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For those wondering what the purpose is: https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/architecture-and-technical-specifications/#23-user-journey https:

For those wondering what the purpose is: https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/architecture-and-technical-specifications/#23-user-journey https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/archit... https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/media/Figure_1_user_journey.png https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/media/... Essentially, the core user journey is a privacy preserving "over 18" check. I suppose this prevents under 18's from accessing porn, in the same way that most blocking technologies impose an expense on everyone but fail to block tech-savvy children. Doesn't seem like it could ever stop someone with a bittorrent client, unless you have to attest you are over 18 to even use bittorrent.

GaggiX 1y ago
>but fail to block tech-savvy children. If I were a kid, I could see myself downloading Opera GX and enabling the free VPN. It's probably not "tech-savvy" because the browser gets a lot of ad views on YouTube; it would be pretty obvious.
- avidiax 1y ago
  Or using a torrent. Or trading a fileshare with your friends. Or finding a box in the woods. Or finding dad's "tax returns" folder. Or getting on TOR. Or finding an open directory. Or asking AI to produce something. Basically anything other than going to a legally compliant website and trying to attach your mom's passport to the age verification app and doing the challenge.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    > Or finding dad's "tax returns" folder. I would want to sit in on this audit.
    - SauciestGNU 1y ago
      Are you coming onto his dad?
latentsea 1y ago
I think social media does more damage than porn. We should just instead legislate that all social media has to shutdown and just let everyone watch porn and be done with it. Sure, you wind up with ED if you watch that stuff since you were a kid, but hey, if birth rates around the world are anything to go by, no one seems to really want to bring children into this world anymore anyway, so it's not as if that actually matters anymore. I think I have become far too cynical.
- avidiax 1y ago
  The one good thing (in principle) about a service like this is that social media is much more centralized, so this kind of system could put seemingly-effective age restrictions on social media. For example, no under-14's, or under-14 requires a supervising guardian and has other guardrails. But this still wouldn't stop determined kids from VPNing to another country to make their account, and wouldn't stop peer pressure on kids from bleeding to parents to help them.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    Or you know the government could stay out of it and parents that wanted kids to stay off of social media could use the existing parental controls.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      Be careful about telling parents to parent. For some reason people do not like being told that it is the parents' job, and not the Government's.
    - juanani 1y ago
      [dead]
    - bigbacaloa 1y ago
      [dead]
    - _w1tm 1y ago
zeta0134 1y ago
I keep coming back to the actual solution being to keep kids off the internet period. If you are under 18, and online without some sort of adult supervision, we have failed you. Maybe that ship has sailed with so much coursework requiring online access, but I maintain that perhaps we should declare it lost at sea and try again. Because the practical reality here is, like, porn is the big scary word, but the actual danger to kids is *other people.* Other addictions still exist. Removing one vice without solving the underlying systemic problem merely shifts the goalposts, and everyone is up in arms about what a slippery slope that is for good reason. EDIT: Clarity here because I phrased that badly in a hurry: I'm in disfavor of internet access being a requirement for schoolwork, but I failed to set that context initially. If parents trust their kids enough with access, once they've reached a certain point of maturity, that's fine. I'm against technological age gates and I'm against removal of bad content from the net at large. Parents should decide when their kids are ready, and guide them appropriately. I will leave my original remarks unedited so the remaining discussion is sensible. (Sorry!)
- sillysaurusx 1y ago
  Couldn’t disagree more. I watched my first beheading video at 13, let alone porn. I still remember it, Nick Berg. I think I turned out ok. My online freedom was largely why I became who I am. As for other people being the danger, there’s some truth to that for women. I have a daughter, so this will be a concern. But you know, she won’t die. Everyone goes through trauma. The key here is to make sure she feels comfortable enough to talk to me and to my wife before doing anything (too) stupid. I snuck out of my parents’ house to go see a girl when I was 16. Took my dad’s station wagon. On the way, some car tried to pass me and ended up hitting a big truck on the side. Truck was fine, I was fine, that fella was not. He ended up on the side of the road. Me and trucker just kept going. I still think about that guy a lot, because obviously the correct thing to do would have been to call 911, but I was a dumb 16yo who was out past midnight to go see a girl. Point is, if things went a little differently, I could have been the one who crashed, or even dead. But that doesn’t mean that the girl I was going to go see was somehow a threat to me. It means I was doing something dangerous. Again, this is easy to say as a man. The threat model for women is different. But prohibiting minors from the internet without supervision is totally absurd, and I feel bad for any parent who helicopters their kids like that. Ultimately your kid will grow up and have their own life. Do you want to be remembered as the parent who had them under lock and key in the name of safety, or as a parent who monitored from a distance and occasionally let them do stupid things so that they could learn from it? For me, the latter is far more preferable.
washadjeffmad 1y ago
It seems reversed, that the default is legal eligibility, and that minors should need to prove their status. They're the ones who need policing, after all, not us. For instance, it's not illegal for me to be served alcohol. If I'm not carded when being sold a drink, nothing illegal has taken place. If the lawmakers are being cowards and not saying they want to round up and ID all the children from birth until they are eligible to participate in the adult world, that's their battle to fight and not our burden.
wkat4242 1y ago
If they could have stopped BitTorrent they would have long ago. So no, this is totally ineffective. And it's not like there's actually a problem. There's no crisis of messed up kids or young adults. We all had access to porn in some form and we all turned out fine. I used to watch the late night pay tv which was just 'scrambled' by removing the sync signal. It was easy to put that back with some electronics chops. I saw my share of gangbangs and cumshots and I did not get messed up or get weird ideas. In fact I often get compliments I'm a sensitive and caring lover. I never do or push for the dirty porn tropes (unless she asks for them :) So did most of my school friends. Also video tapes got passed on at school and later CDroms (when the writable DVD came I was already an adult). We all had plenty. This is all to mitigate a "crisis" which doesn't actually exist.
- druskacik 1y ago
  There's a difference between passing on video tapes and having a pocket machine with an unlimited amount of adult content. Just my opinion, but I think it's worrying kids can access it in basically a few clicks. But I agree, forcing verification will not be effective enough, kids will find their way. The real solution is more education on this topic from younger age.
  - Aachen 1y ago
    Some porn videos were shared via Bluetooth in my school. From my perception, things you get from real people makes you more likely to think it's something real you ought to know about and not just an internet thing. Seems much better to me that kids can discover it on their own terms and know it for what it is
    - OJFord 1y ago
      Every six months or so I'm amused remember that Bluetooth used to be synonymous with file transfer, verbified even.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Then don't give your kid a smartphone. Even with a safety argument - a regular cell phone does that. The smartphone is just not necessary at a young age. It's a choice and it comes with consequences. Parents can step up if they so choose - the problem is they don't choose. If even the exact parents a child don't care, why should I? They've decided it's okay, and it's their kid. I'm inclined to just agree with them and move on.
ozgrakkurt 1y ago
So they are doing this to block the children that are able to “hack” their phones, from watching porn. Don’t know how to describe how insane this is
drtgh 1y ago
> Essentially, the core user journey is a privacy preserving "over 18" check. You can not check the age without breaking the privacy, technically it is Not possible; this is like a religious faith exercise, not science. What one read in the specification is, firstly you install an official software in your device, the device becomes identified "as you" the first time you verify your ID and receive your unique internet ID hash, linked to your personal data at the identifier platform. In addition, your unique internet ID hash will become you, and each time a Non-porn-related platform ask for it, you will leave track of who are you -as internet ID- to the platform (finger printing), and also what you visit to the identifier platform. Yeah, I said Non-porn-related platform, literally, because what we are reading here is about an Internet digital ID hash for each EU citizen, Lets be clear, if it were to protect the children from porn, it would say "verify with the personal internet ID only for porn sites", in company with all the adjectives derived from porn, exclusively, with specificity, nothing more. But what we are seeing here about this matter is deliberately open to interpretation, they say "platform that can be considered to be accessible to minors"... boom, What does this mean, News for adults? Criticise a corrupt government for adults? In my village this is called a back door trojan, because when they want they redact the directives, laws, with precision. Anyway, I invite the reader to take a look to the Digital ID directive on its own, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1183/ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1183/ (2024) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/ (2022) After this, they only have to define progressively, frog cooking time, and increase the affected Internet platforms with obligatory identification, and then we will think that the Great Chinese Firewall was a children game compared with this. The "it's to protect the children" political tactic to break privacy is quite old. In addition we should remember the other EU law about breaking the encryptions. My humble opinion. PS: Ironically no more of two months ago I was saying that as I was European I have freedom and I didn't need a tooling for circumvent something like the Russian and Chinese censure. Oh my... If I were know this, I was absolutely blind about what someones try to cook.

