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A Canadian lobby group is promoting "widespread adoption of age verification"

62 points by clwg 2y ago

helboi4 2y ago
I remember having some sort of parent lock on my laptop I got when I was 11. Was the most annoying thing ever. Stopped me from seeing all sorts of totally useful information so I just hacked around it entirely. Instinctively not very on board with too much internet helicopter parenting.
- dotnet00 2y ago
  Reminds me of how I couldn't even innocently search for information about reproduction in plants in a country with an overly broad internet filter, because the results would have the word "sex" in them at some point. So I had to get good at coming up with indirect searches to get around the filter.
486sx33 2y ago
Biometrics for age verification sounds awful. Really the problems with any sort of age verification system that uses your real name and ID are leaks, identity theft, and advertising. Imagine your unique ad id is your actual info. Or a leak and your name is tied to pornhub, looking at all the army guys who got exposed on Ashley Madison.
- albrewer 2y ago
  One of the things I wish we could start bringing into the public domain are zero-knowledge proofs for biometric data. Basically it'd enable the situation where the person being ID'd gives permission to a third party to know whether they're over 18 or not, and the entity requiring ID gets a yes/no without ever knowing the actual age or identity of the person.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    No solution can be perfect, there will always be ways around things like that. DRM was supposed to stop piracy but it had the opposite effect. You can argue implementation problems all day along but that's exactly ALWAYS the issue.
- donmcronald 2y ago
  It's not about restricting access to porn. That's just the easiest way to get their foot in the door. It's a group funded by a tech mogul lobbying the government to legislate the use of age verification technology. I would bet my life savings the people behind the lobbying group(s) stand to benefit financially. I guarantee you the goal is to collect as much identity information as possible and that's going to include getting parents to "enrol" their kids in the system. The carrot will be lower friction to access online services and the average person won't understand that someone lobbied to create the friction so they could sell the solution back to us. Ultimately the goal is probably to create government authorized identity providers, maybe even just one, and they'll make tons of money from it. It might end up being "free" for people, but only because it'll be funded by taxes. If they succeed, we'll likely end up with a private company doing identity verification for government service just like the USA and id.me. And we also get to pay the price of making the internet more dangerous for kids. The thing these lawmakers don't realize is the insane value children place on their online accounts. Once you limit them to a single account, because it's tied to a real world identity, they'll be terrified of getting banned and losing their account. That might sound like a good idea in the context of fostering healthy online participation in games, etc., but the reality is that kids are gullible and it'll open them up to exploitation by bad actors. Kids will be getting phishing notifications telling them their account has been flagged for illegal activity and they need to pay a fine to unlock it. They'll go to some shady website and type in their VISA debit card number, which is enabled by default on most kids' bank accounts, and get their bank account cleaned out. Remember, if you lose your account, you can't get another one, so you better pay the fine, right? And what kids are going to go ask their parents for help if they're being accused of bad behavior? None of them. The core of the problem is that by tying online accounts to real world identities you make those accounts so valuable that people will act irrationally when threatened with the loss of an account. It's not just kids either, but kids will be the most vulnerable to exploitation. Our politicians are a bunch of low IQ suckers that are getting played by rich tech bros that don't care if they make everything worse as long as they making money.
nullorempty 2y ago
Can one verify age without giving away identity?
- jawns 2y ago
  Yes, if you use an intermediary service. The service verifies your identity, and then it provides an attestation about your age.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    So the answer is "no", since you are still revealing your identity to the intermediary, and can not subsequently control how they use that information.
    - jawns 2y ago
      True, the answer is always going to be "no" depending on how hard-lined you are about privacy. But with a few reasonable concessions, you can get a lot of benefit. For instance, most people believe that the government itself be able to verify your identity, through birth certificates or passports or drivers licenses or tax IDs. If you're willing to allow the government to verify your identity, how about a trusted private company that you get to select? If that company is then trusted by others as an identity verifier, then although you may have to reveal your identity to one trusted entity, you don't have to reveal your identity to any of the others that accept their attestations about attributes like age.
    - tzs 2y ago
      There's an easy fix for that: use as an intermediary a service that already knows who you are. Age verification should involve three parties: you ("the User"), the site that wants to know that you are past a certain age ("the Site"), and the service that actually checks your age by looking at your documents or whatever ("the Service"). Using protocols based on zero-knowledge proofs or blind signatures it is possible to design a protocol whereby (1) all that the Service learns when the User uses them to verify for some site is that the User has asked to verify for somebody but they don't know who, (2) all the Site learns is that the User passed the age check and used the Service to do it, and (3) someone how obtains complete logs of both the Site's age verification communications and the Service's age verification communications cannot figure out how to match them up except by timing. To elaborate on matching records from the Site and the Service, if for example the Site only had one user sign up in the last month who used the Service for verification and the Service was only asked to participate in one verification that month then you can infer the User's identity. If the Service is doing lots of verifications for a large number of sites, so during the few seconds that your signup or login at the Site is being processed at the Service there are dozens of other verifications also going on there involving dozens of other sites, then someone who gets records from the Site and the Service gets dozens of people who might have been the one who actually used the Site. We can make it even harder for someone to match things up. First, we