Key Features
I'd argue that this is negligible for data collectors and governments. Governments already know who you are and what sites you vist for 99.99% of the population. Data collectors already know who you are and have a pretty good idea of the sites you vist.
What unique information is this going to give the government and data collectors to abuse? Lets establish one case that both affects average people and is "bad" and not waste time discussing things that only affect a tiny minority of privacy minded people.
Keep in mind the law states a platform must provide multiple ways to reasonably verify a user is older than 16. No mention of giving the specific user age or requiring govt id
Required reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
https://www.consumermedsafety.org/safety-articles/how-childr...
"Perfect" security is only attainable with zero dissent, zero privacy, and zero freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplantation_in_China
At best, you go back and forth between no privacy, a heavily condition privacy. At best.
Let’s take privacy back, but that’s a big process.
If you haven’t internalized surveillance, start working on it!
Paranoid, maybe. Schizophrenics? No. Firstly, "paranoid schizophrenia" is an outdated diagnosis. Paranoia is a common symptom of schizophrenia, but schizophrenics exhibiting paranoia are not considered to have separate mental illness from those who are not. Secondly, schizophrenia is not caused simply by psychological stress, and is associated with a large cluster of positive and negative symptoms, with paranoia being only one of them.
Forcing providers to divine the age of the user, or requiring an adult's identity to verify that they are not a child, is backwards, for all the reasons pointed out. But that's not the only way to "protect the children". Relying on a very minimal level of parental supervision of device use should be fine; we already expect far more than that in non-technology areas.
It's not even necessary to block parents from giving their children Linux desktops or whatever. It'll largely solve the problem if parents are merely expected to enable parental controls on devices that have the capability.
Which I still don't love, but is at least more fair.
1) Given that it just says you're a "child", how does that work across jurisdictions where the adult age may not be 18?
2) It seems like it could be abused by fingerprinters, ad services, and even hostile websites that want to show inappropriate content to children.
It's a client-side flag saying "treat this request as coming from a child (whatever that means to you)". I don't follow what the jurisdiction concern is.
[EDIT] Oooooh you mean if a child is legally 18 where the server is, but 16 where the client is. But the header could be un-set for a 5-year-old, too, so I don't think that much matters. The idea would be to empower parents to set a policy that flags requests from their kids as coming from a child. If they fail to do that, I suppose that'd be on them.
It doesn't seem sufficient, and would probably lead to age verification laws anyway.
Say you're a parent, with child, living in country A where someone becomes an adult when they're 18. Once the child is 18, they'll use their own devices/browsers/whatever, and the flag is no longer set. But before that, the flag is set.
Now in country B or in country C it doesn't matter that the age of becoming an adult is 15 and 30. Because the flag is set locally on the clients device, all they need to do is block requests with the flag, and assume it's faithful. Then other parents in country B or country C set/unset the flag on their devices when it's appropriate.
No need to tell actual ages, and a way for services to say "this is not for children", and parents are still responsible for their own children. Sounds actually pretty OK to me.
> should
I don't know if "should" is intended as a moral statement or a regulatory statement, but it's not at all unusual for server operators to need to comply with laws in the country in which they are operating…
So namespace it then. "I'm a child as defined by the $country_code government". It's no more of a challenge than what identity-based age verification already needs to do.
> 2) It seems like it could be abused by fingerprinters, ad services, and even hostile websites that want to show inappropriate content to children.
This is still strictly better than identify-based age verification. Hostile or illegal sites can already do this anyway. Adding a single boolean flag which a large proportion of users are expected to have set isn't adding any significant fingerprinting information.
Alternatively, just use an older browser that doesn't serve the header.
If anything, you'd want the reverse. A header that serves as a disclaimer saying "I'm an adult, you can serve me anything" and then the host would only serve if the browser sends that header. And you'd have to turn it on through the settings/parental controls.
Now, this doesn't handle the proxy situation. You could still have a proxy site that served the request with the header for you, but there's not much you can do about that regardless.
That's no different to a law mandating identification-based age verification though. A site in a different jurisdiction can ignore that just the same.
Even the idea of prosecuting parents for allowing their child to access information, no matter what that information is, just sounds like asking for authoritarian insanity.
