6 ms·

One of the first (among many dramatically) critical issues is: > Companies, from Big Tech down to smaller platforms and messaging apps, will need to comply wit

by mdp2021 3y ago

One of the first (among many dramatically) critical issues is: > Companies, from Big Tech down to smaller platforms and messaging apps, will need to comply with a long list of new requirements, starting with age verification for their users. (Wikipedia, the eighth-most-visited website in the UK, has said it won’t be able to comply with the rule because it violates the Wikimedia Foundation’s principles on collecting data about its users.) How would one verify age without checking personal identity. (And who would use a service which involves identification.)

kleiba 3y ago
And what kind of verification would a site like Wikipedia even need? Does it need to classify all articles with respect to a minimum reader age? Or generally allow all contents only for visitors that are over 18? Or what?
- ben_w 3y ago
  As I recall, Wikipedia insisted on HTTPS for all access well before it was fashionable precisely so that governments couldn't decide which knowledge was OK and which was forbidden (and hence the whole site used to get regularly blocked by China because of e.g. the Tiananmen Square article). It doesn't take much effort to find things the British establishment won't want kids seeing even though kids talk about them in school playgrounds (or at least we did when I was last in a school a bit over 23 years ago). For example, I was given a summary of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by some girl in the same class as me when I was 8 or 9. And even as an adult, you really don't want to see a real photograph of a newborn with anencephaly, which Wikipedia did have when I was first looking up the condition. The point of Wikipedia — that it can be edited at any time — absolutely makes it impossible to survive any age rating system other than "adults only".
  - contravariant 3y ago
    I mean this is a very good argument, so what I'm about to say is not much of a counterargument and more of a feeling. But fuck that shit. Sure some information is unpleasant (and frankly an image-free wikipedia would be very convenient for some queries), but trying to prevent this with age restrictions is just not the way to go. Trying to prevent this from reaching the school playground is like restricting kids to keep them from scraping their knee, it's futile and likely more harmful than beneficial.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I kinda agree with your vibes, though only kinda. Our world is a big complex mess and people have uglier souls than I'd like; the transition from innocent childhood to the adult realisation of this should be… kind and sympathetic, not just the equivalent of throwing someone in the deep end of a pool to teach them to swim.
    - Arch-TK 3y ago
      >like restricting kids to keep them from scraping their knee Extremely on-brand for the UK.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    > The point of Wikipedia — that it can be edited at any time — absolutely makes it impossible to survive any age rating system other than "adults only". Oh but when it's news at dinner time showing dead children and weapons firing on and on it's all fine, I guess?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      1) When that comes up in UK news, it does get prefixed with "this report has some scenes that viewers may find disturbing". 2) I don't know what the rules are for broadcasts at different times of day, but I do know they exist 3) I have always been perplexed as to why violence is considered so much more acceptable than, for example, sexuality. Outright murder? Apparently a suitable topic for children's shows. Nipples, which are the defining characteristic of the class Mammalia to which we belong? Hide them all! Unless it's a famous statue (then it's Classical Art), or a man's vestigial ones (then it's so unremarkable nobody even says anything).
      - rpastuszak 3y ago
        Re 3) FYI this is a relatively US/UK centric approach. In most of the countries I lived in, besides the UK, the bias was against violence, in this context. Edit: there was an IG account posting solely picture of nipples, male and female, cropped so it was hard to ascertain the sex of the photographed person. It existed purely to mess with the IG censorship rules. I don’t recall the name of the account but I think it was a genius idea.
    - rzwitserloot 3y ago