can add random delays between the the User initiating a signup at the Site and the User initiating verification with the Service and between the Service's finishing of that and the User using that result to complete signup. So now someone who obtains signup records from the Site and tries to use timing to match them up to users of the Service will need to look at Service records from a wider interval. Second, the User's client can make random dummy verification requests at random times. That increases traffic to the Service which helps make it harder in general for timing analysis to work. It also makes it so if someone is trying to figure out who signed up at the Site on a specific time and they find you did a verification in the right timeframe and ask you what you were verifying for you can say you weren't...it must have been one of the random dummy verifications. Third, there should only be a few providers of the ID checking side of this (the Service). It would probably make the most sense for this to be handled by government, probably be the same departments that issue the ID documents you will be using to prove identity. This helps ensure that they are dealing with a large number of verifications, which is the key to protection against timing attacks.
sandworm101 2y ago
Fyi, Canada has a history of leading change in internet standards (Facebook, 2008). Governments around the world are looking for solutions. When Canada gets a reasonable standard out first, its broad principals tend to be adopted by the larger countries/alliances that generally move more slowly. As requested below: https://www.cippic.ca/articles/facebook-may-2008-2010 https://www.cippic.ca/articles/facebook-may-2008-2010 https://www.denverpost.com/2008/05/31/canada-begins-investigation-into-facebook-privacy-2/ https://www.denverpost.com/2008/05/31/canada-begins-investig... https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/facebook-to-address-canadian-privacy-issues-1.858701 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/facebook-to-address-canadian...
- ravenstine 2y ago
  Care to provide an example? I'm genuinely curious.
- 121789 2y ago
  I don’t think your examples support your claim. A single website/company changing their practices in response to Canada is not evidence that other countries adopt Canadian standards. Do you have any examples of that specifically?
ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
An entire generation learning how to bypass dumb restrictions sounds like a good thing, the youth need to learn how to use a computer. I support this.
- pixl97 2y ago
  "An entire generation learning to obey big brother for face the consequences sounds like a good thing, the youth need to learn their place. I support this" your unstated counterargument.
- donmcronald 2y ago
  This isn't the case anymore. Technology has evolved and users don't control their stuff any more. All kinds of things like parts serialization, cryptographic attestation, etc. are finally getting to the point where it's impossible to bypass the controls. As those solutions get polished and become more accessible, we'll see a rapid increase in products and services where users never truly have control over them. Even worse, I'd say that between businesses and people that want to keep their kids safe, the majority of people will opt-in to boot-locked PCs if they're marketed for safety. Give it a bit and I bet Microsoft will start offering some kind of secure or safety mode for Windows PCs. The TPM requirement on Windows 11 must have some long term goal associated with it, and perfectly locked down devices doing attestation is likely part of their identity play. Whether it's attesting for or against the user is another question.
blindriver 2y ago
Canada is turning into Totalitarian state with no freedoms or ability for privacy. As an expat I’m really sad to see how spineless my fellow Canadians are at standing up to Justin Trudeau and his fascism. I admired the truckers but the fact Trudeau used the War Measures Act or whatever it’s called now to trample their freedoms makes me sick. The fact a tribunal said they were wrong to use it is cold comfort years after the fact and no one was held accountable. I’m anxious for Polivore but worries he will be exactly the same instead of rolling back the policies Trudeau put in place.
- twisteriffic 2y ago
  Just like last time this was posted, I'm here to remind you that the Liberals are the only ones not supporting this bill. It was introduced and enthusiastically supported by the Conservatives. Your hatred has blinded you.
- algesten 2y ago
  The article says "the government has called the bill “fundamentally flawed”, but there may be sufficient House support to turn it into binding legislation" Sounds like Trudeau is not the problem in this instance?
- sevagh 2y ago
  >As an expat I’m really sad to see how spineless my fellow Canadians are You ran away, you spineless coward?
  - lostemptations5 2y ago
    Ah yes those cowards -- like all the multicultural immigrants that built Canada and have made it a prosperous country. Cowards to leave their counties, etc /s
  - blindriver 2y ago
    I went to the U.S. and am making more money than I ever could have in Canada and living in a house that I never could have afforded. The tuition per kid that I’m paying right now for elementary school is more than my salary that I was earning in Canada. The Canadian brain drain is real and that’s because the politicians completely fucked up what we had previously which was a dominance in telecommunications. Ottawa could have truly been a “Silicon Valley of the North” but they fucked it up and couldn’t get around the idea that you have to grow prosperity, not tax people to death. 25 years later the gap between Canada and the U.S. is immense in terms of technical excellence and I don’t regret my decision at all to leave. I’m not going to sit around and become a slave to the worthless politicians, both Liberal and PC so they can siphon all my wealth like the Matrix in some delusional belief that it’s “patriotic”.
Edmond 2y ago
Whenever this comes up, the focus is on simply opposing the idea. I think perhaps devoting energy to solutions that can address both the concern of safety and privacy is also worth considering. The internet is going to be a fundamental part of human life I would argue indefinitely. The need for robust information verification is not something we're going to be able to do without. The question is, would solutions end up being effective ones or ones that "work" but create all sorts of other problems? The worse outcome in my view would be that we all end up being required to use big tech companies as gate keepers for our digital lives. Now for my pitch :). Cryptographic certificates are a solution option that CAN bridge this gap. App: https://certisfy.com/ https://certisfy.com/ Demo: https://youtu.be/92gu4mxHmTY https://youtu.be/92gu4mxHmTY Technical Doc: https://cipheredtrust.com/doc/#pki-overview https://cipheredtrust.com/doc/#pki-overview
- fidotron 2y ago