A good rule of thumb when creating laws: imagine someone with opposite political views from yours enforcing it at their discretion. Another good question to ask yourself: is this really a severe enough problem that government needs to apply authoritarian control via its monopoly on violence to try to solve? Or is it just something I'm abstractly worried about because some pseudo-intellectual did a media tour to try to sell books?
As with every generation who is constantly worried about what "kids these days" are up to, the kids will be totally fine.
The worrying is a good instinct, but when it becomes an irrational media hysteria (the phase we're in for the millennial generation currently becoming their parents), it creates perverse incentives and leads to dumb outcomes.
The truth is the young are more adaptable than the old. It's the adults we need to worry about.
This assumes an absolutist approach to enforcement, which I did not advocate and is not a fundamental part of my proposed solution. In any case, the law already has to make a subjective decision in non-technology areas. It would be no different here. Courts would be able to consider the surrounding context, and over time set precedents for what does and does not cross the bar in a way that society considers acceptable.
What could humanity do instead with all that time and resources?
I know the US is a nation built by lawyers, for lawyers, but this is both its best strength and worst weakness. Sometimes it's in everyones best interest to accept the additional risks privately as opposed to bubble wrapping everything and expanding the scope of the extremely flawed government-industrial complex.
You have way too much faith in the fairness of the court system.
It was derided as a "system for mass censorship", and got shot down. In hindsight a mistake, and it should have been implemented - it was completely voluntary by the user.
Worse, it leads to situations where society seems to want to flat out be kid free in many ways. With families reportedly afraid to let their kids walk to and from school unsupervised.
I don't know an answer, mind. So this is where I have a gripe with no real answer. :(
I'm not seeing the correlation / causation here.
A. "Your kid is not my problem"
B. "Your kid is everyone's problem"
Note that I'm not even necessarily worried about cops getting called. Quite the contrary, I am fine with the idea of cops having a more constant presence around parks and such. I do worry about people that get up in arms about how things are too unsafe for kids to be let outside. If that is the case, what can we do to make it safe?
What content is appropriate for children is properly up to their parents themselves, not to the government or to some nebulous concept of "society". If parent's choose not to set such a flag on their children's devices, then that means that they're choosing to allow their children to access content without restriction, and that's what defines what is OK for their children to access.
Thank you for your well written take.
Wait, those grand parents also had bad models to work with, so really it's the great grandparents that were to blame...
No, wait, it was the society that they grew up in that encouraged poor behaviour toward them, and forced them to react by taking on toxic behaviours. We all should pay because we all actively contribute to the world around us, and that includes being silent when we see bad things happening.
This completely leaves it up to the families / parents to control and gives some level of compliance to make the effort worth while.
There may even be a way to generate enough noise with the request to prevent any forms of tracking. This sort of thing should really be isolated in that way to prevent potential abuses via data brokers by way of sale of the information
https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/childmedia/chpt/internet-c...
If so I would expect such sites to appear, and the only way to secure a child device is to have a whitelist of webpages (to avoid the proxies), putting us back close to where we are today.
The problem is that it's easy to make, easy to deploy, easy to make money on, and a single site opens up the whole Internet. It will happen even if it's illegal.
Compare this to adult webpages setting the header. They will probably be quite willing to do so, since they want to make their money legally, and there is probably little money in serving to kids anyway. And even if a single out of thousand adult webpages refuses, it still only opens that single site.
Worrying about the latter makes no sense, because they are sort of like organized crime. People still take drugs even though they are illegal.
The surveillance and censorship system is built, administered and maintained by Silicon Valley companies who have adopted this as their "business model". "Monetising" surveillance of other peoples' noncommercial internet use
These Silicon Valley companies have been surveilling internet subscribers for over a decade, relentlessly connecting online identity to offline identity, hell bent on knowing who is accessing what website, where they live, what they are interested in, and so on, building detailed advertising profiles (including the age of the ad target) tied to IP addresses, then selling the subscribers out to advertisers and collecting obscene profits (and killing media organisations that hire journalists in the process)
Now these companies are being forced to share some of the data they collect and store
Gosh, who would have forseen such an outcome
These laws are targeting the Silicon Valley companies, not internet subscribers
But the companies want to spin it as an attack on subscribers
The truth is the companies have been attacking subscriber privacy and attempting to gatekeep internet publication^1 for over a decade, in the name of advertising and obscene profits
1. Discourage subscribers from publishing websites and encourage them into publishing a page on the company's website instead. Centralise internet publication, collect data, perform surveillance and serve advertisements
Silicon valley uses that information to sell adds, and sometimes votes. Not great, but I can imagine much worse from a State.