      It's not of course. But 'screening' news casts for 'inappropriate' content is easy and it is easy to point fingers when it doesn't meet 'standards'. Whereas with wikipedia, unless a dedicated team of editors who are contracted or liable to vet _every_ change. Possibly only for the UK, who get a special 'only with vetted edits' version or some such, I don't think wikipedia would be interested in making such a thing. Separate from that, wikipedia has various pages on (conditions related to) our sexual organs, as well as lots of articles about politically contentious things. I don't think they are particularly interested in filtering that either. In contrast to news channels, most of which would have no particular complaints about a bunch of rules about content. As a rule your 9'o clock news isn't going to just casually show frontal nudity (except e.g. Germany because they're fine with it). One obvious problem is all those words in single quotes: Who gets to decide? Evidently you aren't happy with whomever decided how far you can go with the content shown on the news, and I concur that it goes quite far. But the point isn't about the current standards being applied. The point is whether _any_ standard can be applied at all. To news: Yes. To wikipedia: Not in a way wiki foundation would accept.
  - aziaziazi 3y ago
    Shouldn’t we also make encyclopedias usage prohibited for children? Perhaps technically easier to just forbid both encyclopedias and children within libraries.
    - mdp2021 3y ago
      Careful with that irony Eugene, there have been displays on the news even recently of people who find the Arts unacceptable because they may depict genitals (Greek Urns, Renaissance Statues etc.), so easily you will find around voices that could respond recommending that children be protected from exposure to the Arts. (And - ironically - not from the obscenity of those very voices.)
      - ben_w 3y ago
        There was a Simpsons episode about that, wasn't there?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Sometimes people un-ironically say such things about dictionaries. I would note that there are such things as "children's encyclopaedias"; I might have had an earlier edition of this one myself as a kid: https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Illustrated-Encyclopedia-DK/dp/1465451692 https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Illustrated-Encyclopedia-DK... (I wonder if they still put in the cartoon of the Aztec Blood Sacrifice?)
aklju90709 3y ago
They plan to have 3rd party companies that do verification. Of course this will be a privacy disaster and likely intentionally so. The Tories are obsessed with weakening privacy and data protection laws. It's part pro-business/anti-consumer ideology, part dislike of the EU and its goals and a large dash of corruption. See for example giving away NHS data to Palantir, a company literally funded by the CIA.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  > The Tories are obsessed with weakening privacy and data protection laws True, but from the quoted article: > I'm not sure I've seen anything by way of potential legislation that's had as broadly based a political consensus behind it. I'm afraid I don't expect anything to change if Labour win the next general election.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - xethos 3y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong and Labour will change anything, but those quotes refer to different versions of the bill. Your second quote is for the initial draft, from 2019, while the first refers to the revised, recently passed, bill (among other things).
- LelouBil 3y ago
  That makes me think about the app that starting to get publicly available in France. France Identité, that allows you to use NFC to communicate with your ID and generate a single use, verifiable proof of identity, as well as having a valid digital ID on your phone you can present to the authorities. I assume it will also be possible to provide a single use proof of age without revealing identity with this kind of system. I do not get at all why 3rd party companies would be allowed to do something like this. If I need a way to give a digital proof of something like this, I'd much rather have my government handle it.
  - 3y ago
api 3y ago
Unclear to me is whether this would apply to peer to peer apps like Nostr or non-profit federated systems like Mastodon or Matrix. None of these have coherent entities behind them. Also looks like the UK is about as bad a place to host something as mainland China.
aziaziazi 3y ago
“age verification” modalities does not seems to be expressed, so a simple “confirm your age” à la porn websites may suffice?
didntcheck 3y ago
It should be possible to have a third party IdP provide the site with a trustworthy claim that the user is an adult without any more information, shouldn't it? I think people are a little too quick to claim victory because something is "technically impossible" when it actually isn't (efficacy of public sector IT projects notwithstanding)
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  But if Wikimedia is taking broad approach to enforcing their principles, they would refuse to interface with such a privacy destroying service anyway.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Wikipedia don't refuse to interface with privacy destroying payment systems required to collect donations. They will be fine
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      Donations are voluntary.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        So is your use of Wikipedia. Your point?
        mdp2021 3y ago