  Respectfully, you are making the error of assuming it is a technical problem when it is a political one. The problem the government have is the masses trust those bad people over there more than our trusted and approved government experts over here, and they think this is a communication problem and not a problem of substance. I would agree that technical measures for trust are necessary, but the gov should not be allowed to be the arbiter of who gets to trust who - that is a fundamental freedom that must be left to individuals.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    One could also argue that the problem is actually educational.
- nvy 2y ago
  >Whenever this comes up, the focus is on simply opposing the idea. Well, because the idea is fundamentally unsound. Nobody can keep such a database secure, and certainly not the Canadian government, champions of ineptitude that they are. >Certify Goodness, that's dystopian.
  - 2y ago
Workaccount2 2y ago
As far as I can tell, adolescent exposure to porn has proved as meaningless as adolescent exposure to violent video games. It dawned on me the other day that millennial men, being the first generation with access to seemingly unlimited amounts of porn from a young age, are not a bunch of sexually deranged rapists. In the same way we aren't a generation of murderers despite growing up on golden eye and counter strike. You probably don't want your kids looking at porn, but I also think it's miles (kilometers?) from the point where we want a surveillance state in order to stop it.
- nojvek 2y ago
  Surveillance isn't about porn or violence from video games. It's about having power to control the population. To find people who may be a threat.
- MisterDizzy 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - __s 2y ago
    flipping through link, not seeing any stats
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      31 citations, and the most intelligent response is "not seeing any stats."
      - jchw 2y ago
        To be fair, the citations don't pass the sniff test. The very first citation contradicts statements in the article. Check the summary for it: > Risky sexual behaviors were not associated with online pornography exposure in any of the groups, except that males who were exposed (deliberately or not) had higher odds of not having used a condom at last intercourse. Bi/homosexual orientation and Internet use parameters were not associated either. Additionally, males in the wanted exposure group were more likely to be sensation-seekers. On the other hand, exposed girls were more likely to be students, higher sensation-seekers, early maturers, and to have a highly educated father. We conclude that pornography exposure is not associated with risky sexual behaviors and that the willingness of exposure does not seem to have an impact on risky sexual behaviors among adolescents.
Tran84jfj 2y ago
[flagged]
loceng 2y ago
Centralization like this is an unacceptable single point-of-failure, and a dangerous risk for a single point-of-capture. The solution is technology coming loaded with the tools and features that make it easy for parents to monitor and regulate what their children see - and not by fear mongering by a government-state looking to have their fingers and eyes on everyone, integrated fully into our information channels. Reminder that Trudeau has said on video that he admires China's - the CCP's dictatorship. Take that for what you will.
deleted 2y ago
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hanklazard 2y ago
Sure let’s start with age verification and get the infra and social expectation in place for blacklists on *any* parameter they choose (for the sake of “safety”, of course).
MisterDizzy 2y ago
So many people will put up with the most heinous and blatant rights violations in the name of safety or health but as soon as you start making it more difficult to get unlimited free pornography, that's when it suddenly becomes a problem.
moose44 2y ago
Honestly, Bill C-63 is a bigger worry atm.
- stronglikedan 2y ago
  Yeah, that one is truly scary. Dystopian even. That said, both should be heavily opposed.
axelthegerman 2y ago
Where are all the Blockchain peeps at? That should be right down their alley... Oh wait maybe not enough surveillance potential or just straight up doesn't work
- riskable 2y ago
  What are you talking about? There's a whole category of porn devoted to blocks and chains!
jawns 2y ago
While it's true that there's a correlation between age and maturity in childhood and adolescence, there's also some variability. Nevertheless, the law typically treats age as a proxy for maturity, because it's an objective, easily verifiable trait. If that disadvantages certain children and teens who are mature beyond their physical age, society is mostly OK with that drawback. Yet over the past several decades, we've seen a change in society attitudes about another personal attribute, sex, which was previously treated as an objective characteristic but is now largely (both socially and in the law) treated as a subjective characteristic, meaning the only way to determine whether someone is male or female is through their own assertion. I am curious whether we will see a similar shift in attitude toward age. The idea that "age is just a number" and "you're only as old as you feel" has been around forever, but I'd be interested to see if the law codifies that somehow.
chongli 2y ago
The bigger concern for me is not the blocking/censorship angle to this bill (though that is a concern), it's the business angle. Jim Balsillie and his business lobby groups are pushing really hard on this because they smell an opportunity. In Canada we have a hopeless addiction to bad regulations that strangle all the competition out of our markets through regulatory capture and government-created monopolies. Our wireless market is one of the least competitive and most expensive in the world. Our aviation sector is completely dominated by 2 airlines which are barely competitive at all. Our news media marketplace was recently devastated by Bill C-18 (the Online News Act), another ham-fisted cash grab designed to enrich the big Canadian media companies (PostMedia, Bell GlobeMedia, Rogers Media) which backfired and destroyed a lot of Canadian independent media outlets. I think this bill, should it pass, will lead to the creation of another regulatory-enforced monopoly. Honestly, it feels like Canada is falling into some kind of neo-feudalism with all this nonsense.
TriangleEdge 2y ago
My loose train of thought: 0: I have not seen any data to show this would work. Kids would just buy and sell usb sticks filled with porn. 1: Life is already good in Canada, except for the housing situation and low wages. 2: People have a need to feel special and politicians are people. 3: Some people meet their need to feel special by changing their surroundings. 4: Since Canada is already good, except for wages and housing, and politicians can't figure out a way to fix that, they're meeting their need to feel special by being controversial. 5: Debating controversial subjects makes politicians feel special and important. Conclusion: The root cause of this is narcissism.
thatgerhard 2y ago
