is NEVER something we should ever go for. This is basically "FLOCK ONLINE". And we see how devastating Flock is, even when pigs only have access.
No ID scans. No eyeball scans. No face scans. Im done with all of it.
Security and Privacy are not the same thing.
‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety’ — Benjamin Franklin
This isn’t a simple solution to the problem but it reminds me that it is not a new problem. We should remember that
I'm just gonna say here that all of this, whatever solution whatever unaccountable political group decides is the one, can only be built by tech workers. All of these require fingers hitting keys to produce code to function.
If we unified and refused, it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. I am begging my fellow developers in this space to remember that you are WORKERS. The owning class will throw you into the meat grinder with every other worker the second it's convenient to their wealth extraction.
Throw down your tools and say no.
If you find yourself tasked with implementing age verification shit you think is profoundly unethical, don't build it.
If you find yourself building products you know to be harmful, refuse.
If you find yourself put against a wall to ship garbage you know doesn't work to check boxes for some fucking CEO, stop.
We are the tip of the spear in the global effort to make the world more surveilled, more dangerous, less free, and more expensive. We have a CHOICE and we have to start making it.
And yes, it may cost you your job. It'll certainly cost you status. Your boss will hate you. But the last year or so has made it abundantly clear that whatever professional "safety" we feel is not warranted. We are just as replaceable as the delivery drivers who get caught pissing in bottles.
> If we unified
That's cute. About half my coworkers are socialists and the other half fire breathing MAGA. The only thing we have united on was that we don't talk politics at work. But I assure you, there is not universal agreement at all that authoritarian technology is bad. Some people, including many developers, absolutely support it.
What you propose requires agreeing on the definition of harmful. And immediately it fails.
Arab spring, Gaza genocide and genZ revolutions lately has the attention of the oligarchy... The war for youth attention and minds
we we call "mass surveillance" is actually genocide preperation
I also dislike how confident people are in children's technical skills. It's really not hard at all to block VPN's. It's actually relatively easy to block certain content on your internet devices. I get it, kids are smart, but why do we think everyone is a malicious person who also has the ability to bypass all the restrictions?
Perhaps it's the parents who are too dumb to understand how to configure a network?
Perhaps save kids from peter file gangsters first? If local police protects child molesters, and government supports it... Very difficult to take this child internet protection seriously!!!
What an exceptionally bad faith way to put this whole thing. A five year old watching hours of the most depraved porn available is harmful to that child. Even if you disagree with that statement, you surely must acknowledge that it is an entirely reasonable opinion to hold and one our societies have generally held to this sort of thing for ages.
I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented.
There is also a reasonable debate to be had about the merits of various technical and legal schemes being implemented to achieve these goals.
But this take is neither of those. For one, surveillance isn't the number one harm being prevented (even though, a number of legal codes attempt to make this the case).
As has been pointed out previously, there absolutely can be age verification that is without surveillance. The fact that these solutions aren't always legally mandated and therefore age verification can be used to increase surveillance is a reasonable thing to attempt to amend to the implementations of these laws.
Your example is in bad faith as your example assumes that the only thing blocking a child of 5 from porn is age verification of some type. There are lots of blockers today for 5 year olds to get access to porn.
> I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented
Nobody on the "we need age verification" side wants a debate. They want to run face first in to dumb legislation giving governments and companies even more power to track every movement and know exactly who you are.
The blockers generally don’t work (I’ve tried). A big part of the problem is that it is in the interest of the providers to subvert them. The main benefit of age verification is changing that responsibility by making it the business of providers to ensure it works, not consumers.
You can make the same argument with alcohol: surely it’s sufficient that parents supervise their children not to drink. But it’s prove to be more effective to distribute that responsibility to the providers as well.
Disclaimer: I do not agree this take was made in bad faith. I think that raising a kid comes with its own set of expectations around caring and curating experiences of said kid. Therefore, I do think that offloading that responsibility to the state (and by extension, businesses that offer age-gating tech to that state...) is not the right way to do it. And even in the absence of that, my experience taught me it is entirely possible to grow up with unsupervised internet access and turn out an OK adult. The internet is not only "depraved porn". It is also a lifeline for that weird kid who has been bullied and effectively barred from social experiences.
Of course, YMMV.
That said, if such a nanny state is inevitable: zero-knowledge-proof-based age verification would not only be possible, it would further protect these kids from a bad state actor. In that spirit, I agree with your last point. The fact that any other alternatives are even being considered makes it on principle a non-starter to me, because it betrays the actual goals of the political actors involved.
California's proposal is better than the one you're proposing, so Californian legislators goals are actually to solve GP's problem. Articles like this one that don't consider other proposals like California's are idiotic because voters actually want to solve GP's problem, and pretending they don't exist does not convince voters.
Who gave the child access to that?
You can't use the words "reasonable debate" in your post after you've immediately jumped straight to some mythical worst case scenario of a 5 year old being given a device with no supervision and somehow managing to immediately find their way to some sort of super duper snuff porn that will scar them for life.
I agree going to the worst-case is a weak technique, and this is what the OP does:
> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.
This comment should not be downvoted. The original article lost me in the first sentence with this:
"The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet"
Sorry, but a firehose of unlimited pornography, violence, racist, misogynist, and divisive content for developing children is bad. You can "well actually..." me all day I don't care at all.
I agree that there's no good solutions here, and I think this is a genuinely complicated and difficult issue for exactly the reasons people often state. But every argument that pretends that it's a one-sided discussion should be dismissed out of hand. There are two sides to this, both thorny.