        The contextual critical matter in accessing information is that you do it in privacy. When you finance the source you relatively openly promote the source. The two activities are dissimilar.
        throwaway290 3y ago
        > The contextual critical matter in accessing information is that you do it in privacy. Since when, in human history, was this an implicit critical assumption in anyone's mind? > The two activities are dissimilar. Yes they are different activities. The point is still: Wikipedia doesn't worry about integrating with systems that require you to be identified. (Actually, internet is another such system, you can't use it without providing some form of ID in probably most countries.)
throwaway290 3y ago
> How would one verify age without checking personal identity. Just like one can auth without checking password. Ever heard of OAuth?
- mratsim 3y ago
  Unless you use zero-knowlege proofs, there is always a 3rd party that needs to guarantee they checked your identity.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    App requests that you are of age. You are redirected to gov site, you log in to gov site, gov site tells app true or false. No one knows your age, no one checks your ID, besides the gov site which anyway knows your age because they issued your ID. This is basic OAuth. What's the problem again?
    - Ographer 3y ago
      So now the government gets to gatekeep every website deemed controversial? That's quite the slippery slope.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        True, but gov site doesn't have to be informed which site is asking whether you are of age or not. The problem as I see it is not about government gatekeeping stuff (they already can do it if they want and we can already bypass it if we want, like literally nothing will change) but that third-party sites that profile users can now also add "of age" to fingerprints.
    - headsman771 3y ago
      Now gov site has a list of every website you've looked at.
ilkke 3y ago
Here's hoping that the resulting dumpster fire will at least serve as a deterrent to others.
ekianjo 3y ago
just block all visitors from the UK. See how long their stupid law lasts.
- rwmj 3y ago
  A lot longer than you think. However, yes, blocking is a good idea. It trains users to bypass the block using VPNs etc. In your block message, make it very clear (a) exactly why the site is blocked, (b) what legal routes people can take (petition their MP etc), and (c) how to get around the block by technical means.
  - WithinReason 3y ago
    This will just lead to VPNs being outlawed
- mdp2021 3y ago
  Yes, but the problem is with this practice spreading to more legislations.
ko27 3y ago
All the responses you are getting are very US centric. Just to give an example how you could do this in the EU, today. Every country is now issuing (or planning to issue soon) electronic ID cards with digital signatures that can be scanned with your smartphone. The plan is to allow users to attest they are over or under 18 without revealing any other personal information. They will release an official EU app (like they did for Covid) or Google/Apple will add the appropriate secure API. I don't necessarily agree we need this, but to claim it's impossible to do this in a secure way is ridiculous.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  Practically, I am not sure about the feasibility. You request a one-time-certificate with a smartphone, then copy it on a laptop (already this is not automatic): once per website or page? That is a lot of certification requests. And that would be to access the content in the www? It creates a dependency stronger than DNS. And there should be full warranty that the issuer and the receiver cannot cross information (of the issued and the received - that would identify the user). Plus, not everybody has a smartphone. Not everyone accepts Android or iOS at their current implementations. Do those people remain without access to the www?
  - ko27 3y ago
    > Practically, I am not sure about the feasibility. Last week I logged into my e-gov website by confirming a push notification on my authenticator app that's tied to my e-ID card to download my birth certificate. No copy pasting needed. Random websites now even support logging in without passwords by using your smartphone passkeys. I am sure they can make it work for a simple yes/no (over 18) challenge-request scenario. > Plus, not everybody has a smartphone. Not everyone accepts Android or iOS at their current implementations. Do those people remain without access to the www? We are talking about adult content. The alternative is having that content banned. Many democratic countries have already done that, like South Korea. I don't prefer this scenario.
    - dvdkon 3y ago
lost_tourist 3y ago
So how would an American company who doesn't want to comply with this handle it? Simply block all incoming UK IP addresses? I wonder if there is any chance that British courts would say this goes against basic human rights. I have no idea if there is a "set" of basic rights like the Amendments in the US Constitution.