Between canada and the eu, they're taking away small slices of free internet at a time.. Let's not forget that the wild west internet is why all of us are here..
deleted 2y ago
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yatz 2y ago
THB, these bills seems more interested in figuring out our interests more than actually keeping the young's away from porn!
derefr 2y ago
To me (a Canadian), there's been an implicit shift in the base expectation of privacy over the years — one might call this an "erosion of our un-formalized, but natural, right to privacy." I don't think this is anything in the cultural zeitgeist. There's been no shift in the desire for privacy; the public hasn't become more concerned over time with snooping on their neighbours. We've just gradually had the privacy we wanted taken away. This is something the state has been doing to us, through the passage of law. But, crucially, I also don't think that this has been the plan of any particular political party. "Eroding privacy" isn't on any party's platform; nor even is any benefit to which "eroding privacy" is the cost. This is not the effect of partisan politics. Privacy erosion has been happening just the same no matter who's been in charge. Rather, I think what's been happening to privacy, has been happening almost by accident, by an inherent flaw in the "internal architecture" of our informal political institutions — not the executive/judiciary/etc, but the political parties, the "deep state", and so forth. This is what I think is happening: • Politicians are in some ways "public figures" and have no privacy; but in other ways have already had their lives engineered systematically to ensure their privacy (coincidentally, in the name of national security) — down to being told what apps they can and can't install, using special secure phones, having meetings in special secure rooms, being driven around in the back of sound-proofed limousines, etc. Politicians have an entirely out-of-whack experience of "privacy" compared to anyone else, and so don't really understand that "privacy" is, for the average citizen, something maintained these days mostly by making market purchasing choices to use "privacy-preserving" technologies instead of "privacy-violating" ones; and that the existence of these privacy-preserving technology products/services are not enshrined in law, and can easily be annihilated by accident by bills that seek to do something else (e.g. protect children.) • Along with this, those in the "deep state" that politicians speak to about technology and privacy issues, are themselves in the strange position of having been thoroughly picked over (security-cleared) as having absolutely nothing interesting about them that they would need to keep private. Departments entirely composed of such individuals, will have extremely skewed views on the need for privacy. (Thus why such departments elsewhere, had no internal revulsion to implementing e.g. PRISM — nobody in the room had anything to hide that PRISM would expose!) • And also, the political parties, the "deep state", and any associated parts of government (e.g. an appointed judiciary) are all generally seniority-based systems. Which means that, inevitably, the people at the top who make most of the long-term decisions and "steer the ship" (not the Prime Minister, nor the MPs — but rather, party leaders, and the long-serving heads of departments working directly below cabinet ministers, etc) are all quite old. These "old hands" generally no longer attempt to keep up with the rapid pace of technological progress, and have fallen far-enough behind the curve that they have no sense for the current technological landscape having a major dividing axis of "privacy-violating" or "privacy-preserving" that a citizen might feel the need to care about. Instead, these "old hands" just feel a kind of Amish-like hesitance toward all technology — fear for what technology could do/enable. They hear reports from citizens about what some (usually privacy-violating) technologies have done; and rather than this moving them to opinions regarding privacy, this instead reinforces their beliefs about technology itself as being a modern boogeyman — with technology companies not serving the public good, and therefore technology-sector lobbyists and their pet issues being actively deprioritized vs other lobbies (esp in this case: the crime-reduction lobby.) Which means that these "old hands" are tuning out the words of Google and Meta (probably for the best!) but also tuning out the words of the EFF (very bad!) --- I'm sorry to say that I personally have no suggestions for what to do about any of these effects. They seem pretty inherent in the design of the informal institutions themselves. We could perhaps formalize these institutions, such that they could be regulated? Reify "political parties" and "executive departments" as their own concepts in law, and legislate their leadership structure and selection processes, to prevent them from defaulting to seniority? But I feel like this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater — there's a lot we gain by having short-serving elected politicians (who can say what the public wants these days), working together with long-serving public servants and appointees (who have seen all this before, and can keep long-term-project balls in the air.) It seems somewhat obvious to me that even doing nothing, generational shift will help. Once the leaders of these institutions pass on, and are replaced by leaders who grew up in the current technological milieu, a concern for privacy might arise, with the government then seeking to backpedal on the erosion of privacy that has come before. This might take another 30 years, though. And although they'll then be conscious of privacy, something else — something that is only coming into the public consciousness as an issue today, and which likewise won't have an effect on the political class — will likely be left to erode in its place, due to those politicians having no foundational experience with it.
6510 2y ago
To state the obvious: If you go there (or require diplomas and/or licenses to access material) the requirements won't be static enough to rule out obvious stupid shit being included.
orwin 2y ago
If it's not a zero knowledge system, it's a bad system. I know i will trigger the ancaps here, but this is typically a case where the government has to be on it, and _has_ to be great. Like a secret, digital ID that will allow you to generate a code easily (with both an app for the ease of access, and a website where you just have to input your ID and a validation code that change every X years and that you receive with your voter ID or something). This code is an auth token to an API that will just respond "OK" if the token is a valid token, but should have no idea who issued it. The advantage is that if you extends it to be send before an online purchase, or to be send SM to limit some features before like, 16 yo, you can make it so that even if the government lies and tries to identify who generated the auth token, if multiple private companies use a third party SaaS to handle it, the government can't know why the token was used.