Equally, I think insisting that there must be no controls to internet access whatsoever is not right either. There is now plenty of evidence that eg. social media are very harmful to teenagers - and frankly, before I noticed, going on FB got me depressed each time I did it at one point. And as a parent, you realise how little control you have over your children's tech access. Case in point - my kids seem to have access to very poorly locked down iPads at school. I complained, but they frankly don't understand.
We all accept kids can't buy alcohol and cigarettes, even if that encroaches on their freedom. But or course flashing an ID when you're over 18 is not very privacy-invading.
Likewise, I think it is much better to discuss better means of effecting these access controls. As some comments here mention, there are e.g. zero knowledge proofs.
I'm sure I'll be told it's all a sham to collect data and it's not about kids. And maybe. But I care about kids not having access to TikTok and Pornhub. So I'd rather make the laws better than moan about how terrible it is to limit access to porn and dopamine shots.
Things like this will give them a huge advantage in not being manipulated and lied to.
I'd be comfortable with it having large segments of "uncategorized." But right now, if I scan over to my ISP to see how much data I have used for the month, I have little to no help in saying how much of that was what.
Again, I get that that will be a lot I have to write off as "uncategorized." I'm not even trying to drive all telemetry down to zero. I'm comfortable knowing that my HVAC may send diagnostic stuff in, as an example. But it seems kind of crazy to me that this is not something that is often discussed? Do I just miss those discussions?
For the folks in the back row:
Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance
Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance
Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance
Without even reaching for my tinfoil hat, the strategy at work here is clear [0 1 2]. If we have to know that you're not a minor, then we also have to know who you are so we can make any techniques to obfuscate that illegal. By turning this from "keep an eye on your kids" to "prove you're not a kid" they've created the conditions to make privacy itself illegal.
VPNs are next. Then PGP. Then anything else that makes it hard for them to know who you are, what you say, and who you say it to.
Please, please don't fall into the trap and start discussing whether or not this is going to be effective to protect kids. It isn't, and that isn't the point.
0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...
1 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-usage...
2 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/57714...
In real life, we think age verification is a good thing. Kids shouldn't buy porn. Teenagers shouldn't get into bars. etc... There has to be room somewhere for reasonable discussion about making sure children do not have access to things they shouldn't. I think it's important to note, that complete dismissal of this idea only turns away your allies and hurts our cause in the long run.
I'm even willing to talk about the possibility that we could use more robust systems deployed more broadly. A lot of folks here are talking about ZKPs in this regard, and that's not a bad idea at all.
The issue I'm trying to sound the horn on is that the current push for AF in the US and EU has nothing to do with kids. I think you could put together a working group on ZKPs and Age Verification, write up a paper and run experiments, and when you bring it to the lawmakers they're gonna say something to the tune of:
"yeah but that's not trustworthy enough and too technical for people to understand so we're just going to serve legal notices to VPN providers instead to tell them that they can't anymore"
...or something to that tune. I'm not a mind reader, I've just read the reports (by lawmakers) mentioning VPNs as an "area of concern".
This is a political gambit and not a new one. The more we treat the current issue as having anything to do with protecting kids the more we legitimize what is an obvious grift.
The EU is currently doing large-scale field tries of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, which they have been working on for several years. It uses ZKPs for age verification. They expect to roll it out to the public near the end of 2026.
> i had not yet heard of this EU DIW thing
That's a joke of a comment chain. You're "sounding the horn" on something you have barely even researched? You're spreading misinformation and fear mongering without even reading any of the proposals?
The other guy was gallant, I'm not. That's clown behavior.
> This is a political gambit and not a new one.
Well, you're the expert.