kleiba 3y ago

And what kind of verification would a site like Wikipedia even need? Does it need to classify all articles with respect to a minimum reader age? Or generally allow all contents only for visitors that are over 18? Or what?

ben_w 3y ago
As I recall, Wikipedia insisted on HTTPS for all access well before it was fashionable precisely so that governments couldn't decide which knowledge was OK and which was forbidden (and hence the whole site used to get regularly blocked by China because of e.g. the Tiananmen Square article). It doesn't take much effort to find things the British establishment won't want kids seeing even though kids talk about them in school playgrounds (or at least we did when I was last in a school a bit over 23 years ago). For example, I was given a summary of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by some girl in the same class as me when I was 8 or 9. And even as an adult, you really don't want to see a real photograph of a newborn with anencephaly, which Wikipedia did have when I was first looking up the condition. The point of Wikipedia — that it can be edited at any time — absolutely makes it impossible to survive any age rating system other than "adults only".
- contravariant 3y ago
  I mean this is a very good argument, so what I'm about to say is not much of a counterargument and more of a feeling. But fuck that shit. Sure some information is unpleasant (and frankly an image-free wikipedia would be very convenient for some queries), but trying to prevent this with age restrictions is just not the way to go. Trying to prevent this from reaching the school playground is like restricting kids to keep them from scraping their knee, it's futile and likely more harmful than beneficial.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I kinda agree with your vibes, though only kinda. Our world is a big complex mess and people have uglier souls than I'd like; the transition from innocent childhood to the adult realisation of this should be… kind and sympathetic, not just the equivalent of throwing someone in the deep end of a pool to teach them to swim.
  - Arch-TK 3y ago
    >like restricting kids to keep them from scraping their knee Extremely on-brand for the UK.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > The point of Wikipedia — that it can be edited at any time — absolutely makes it impossible to survive any age rating system other than "adults only". Oh but when it's news at dinner time showing dead children and weapons firing on and on it's all fine, I guess?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    1) When that comes up in UK news, it does get prefixed with "this report has some scenes that viewers may find disturbing". 2) I don't know what the rules are for broadcasts at different times of day, but I do know they exist 3) I have always been perplexed as to why violence is considered so much more acceptable than, for example, sexuality. Outright murder? Apparently a suitable topic for children's shows. Nipples, which are the defining characteristic of the class Mammalia to which we belong? Hide them all! Unless it's a famous statue (then it's Classical Art), or a man's vestigial ones (then it's so unremarkable nobody even says anything).
    - rpastuszak 3y ago
      Re 3) FYI this is a relatively US/UK centric approach. In most of the countries I lived in, besides the UK, the bias was against violence, in this context. Edit: there was an IG account posting solely picture of nipples, male and female, cropped so it was hard to ascertain the sex of the photographed person. It existed purely to mess with the IG censorship rules. I don’t recall the name of the account but I think it was a genius idea.
  - rzwitserloot 3y ago
    It's not of course. But 'screening' news casts for 'inappropriate' content is easy and it is easy to point fingers when it doesn't meet 'standards'. Whereas with wikipedia, unless a dedicated team of editors who are contracted or liable to vet _every_ change. Possibly only for the UK, who get a special 'only with vetted edits' version or some such, I don't think wikipedia would be interested in making such a thing. Separate from that, wikipedia has various pages on (conditions related to) our sexual organs, as well as lots of articles about politically contentious things. I don't think they are particularly interested in filtering that either. In contrast to news channels, most of which would have no particular complaints about a bunch of rules about content. As a rule your 9'o clock news isn't going to just casually show frontal nudity (except e.g. Germany because they're fine with it). One obvious problem is all those words in single quotes: Who gets to decide? Evidently you aren't happy with whomever decided how far you can go with the content shown on the news, and I concur that it goes quite far. But the point isn't about the current standards being applied. The point is whether _any_ standard can be applied at all. To news: Yes. To wikipedia: Not in a way wiki foundation would accept.
- aziaziazi 3y ago
  Shouldn’t we also make encyclopedias usage prohibited for children? Perhaps technically easier to just forbid both encyclopedias and children within libraries.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    Careful with that irony Eugene, there have been displays on the news even recently of people who find the Arts unacceptable because they may depict genitals (Greek Urns, Renaissance Statues etc.), so easily you will find around voices that could respond recommending that children be protected from exposure to the Arts. (And - ironically - not from the obscenity of those very voices.)
    - ben_w 3y ago
      There was a Simpsons episode about that, wasn't there?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Sometimes people un-ironically say such things about dictionaries. I would note that there are such things as "children's encyclopaedias"; I might have had an earlier edition of this one myself as a kid: https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Illustrated-Encyclopedia-DK/dp/1465451692 https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Illustrated-Encyclopedia-DK... (I wonder if they still put in the cartoon of the Aztec Blood Sacrifice?)

aklju90709 3y ago

They plan to have 3rd party companies that do verification. Of course this will be a privacy disaster and likely intentionally so. The Tories are obsessed with weakening privacy and data protection laws. It's part pro-business/anti-consumer ideology, part dislike of the EU and its goals and a large dash of corruption. See for example giving away NHS data to Palantir, a company literally funded by the CIA.

red_admiral 3y ago
> The Tories are obsessed with weakening privacy and data protection laws True, but from the quoted article: > I'm not sure I've seen anything by way of potential legislation that's had as broadly based a political consensus behind it. I'm afraid I don't expect anything to change if Labour win the next general election.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- xethos 3y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong and Labour will change anything, but those quotes refer to different versions of the bill. Your second quote is for the initial draft, from 2019, while the first refers to the revised, recently passed, bill (among other things).
LelouBil 3y ago
That makes me think about the app that starting to get publicly available in France. France Identité, that allows you to use NFC to communicate with your ID and generate a single use, verifiable proof of identity, as well as having a valid digital ID on your phone you can present to the authorities. I assume it will also be possible to provide a single use proof of age without revealing identity with this kind of system. I do not get at all why 3rd party companies would be allowed to do something like this. If I need a way to give a digital proof of something like this, I'd much rather have my government handle it.
- 3y ago

api 3y ago

Unclear to me is whether this would apply to peer to peer apps like Nostr or non-profit federated systems like Mastodon or Matrix. None of these have coherent entities behind them. Also looks like the UK is about as bad a place to host something as mainland China.

aziaziazi 3y ago

“age verification” modalities does not seems to be expressed, so a simple “confirm your age” à la porn websites may suffice?