62 points by clwg 2y ago

I remember having some sort of parent lock on my laptop I got when I was 11. Was the most annoying thing ever. Stopped me from seeing all sorts of totally useful information so I just hacked around it entirely. Instinctively not very on board with too much internet helicopter parenting.

dotnet00 2y ago
Reminds me of how I couldn't even innocently search for information about reproduction in plants in a country with an overly broad internet filter, because the results would have the word "sex" in them at some point. So I had to get good at coming up with indirect searches to get around the filter.

486sx33 2y ago

Biometrics for age verification sounds awful. Really the problems with any sort of age verification system that uses your real name and ID are leaks, identity theft, and advertising. Imagine your unique ad id is your actual info. Or a leak and your name is tied to pornhub, looking at all the army guys who got exposed on Ashley Madison.

albrewer 2y ago
One of the things I wish we could start bringing into the public domain are zero-knowledge proofs for biometric data. Basically it'd enable the situation where the person being ID'd gives permission to a third party to know whether they're over 18 or not, and the entity requiring ID gets a yes/no without ever knowing the actual age or identity of the person.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  No solution can be perfect, there will always be ways around things like that. DRM was supposed to stop piracy but it had the opposite effect. You can argue implementation problems all day along but that's exactly ALWAYS the issue.
donmcronald 2y ago
It's not about restricting access to porn. That's just the easiest way to get their foot in the door. It's a group funded by a tech mogul lobbying the government to legislate the use of age verification technology. I would bet my life savings the people behind the lobbying group(s) stand to benefit financially. I guarantee you the goal is to collect as much identity information as possible and that's going to include getting parents to "enrol" their kids in the system. The carrot will be lower friction to access online services and the average person won't understand that someone lobbied to create the friction so they could sell the solution back to us. Ultimately the goal is probably to create government authorized identity providers, maybe even just one, and they'll make tons of money from it. It might end up being "free" for people, but only because it'll be funded by taxes. If they succeed, we'll likely end up with a private company doing identity verification for government service just like the USA and id.me. And we also get to pay the price of making the internet more dangerous for kids. The thing these lawmakers don't realize is the insane value children place on their online accounts. Once you limit them to a single account, because it's tied to a real world identity, they'll be terrified of getting banned and losing their account. That might sound like a good idea in the context of fostering healthy online participation in games, etc., but the reality is that kids are gullible and it'll open them up to exploitation by bad actors. Kids will be getting phishing notifications telling them their account has been flagged for illegal activity and they need to pay a fine to unlock it. They'll go to some shady website and type in their VISA debit card number, which is enabled by default on most kids' bank accounts, and get their bank account cleaned out. Remember, if you lose your account, you can't get another one, so you better pay the fine, right? And what kids are going to go ask their parents for help if they're being accused of bad behavior? None of them. The core of the problem is that by tying online accounts to real world identities you make those accounts so valuable that people will act irrationally when threatened with the loss of an account. It's not just kids either, but kids will be the most vulnerable to exploitation. Our politicians are a bunch of low IQ suckers that are getting played by rich tech bros that don't care if they make everything worse as long as they making money.

nullorempty 2y ago

Can one verify age without giving away identity?

jawns 2y ago
Yes, if you use an intermediary service. The service verifies your identity, and then it provides an attestation about your age.
- Gormo 2y ago
  So the answer is "no", since you are still revealing your identity to the intermediary, and can not subsequently control how they use that information.
  - jawns 2y ago
    True, the answer is always going to be "no" depending on how hard-lined you are about privacy. But with a few reasonable concessions, you can get a lot of benefit. For instance, most people believe that the government itself be able to verify your identity, through birth certificates or passports or drivers licenses or tax IDs. If you're willing to allow the government to verify your identity, how about a trusted private company that you get to select? If that company is then trusted by others as an identity verifier, then although you may have to reveal your identity to one trusted entity, you don't have to reveal your identity to any of the others that accept their attestations about attributes like age.
  - tzs 2y ago
    There's an easy fix for that: use as an intermediary a service that already knows who you are. Age verification should involve three parties: you ("the User"), the site that wants to know that you are past a certain age ("the Site"), and the service that actually checks your age by looking at your documents or whatever ("the Service"). Using protocols based on zero-knowledge proofs or blind signatures it is possible to design a protocol whereby (1) all that the Service learns when the User uses them to verify for some site is that the User has asked to verify for somebody but they don't know who, (2) all the Site learns is that the User passed the age check and used the Service to do it, and (3) someone how obtains complete logs of both the Site's age verification communications and the Service's age verification communications cannot figure out how to match them up except by timing. To elaborate on matching records from the Site and the Service, if for example the Site only had one user sign up in the last month who used the Service for verification and the Service was only asked to participate in one verification that month then you can infer the User's identity. If the Service is doing lots of verifications for a large number of sites, so during the few seconds that your signup or login at the Site is being processed at the Service there are dozens of other verifications also going on there involving dozens of other sites, then someone who gets records from the Site and the Service gets dozens of people who might have been the one who actually used the Site. We can make it even harder for someone to match things up. First, we can add random delays between the the User initiating a signup at the Site and the User initiating verification with the Service and between the Service's finishing of that and the User using that result to complete signup. So now someone who obtains signup records from the Site and tries to use timing to match them up to users of the Service will need to look at Service records from a wider interval. Second, the User's client can make random dummy verification requests at random times. That increases traffic to the Service which helps make it harder in general for timing analysis to work. It also makes it so if someone is trying to figure out who signed up at the Site on a specific time and they find you did a verification in the right timeframe and ask you what you were verifying for you can say you weren't...it must have been one of the random dummy verifications. Third, there should only be a few providers of the ID checking side of this (the Service). It would probably make the most sense for this to be handled by government, probably be the same departments that issue the ID documents you will be using to prove identity. This helps ensure that they are dealing with a large number of verifications, which is the key to protection against timing attacks.