There are actual discussions about VPN regulation in relation to AV in the US [1]. The UK's OSA [2] is blatant about the need to violate encryption. Australia's OSA [3] has also come under criticism for precisely the things I'm talking about. Is it a stretch to extend this reasoning to the EU's incredibly similar legislation? Honk my nose if you must but I don't think so.
Here's the thing - I don't want you to listen to me, or anyone else on the internet, as an 'expert'. Verify your information personally, even when you trust it.
0 - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32...
1 -https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...
The concern about children is aimed at the wrong target. Instead of targeting everyone it would make far more sense to target the platforms. With Roblox having a pedo problem the company should face punishment. That will actually get them to change their ways. However all these massive platforms are major donors to politicians so the chance of that happening is low to none.
It would not surprise me in the least if there are brick-and-mortar businesses doing this, especially larger companies in jurisdictions (such as the majority of the United States) with weak/nonexistent privacy protections.
But yeah, walmart is for sure logging their transactions and selling the data. It's practically free money.
> which is what Google etc have been trying to do for years but this would just completely fast track that.
Excuse me? They have done that for years. There's nothing to "fast track" here. Big Tech already implemented surveillance.
To view adult content, use the code to sign a thing. Content company sees the signed code, verifies against the public list and sends the content.
Privacy preserved, no adult content to kids... Easy.
The one thing you can control is your childs access through their device using parental controls.
I can absolutely guarantee you that any teenager can easily get access to weed, cigarettes and alcohol despite the laws and definitely can use a VPN. It only takes one smart kid to show them how.
Is you argument then that we shouldn't age gate those things in reality either? Would you suggest that teenagers smoke and drink just as much as they would have had it been legal to sell to minors?
Laws don't just exist to stop you, they also exist to shape society. They exist as signals for what we deem appropriate behavior.
Also how much “shaping of society” do you expect to happen when you pass a law that no one respects?
How many kids do you think a law is going to stop from going to the porn sites that completely ignored the law?
How many kids say “I really want to smoke weed but it’s illegally so I won’t do it”?
I think it's generally accepted that marijuana use increases after legalization. So yes.
https://www.mpp.org/issues/legalization/adult-use-legalizati...
"On the illegal market, no one is checking IDs before selling marijuana. When and where cannabis is illegal, high schoolers often sell cannabis to their peers. In contrast, licensed cannabis stores have overwhelming compliance with age-gating."
It has indeed not increased the cannabis use of kids, but that would also still be illegal. That study is an argument that age gating works.
But even if that wasn’t the case, underage cigarette smoking has been rampant forever
Turns out being illegal isn't as much of a disincentive as being uncool. If your parents are smoking it...
Kids: You can sniff glue and get high!!!
Ok. In real life, do we think having agents from the government and corporations following you everywhere, writing down your every move and word, is a good thing?
These are not equivalent, I don't have to scan my face, upload my ID and share my personal biometric data with various 3rd parties, who will sell and leak my data, every time I want to look at porn or sip a beer.
Also, there are countries where teenagers can drink and go to pubs, and society hasn't crumbled. We also have several generations of young adults with access to porn, and the sky didn't fall.
Maybe we shouldn't use the government to implement a "papers, please" process just to use and post on the internet, maybe we should instead legislate the root cause of the problem: algorithmic optimization and manipulation. That way everyone benefits, not just kids, and we won't have to scan our faces to look at memes on Reddit.
Oh man, you must just not go out much anymore. I’ve seen a lot of bars with full blown facial scanners next to their bouncer.
My heuristic is that social media focuses on particular people, regardless of what they're talking about. In contrast, forums (like HN) focus on a particular topic, regardless of who's talking about it.
I was replying to a discussion between two HN users, who were using conflicting definitions of the term. AFAIK they are not "those in power".
AFAIK nobody here is. The point is that with relevance to the current discussion on potential future age-verification laws, only the widest definition matters, because that's what's at risk.
That is untrue
(This includes being robust against law enforcement action, legal or otherwise.)
When I say "if we have to know you're not a kid, we have to know who you are" I'm not stating an actual truth, but the argument as it is playing out politically.