didntcheck 3y ago

It should be possible to have a third party IdP provide the site with a trustworthy claim that the user is an adult without any more information, shouldn't it? I think people are a little too quick to claim victory because something is "technically impossible" when it actually isn't (efficacy of public sector IT projects notwithstanding)

empyrrhicist 3y ago
But if Wikimedia is taking broad approach to enforcing their principles, they would refuse to interface with such a privacy destroying service anyway.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Wikipedia don't refuse to interface with privacy destroying payment systems required to collect donations. They will be fine
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Donations are voluntary.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      So is your use of Wikipedia. Your point?
      - mdp2021 3y ago
        The contextual critical matter in accessing information is that you do it in privacy. When you finance the source you relatively openly promote the source. The two activities are dissimilar.
        throwaway290 3y ago
        > The contextual critical matter in accessing information is that you do it in privacy. Since when, in human history, was this an implicit critical assumption in anyone's mind? > The two activities are dissimilar. Yes they are different activities. The point is still: Wikipedia doesn't worry about integrating with systems that require you to be identified. (Actually, internet is another such system, you can't use it without providing some form of ID in probably most countries.)

throwaway290 3y ago

> How would one verify age without checking personal identity. Just like one can auth without checking password. Ever heard of OAuth?

mratsim 3y ago
Unless you use zero-knowlege proofs, there is always a 3rd party that needs to guarantee they checked your identity.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  App requests that you are of age. You are redirected to gov site, you log in to gov site, gov site tells app true or false. No one knows your age, no one checks your ID, besides the gov site which anyway knows your age because they issued your ID. This is basic OAuth. What's the problem again?
  - Ographer 3y ago
    So now the government gets to gatekeep every website deemed controversial? That's quite the slippery slope.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      True, but gov site doesn't have to be informed which site is asking whether you are of age or not. The problem as I see it is not about government gatekeeping stuff (they already can do it if they want and we can already bypass it if we want, like literally nothing will change) but that third-party sites that profile users can now also add "of age" to fingerprints.
  - headsman771 3y ago
    Now gov site has a list of every website you've looked at.

ilkke 3y ago

Here's hoping that the resulting dumpster fire will at least serve as a deterrent to others.

ekianjo 3y ago

just block all visitors from the UK. See how long their stupid law lasts.

rwmj 3y ago
A lot longer than you think. However, yes, blocking is a good idea. It trains users to bypass the block using VPNs etc. In your block message, make it very clear (a) exactly why the site is blocked, (b) what legal routes people can take (petition their MP etc), and (c) how to get around the block by technical means.
- WithinReason 3y ago
  This will just lead to VPNs being outlawed
mdp2021 3y ago
Yes, but the problem is with this practice spreading to more legislations.

ko27 3y ago

All the responses you are getting are very US centric. Just to give an example how you could do this in the EU, today. Every country is now issuing (or planning to issue soon) electronic ID cards with digital signatures that can be scanned with your smartphone. The plan is to allow users to attest they are over or under 18 without revealing any other personal information. They will release an official EU app (like they did for Covid) or Google/Apple will add the appropriate secure API. I don't necessarily agree we need this, but to claim it's impossible to do this in a secure way is ridiculous.

mdp2021 3y ago
Practically, I am not sure about the feasibility. You request a one-time-certificate with a smartphone, then copy it on a laptop (already this is not automatic): once per website or page? That is a lot of certification requests. And that would be to access the content in the www? It creates a dependency stronger than DNS. And there should be full warranty that the issuer and the receiver cannot cross information (of the issued and the received - that would identify the user). Plus, not everybody has a smartphone. Not everyone accepts Android or iOS at their current implementations. Do those people remain without access to the www?
- ko27 3y ago
  > Practically, I am not sure about the feasibility. Last week I logged into my e-gov website by confirming a push notification on my authenticator app that's tied to my e-ID card to download my birth certificate. No copy pasting needed. Random websites now even support logging in without passwords by using your smartphone passkeys. I am sure they can make it work for a simple yes/no (over 18) challenge-request scenario. > Plus, not everybody has a smartphone. Not everyone accepts Android or iOS at their current implementations. Do those people remain without access to the www? We are talking about adult content. The alternative is having that content banned. Many democratic countries have already done that, like South Korea. I don't prefer this scenario.
  - dvdkon 3y ago

lost_tourist 3y ago

So how would an American company who doesn't want to comply with this handle it? Simply block all incoming UK IP addresses? I wonder if there is any chance that British courts would say this goes against basic human rights. I have no idea if there is a "set" of basic rights like the Amendments in the US Constitution.