sandworm101 2y ago

Fyi, Canada has a history of leading change in internet standards (Facebook, 2008). Governments around the world are looking for solutions. When Canada gets a reasonable standard out first, its broad principals tend to be adopted by the larger countries/alliances that generally move more slowly. As requested below: https://www.cippic.ca/articles/facebook-may-2008-2010 https://www.cippic.ca/articles/facebook-may-2008-2010 https://www.denverpost.com/2008/05/31/canada-begins-investigation-into-facebook-privacy-2/ https://www.denverpost.com/2008/05/31/canada-begins-investig... https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/facebook-to-address-canadian-privacy-issues-1.858701 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/facebook-to-address-canadian...

ravenstine 2y ago
Care to provide an example? I'm genuinely curious.
121789 2y ago
I don’t think your examples support your claim. A single website/company changing their practices in response to Canada is not evidence that other countries adopt Canadian standards. Do you have any examples of that specifically?

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago

An entire generation learning how to bypass dumb restrictions sounds like a good thing, the youth need to learn how to use a computer. I support this.

pixl97 2y ago
"An entire generation learning to obey big brother for face the consequences sounds like a good thing, the youth need to learn their place. I support this" your unstated counterargument.
donmcronald 2y ago
This isn't the case anymore. Technology has evolved and users don't control their stuff any more. All kinds of things like parts serialization, cryptographic attestation, etc. are finally getting to the point where it's impossible to bypass the controls. As those solutions get polished and become more accessible, we'll see a rapid increase in products and services where users never truly have control over them. Even worse, I'd say that between businesses and people that want to keep their kids safe, the majority of people will opt-in to boot-locked PCs if they're marketed for safety. Give it a bit and I bet Microsoft will start offering some kind of secure or safety mode for Windows PCs. The TPM requirement on Windows 11 must have some long term goal associated with it, and perfectly locked down devices doing attestation is likely part of their identity play. Whether it's attesting for or against the user is another question.

blindriver 2y ago

Canada is turning into Totalitarian state with no freedoms or ability for privacy. As an expat I’m really sad to see how spineless my fellow Canadians are at standing up to Justin Trudeau and his fascism. I admired the truckers but the fact Trudeau used the War Measures Act or whatever it’s called now to trample their freedoms makes me sick. The fact a tribunal said they were wrong to use it is cold comfort years after the fact and no one was held accountable. I’m anxious for Polivore but worries he will be exactly the same instead of rolling back the policies Trudeau put in place.

twisteriffic 2y ago
Just like last time this was posted, I'm here to remind you that the Liberals are the only ones not supporting this bill. It was introduced and enthusiastically supported by the Conservatives. Your hatred has blinded you.
algesten 2y ago
The article says "the government has called the bill “fundamentally flawed”, but there may be sufficient House support to turn it into binding legislation" Sounds like Trudeau is not the problem in this instance?
sevagh 2y ago
>As an expat I’m really sad to see how spineless my fellow Canadians are You ran away, you spineless coward?
- lostemptations5 2y ago
  Ah yes those cowards -- like all the multicultural immigrants that built Canada and have made it a prosperous country. Cowards to leave their counties, etc /s
- blindriver 2y ago
  I went to the U.S. and am making more money than I ever could have in Canada and living in a house that I never could have afforded. The tuition per kid that I’m paying right now for elementary school is more than my salary that I was earning in Canada. The Canadian brain drain is real and that’s because the politicians completely fucked up what we had previously which was a dominance in telecommunications. Ottawa could have truly been a “Silicon Valley of the North” but they fucked it up and couldn’t get around the idea that you have to grow prosperity, not tax people to death. 25 years later the gap between Canada and the U.S. is immense in terms of technical excellence and I don’t regret my decision at all to leave. I’m not going to sit around and become a slave to the worthless politicians, both Liberal and PC so they can siphon all my wealth like the Matrix in some delusional belief that it’s “patriotic”.

Edmond 2y ago

Whenever this comes up, the focus is on simply opposing the idea. I think perhaps devoting energy to solutions that can address both the concern of safety and privacy is also worth considering. The internet is going to be a fundamental part of human life I would argue indefinitely. The need for robust information verification is not something we're going to be able to do without. The question is, would solutions end up being effective ones or ones that "work" but create all sorts of other problems? The worse outcome in my view would be that we all end up being required to use big tech companies as gate keepers for our digital lives. Now for my pitch :). Cryptographic certificates are a solution option that CAN bridge this gap. App: https://certisfy.com/ https://certisfy.com/ Demo: https://youtu.be/92gu4mxHmTY https://youtu.be/92gu4mxHmTY Technical Doc: https://cipheredtrust.com/doc/#pki-overview https://cipheredtrust.com/doc/#pki-overview

fidotron 2y ago
Respectfully, you are making the error of assuming it is a technical problem when it is a political one. The problem the government have is the masses trust those bad people over there more than our trusted and approved government experts over here, and they think this is a communication problem and not a problem of substance. I would agree that technical measures for trust are necessary, but the gov should not be allowed to be the arbiter of who gets to trust who - that is a fundamental freedom that must be left to individuals.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  One could also argue that the problem is actually educational.
nvy 2y ago
>Whenever this comes up, the focus is on simply opposing the idea. Well, because the idea is fundamentally unsound. Nobody can keep such a database secure, and certainly not the Canadian government, champions of ineptitude that they are. >Certify Goodness, that's dystopian.
- 2y ago