Assuming that's even a goal, of course. The cited paragraph mentions RPs (the websites, from what I understand), but makes no mention of attestation providers.
In the non-ZKP presentation, the "holder" (phone) sends the credential to the relying party (website), and the RP executes some verification algorithm. In the ZK presentation, the holder executes the verification algorithm and sends to the RP a proof that the algorithm was executed correctly.
The "proof" has this magical property that it reveals nothing other than the check passed. (You will have to take on faith that such proofs exist.) In particular, if the check was the predicate "I have a signature by ISSUER on HASH, and SHA256(DOCUMENT)==HASH, and DOCUMENT["age_gt_18"]=TRUE", anybody looking at the proof cannot infer ISSUER, HASH, DOCUMENT, or HASH, or nothing else really. "Cannot infer" means that the proof is some random object and all HASH, DOCUMENT, ISSUER, etc. that satisfy the predicate are equally likely, assuming that the randomness used in the proof is private to the holder. Moreover, a generating a proof uses fresh randomness each time, so given two proofs of the same statement, you still cannot tell whether they come from the same ISSUER, HASH, DOCUMENT, ...
The currently favored approach works like this. The DOCUMENT contains a device public key DPK. The corresponding secret key is stored in some secure hardware on the phone, designed so that I (or malware or whatever) cannot extract the secret key from the secure hardware. Think of it as a yubikey or something, but embedded in the phone. Every presentation flow will demand that the secure element produce a signature of a random challenge from the RP under the secret key of the secure hardware. In the ZKP presentation, the ZKP prover produces a proof that this signature verifies correctly, without disclosing the secret key of the secure hardware.
In your example, the parent could give the phone to the kid. However, in current incarnations, the secure hardware refuses to generate a signature unless unlocked by some kind of biometric identification, e.g. fingerprint. The fingerprint never leaves the secure hardware.
How does the issuer (e.g. the republic of France) know that DOCUMENT is bound to a given fingerprint? This is still under discussion, but as a first bid, a French citizen goes to city hall with his phone and obtains DOCUMENT after producing a fingerprint on the citizen's phone (as opposed to a device belonging to the republic of France). You can imagine other mechanisms based on physical tokens (yubikeys or embedded chips in credit cards, or whatever). Other proposals involve taking pictures compared against a picture stored in DOCUMENT. As always, one needs to be clear about the threat model.
In all these proposals the biometric identification unlocks the secure hardware into signing a nonce. The biometrics themselves are not part of the proof and are not sent to the relying party or to the issuer.
Can I log into an age gated service at a library without a phone?
Are you saying that someone goes to city hall, shows ID, and gets a DOCUMENT that certifies age, but doesn't link back to the person's identity? And it's married to a fingerprint in front of the person checking ID?
Is there a limit on how many times someone can get a DOCUMENT? If not, it'll become a new variation of fake id and eventually there's going to be an effort to crack down on misuse. If yes, what happens if I get unlucky and lose / break my phone limit + 1 times? Do I get locked out of the world? The only way I can imagine limiting abuse and collateral damage at the same time is to link an identity to a DOCUMENT somehow which makes the whole ZKP thing moot.
I'd be more worried about the politics though. There's no way any government on the planet is going to keep a system like that limited to simple age verification. Eventually there's going to be enough pretense to expand the system and block "non-compliant" sites. Why not use the same DOCUMENT to prove age to buy beer? Sanity for guns? Loyalty for food?
What happens if the proof gets flipped to run the other direction and a DOCUMENT is needed to prove you're a certified journalist? Any sources without certification can be blocked and the ZKP aspect doesn't matter at that point because getting the DOCUMENT will be risky if you're a dissenter. Maybe there's an interview. Maybe there's a background check. Has your phone ever shown up near a protest?
It's just like the Android announcement that developers need to identify themselves to distribute apps, even via side loading. The ultimate goal is to force anyone publishing content to identify themselves because then it's possible to use the government and legal system to crush dissenting views.
Big tech caused most of the problems and now they're going to provide the solution with more technology, more cost, and less freedom which is basically what they've been doing for the last 2 decades so it's not a surprise.