Workaccount2 2y ago

As far as I can tell, adolescent exposure to porn has proved as meaningless as adolescent exposure to violent video games. It dawned on me the other day that millennial men, being the first generation with access to seemingly unlimited amounts of porn from a young age, are not a bunch of sexually deranged rapists. In the same way we aren't a generation of murderers despite growing up on golden eye and counter strike. You probably don't want your kids looking at porn, but I also think it's miles (kilometers?) from the point where we want a surveillance state in order to stop it.

nojvek 2y ago
Surveillance isn't about porn or violence from video games. It's about having power to control the population. To find people who may be a threat.
MisterDizzy 2y ago
[flagged]
- __s 2y ago
  flipping through link, not seeing any stats
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    31 citations, and the most intelligent response is "not seeing any stats."
    - jchw 2y ago
      To be fair, the citations don't pass the sniff test. The very first citation contradicts statements in the article. Check the summary for it: > Risky sexual behaviors were not associated with online pornography exposure in any of the groups, except that males who were exposed (deliberately or not) had higher odds of not having used a condom at last intercourse. Bi/homosexual orientation and Internet use parameters were not associated either. Additionally, males in the wanted exposure group were more likely to be sensation-seekers. On the other hand, exposed girls were more likely to be students, higher sensation-seekers, early maturers, and to have a highly educated father. We conclude that pornography exposure is not associated with risky sexual behaviors and that the willingness of exposure does not seem to have an impact on risky sexual behaviors among adolescents.

Tran84jfj 2y ago

[flagged]

loceng 2y ago

Centralization like this is an unacceptable single point-of-failure, and a dangerous risk for a single point-of-capture. The solution is technology coming loaded with the tools and features that make it easy for parents to monitor and regulate what their children see - and not by fear mongering by a government-state looking to have their fingers and eyes on everyone, integrated fully into our information channels. Reminder that Trudeau has said on video that he admires China's - the CCP's dictatorship. Take that for what you will.

deleted 2y ago

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hanklazard 2y ago

Sure let’s start with age verification and get the infra and social expectation in place for blacklists on *any* parameter they choose (for the sake of “safety”, of course).

MisterDizzy 2y ago

So many people will put up with the most heinous and blatant rights violations in the name of safety or health but as soon as you start making it more difficult to get unlimited free pornography, that's when it suddenly becomes a problem.

moose44 2y ago

Honestly, Bill C-63 is a bigger worry atm.

stronglikedan 2y ago
Yeah, that one is truly scary. Dystopian even. That said, both should be heavily opposed.

axelthegerman 2y ago

Where are all the Blockchain peeps at? That should be right down their alley... Oh wait maybe not enough surveillance potential or just straight up doesn't work

riskable 2y ago
What are you talking about? There's a whole category of porn devoted to blocks and chains!

jawns 2y ago

While it's true that there's a correlation between age and maturity in childhood and adolescence, there's also some variability. Nevertheless, the law typically treats age as a proxy for maturity, because it's an objective, easily verifiable trait. If that disadvantages certain children and teens who are mature beyond their physical age, society is mostly OK with that drawback. Yet over the past several decades, we've seen a change in society attitudes about another personal attribute, sex, which was previously treated as an objective characteristic but is now largely (both socially and in the law) treated as a subjective characteristic, meaning the only way to determine whether someone is male or female is through their own assertion. I am curious whether we will see a similar shift in attitude toward age. The idea that "age is just a number" and "you're only as old as you feel" has been around forever, but I'd be interested to see if the law codifies that somehow.

chongli 2y ago

The bigger concern for me is not the blocking/censorship angle to this bill (though that is a concern), it's the business angle. Jim Balsillie and his business lobby groups are pushing really hard on this because they smell an opportunity. In Canada we have a hopeless addiction to bad regulations that strangle all the competition out of our markets through regulatory capture and government-created monopolies. Our wireless market is one of the least competitive and most expensive in the world. Our aviation sector is completely dominated by 2 airlines which are barely competitive at all. Our news media marketplace was recently devastated by Bill C-18 (the Online News Act), another ham-fisted cash grab designed to enrich the big Canadian media companies (PostMedia, Bell GlobeMedia, Rogers Media) which backfired and destroyed a lot of Canadian independent media outlets. I think this bill, should it pass, will lead to the creation of another regulatory-enforced monopoly. Honestly, it feels like Canada is falling into some kind of neo-feudalism with all this nonsense.