So like, we've got this algorithm that gets sent our way and we run it and that provides kind of a cryptographic hash or whatever. But if we're running the algorithm ourselves what's to stop us from lying? Where does the 'proof' come from? What's the check that it's running and why do we inherently trust the source it's checking?
Here is a hopefully simple example of how this ZKP thing may even be possible. Imagine that you give me a Sudoku puzzle. I solve it, and then I want to prove to you that I have solved it without telling you the solution. It sounds impossible, but here is one way to do it. I compute the solution. I randomly scramble the digits 1-9 and I put the scrambled solution in a 9x9 array of lock boxes on a table. I have the keys to the 81 locks but I am not giving you the key yet. You randomly ask me to open either 1) one random row chosen by you; 2) one random column chosen by you; 3) one random 3x3 block chosen by you; or 4) the cells corresponding to the original puzzle you posed to me. In total you have 28 possibilities, and assume that you choose them with equal probability. You tell me what you want and I open the corresponding lockboxes. You verify that the opened lock boxes are consistent with me knowing a solution, e.g. all numbers in a row are distinct, the 3x3 block consists of distinct numbers, etc. If I am cheating, then at least one of your 28 choices will be inconsistent, and you catch me with probability 1/28, so if we repeat this game 1000 times, and I don't know the solution, you will catch me with probability at least 1-(1/28)^1000 which is effectively 1. However, every time we repeat the game, I pick a different random scrambling of the integers 1-9, so you don't learn anything about the solution.
All of ZKP is a fancy way to 1) encode arbitrary computations in this sort of protocol, and 2) amplify the probability of success via clever error-correction tricks.
The other thing you need to know is that the protocol I described requires interaction (I lock the boxes and you tell me which ones to open), but there is a way to remove the interaction. Observe that in the Sudoku game above, all you are doing is flipping random coins and sending them to me. Of course you cannot let me pick the random coins, but if we agree that the random coins are just the SHA256 hash of what I told you, or something else similarly unpredictable, then you will be convinced of the proof even if the "coins" are something that I compute myself by using SHA256. This is called the "Fiat-Shamir transformation".
How do we implement the lock boxes? I tell you SHA256(NONCE, VALUE) where the NONCE is chosen by me. Given the hash you cannot compute VALUE. To open the lock box, I tell you NONCE and VALUE, which you believe under the assumption that I cannot find a collision in SHA256.
That's the bit I was missing! The prover pre-registers the scrambled solution, so they can't cheat by making up values that fit the constraints.
This is a simplified method for age verification:
I want to buy alcohol from my phone and need to prove I’m over 18. SickBooze.com asks me for proof by generating a request to assert “age >= 18”.
My phone signs this request with my own private key, and forwards it to the government server.
The government verifies my signature against a public key I previously submitted to them, checks my age data in their own register of residents, and finally signs the request with one of their private keys.
My phone receives the signed response and forwards it back to SickBooze.com, which can verify the government’s signature offline against a cached list of public keys. Now they can sell me alcohol.
- the “request” itself is anonymous and doesn’t contain any identifying information unless that is what you intended to verify
- the government doesn’t know what service I used, nor why I used it, they only know that I needed to verify an assertion about my age
- the web service I used doesn’t know my identity, they don’t even know my exact age, they just know that an assertion about being >= 18 is true.
What information is not disclosed to whom? In what way is it ZK?
One example is Googles "zero-knowledge age verification" where AFAICT, Google still has full insight into all the sensitive data and metadata. It's not like they inherently need to be the designated middleman but that is how the scheme is designed. Therefore I find it ingeniously marketed. A bit like saying "Facebook Messenger protects all your messages with end-to-end encryption", which is arguably technically true but misleading and not an honest statement.
EDIT: Actually do one better - tell them that for 16+ websites, you're actually protecting teenagers by keeping them anonymous.
We should have started arguing when he just said he had a gun, indoors, in the crowd. We shouldn't have quietly walked outside at his demand. But that all happened. Here we are now, at the car, and he's got the gun out, and he's saying "get in", and we're probably not going to win from here -- but pal, it's time to start arguing. Or better yet, fighting back hard.
Because that car isn't going anywhere we want to be. We absolutely can not get in the car right now, and just plan to argue the point later. It doesn't matter how right the argument is at all.
The law does not mandate identity, so your argument does not hold.
But attestor has to have certainty about the age of the person it issues IDs to. That raises obvious questions.
What states are going to accept private attestors? What states are going accept other states as attestors? What state won't start using its issues ID/Wallet for any purpose it sees fit?
This system seems likely to devolve national Internets only populated by those IDs. That can all happen with ZKPs not being broken.
That is how states work.
Because if there aren't, then it matters substantially less whether they're possible.
This would be far easier to implement for websites too. You'd just have a single, unauthenticated API endpoint which, given a code, tells you if the code is valid (and marks it as used). Integrating with such an API is about 1 day of work for a competent dev. Even open, non-profit platforms like Mastodon could easily implement such a mechanism.
Scratch cards wouldn't have to be the only way of getting such codes. THe vast majority of people could just generate them in their banking app or whatever (which would still be far more privacy friendly than the current ID verification mechanisms).
Some of these are getting batted down by judges, so right now the category of "legal" is especially vague. That's why I phrased it like that.
But also, we see cops just straight up stalking people using government tools. So that's another reason to be concerned about "legal" government actions.
Nothing to do with libertarianism.
As I understand it, it's the goal of OpenID4VP[1][2]. Using it a site can request to know if the user is over 18 say, and the user can return proof of just that one claim, I'm over 18, without sharing identifying information.
The new EU age verification solution[3] builds on this for example.
[1]: https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-presentations-1...
[2]: https://docs.walt.id/concepts/data-exchange-protocols/openid...
At least in the EU solution they say there would be multiple attestation serivices the user could choose to use. So that would be technically better than nothing.
2) Cigarette vending machines accept VISA cards and government IDs and they're offline.
3) A medium-sized social media network required photos (not scans) of GovIDs, where only year of birth and validity date need to visible. The rest could be blacked out physically.
4) You can guess users' age and only request solid proof only for those you are unsure about.
The problem is that we technical users think of a one-size-fits-all technical approach that works, without a single fail, for all global users. That is bound to fail.
It is only a law and you can break it big time or small time. Reddit's approach might proof way too weak, it'll be fined and given a year to improve. Others might leave the market. Others will be too strict and struggle to get users. Others might have weak enforcement and keep a low profile forever. Others will start small, below the radar and explode in popularity and then enforcement will have to improve.
You can also request identity and then delete it. (Yes, some will fail to delete and get hacked.)
Giving Facebook a free pass is stupid. They're selling your age cohort "10-11" within 0.0037ms for 0.$0003 to the highest bidder on their ad platform.
We have the technology to do age verification without revealing any more information to the site and without the verification authority finding out what sites we are browsing. However, most people are ignorant of it.
If we don't push for the use of privacy preserving technology we wont get it and we will get more tracking. You cannot defeat age verification on the internet, age verification is already a feature of our culture. The only way out is to ensure that privacy preserving technologies are mandated.
The CNIL gave up 3 years ago, and gave guidelines, you can read about it here [0]. At the time it read like "How well, we tried, we said it is incompatible with privacy and the GDPR multiple times, we insist one more time that giving tools to parents is the only privacy-safe solution despite obvious problems, but since your fucking law will pass, so the best we can do is to draw guidelines, and present solutions and how to implement them correctly".
I think the EFF should do the same. That's just how it is. Define solutions you'll agree with. Fight the fight on chat control and other stuff where the public opinion can be changed, this is too late, and honestly, if it's done well,it might be fine.
If the first implementation is correct, we will have to fight to maintain the statu quo, which in a conservative society, is the easiest, especially when no other solution have been tested. If it's not, we will have to fight to make it correct, then fight to maintain it, and both are harder. the EFF should reluctantly agree and draft the technical solution themselves.
[0] https://www.cnil.fr/en/online-age-verification-balancing-pri...
Either we create the fix, or the feds take it over. we need to sever the idea of a global internet. per-country and allied nations only. anonymous cert-chain verified ID stored on device. problem fixed.
It's deanonymizing and intrusive and mandatory for sites to implement without protecting them from sockpuppets and foreign troll farms.
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