TriangleEdge 2y ago

My loose train of thought: 0: I have not seen any data to show this would work. Kids would just buy and sell usb sticks filled with porn. 1: Life is already good in Canada, except for the housing situation and low wages. 2: People have a need to feel special and politicians are people. 3: Some people meet their need to feel special by changing their surroundings. 4: Since Canada is already good, except for wages and housing, and politicians can't figure out a way to fix that, they're meeting their need to feel special by being controversial. 5: Debating controversial subjects makes politicians feel special and important. Conclusion: The root cause of this is narcissism.

thatgerhard 2y ago

Between canada and the eu, they're taking away small slices of free internet at a time.. Let's not forget that the wild west internet is why all of us are here..

deleted 2y ago

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yatz 2y ago

THB, these bills seems more interested in figuring out our interests more than actually keeping the young's away from porn!

derefr 2y ago

To me (a Canadian), there's been an implicit shift in the base expectation of privacy over the years — one might call this an "erosion of our un-formalized, but natural, right to privacy." I don't think this is anything in the cultural zeitgeist. There's been no shift in the desire for privacy; the public hasn't become more concerned over time with snooping on their neighbours. We've just gradually had the privacy we wanted taken away. This is something the state has been doing to us, through the passage of law. But, crucially, I also don't think that this has been the plan of any particular political party. "Eroding privacy" isn't on any party's platform; nor even is any benefit to which "eroding privacy" is the cost. This is not the effect of partisan politics. Privacy erosion has been happening just the same no matter who's been in charge. Rather, I think what's been happening to privacy, has been happening almost by accident, by an inherent flaw in the "internal architecture" of our informal political institutions — not the executive/judiciary/etc, but the political parties, the "deep state", and so forth. This is what I think is happening: • Politicians are in some ways "public figures" and have no privacy; but in other ways have already had their lives engineered systematically to ensure their privacy (coincidentally, in the name of national security) — down to being told what apps they can and can't install, using special secure phones, having meetings in special secure rooms, being driven around in the back of sound-proofed limousines, etc. Politicians have an entirely out-of-whack experience of "privacy" compared to anyone else, and so don't really understand that "privacy" is, for the average citizen, something maintained these days mostly by making market purchasing choices to use "privacy-preserving" technologies instead of "privacy-violating" ones; and that the existence of these privacy-preserving technology products/services are not enshrined in law, and can easily be annihilated by accident by bills that seek to do something else (e.g. protect children.) • Along with this, those in the "deep state" that politicians speak to about technology and privacy issues, are themselves in the strange position of having been thoroughly picked over (security-cleared) as having absolutely nothing interesting about them that they would need to keep private. Departments entirely composed of such individuals, will have extremely skewed views on the need for privacy. (Thus why such departments elsewhere, had no internal revulsion to implementing e.g. PRISM — nobody in the room had anything to hide that PRISM would expose!) • And also, the political parties, the "deep state", and any associated parts of government (e.g. an appointed judiciary) are all generally seniority-based systems. Which means that, inevitably, the people at the top who make most of the long-term decisions and "steer the ship" (not the Prime Minister, nor the MPs — but rather, party leaders, and the long-serving heads of departments working directly below cabinet ministers, etc) are all quite old. These "old hands" generally no longer attempt to keep up with the rapid pace of technological progress, and have fallen far-enough behind the curve that they have no sense for the current technological landscape having a major dividing axis of "privacy-violating" or "privacy-preserving" that a citizen might feel the need to care about. Instead, these "old hands" just feel a kind of Amish-like hesitance toward all technology — fear for what technology could do/enable. They hear reports from citizens about what some (usually privacy-violating) technologies have done; and rather than this moving them to opinions regarding privacy, this instead reinforces their beliefs about technology itself as being a modern boogeyman — with technology companies not serving the public good, and therefore technology-sector lobbyists and their pet issues being actively deprioritized vs other lobbies (esp in this case: the crime-reduction lobby.) Which means that these "old hands" are tuning out the words of Google and Meta (probably for the best!) but also tuning out the words of the EFF (very bad!) --- I'm sorry to say that I personally have no suggestions for what to do about any of these effects. They seem pretty inherent in the design of the informal institutions themselves. We could perhaps formalize these institutions, such that they could be regulated? Reify "political parties" and "executive departments" as their own concepts in law, and legislate their leadership structure and selection processes, to prevent them from defaulting to seniority? But I feel like this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater — there's a lot we gain by having short-serving elected politicians (who can say what the public wants these days), working together with long-serving public servants and appointees (who have seen all this before, and can keep long-term-project balls in the air.) It seems somewhat obvious to me that even doing nothing, generational shift will help. Once the leaders of these institutions pass on, and are replaced by leaders who grew up in the current technological milieu, a concern for privacy might arise, with the government then seeking to backpedal on the erosion of privacy that has come before. This might take another 30 years, though. And although they'll then be conscious of privacy, something else — something that is only coming into the public consciousness as an issue today, and which likewise won't have an effect on the political class — will likely be left to erode in its place, due to those politicians having no foundational experience with it.

6510 2y ago

To state the obvious: If you go there (or require diplomas and/or licenses to access material) the requirements won't be static enough to rule out obvious stupid shit being included.

orwin 2y ago

If it's not a zero knowledge system, it's a bad system. I know i will trigger the ancaps here, but this is typically a case where the government has to be on it, and _has_ to be great. Like a secret, digital ID that will allow you to generate a code easily (with both an app for the ease of access, and a website where you just have to input your ID and a validation code that change every X years and that you receive with your voter ID or something). This code is an auth token to an API that will just respond "OK" if the token is a valid token, but should have no idea who issued it. The advantage is that if you extends it to be send before an online purchase, or to be send SM to limit some features before like, 16 yo, you can make it so that even if the government lies and tries to identify who generated the auth token, if multiple private companies use a third party SaaS to handle it, the government can't know why the token was used.