GaggiX 1y ago

>but fail to block tech-savvy children. If I were a kid, I could see myself downloading Opera GX and enabling the free VPN. It's probably not "tech-savvy" because the browser gets a lot of ad views on YouTube; it would be pretty obvious.

avidiax 1y ago
Or using a torrent. Or trading a fileshare with your friends. Or finding a box in the woods. Or finding dad's "tax returns" folder. Or getting on TOR. Or finding an open directory. Or asking AI to produce something. Basically anything other than going to a legally compliant website and trying to attach your mom's passport to the age verification app and doing the challenge.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  > Or finding dad's "tax returns" folder. I would want to sit in on this audit.
  - SauciestGNU 1y ago
    Are you coming onto his dad?

latentsea 1y ago

I think social media does more damage than porn. We should just instead legislate that all social media has to shutdown and just let everyone watch porn and be done with it. Sure, you wind up with ED if you watch that stuff since you were a kid, but hey, if birth rates around the world are anything to go by, no one seems to really want to bring children into this world anymore anyway, so it's not as if that actually matters anymore. I think I have become far too cynical.

avidiax 1y ago
The one good thing (in principle) about a service like this is that social media is much more centralized, so this kind of system could put seemingly-effective age restrictions on social media. For example, no under-14's, or under-14 requires a supervising guardian and has other guardrails. But this still wouldn't stop determined kids from VPNing to another country to make their account, and wouldn't stop peer pressure on kids from bleeding to parents to help them.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Or you know the government could stay out of it and parents that wanted kids to stay off of social media could use the existing parental controls.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    Be careful about telling parents to parent. For some reason people do not like being told that it is the parents' job, and not the Government's.
  - juanani 1y ago
    [dead]
  - bigbacaloa 1y ago
    [dead]
  - _w1tm 1y ago

zeta0134 1y ago

I keep coming back to the actual solution being to keep kids off the internet period. If you are under 18, and online without some sort of adult supervision, we have failed you. Maybe that ship has sailed with so much coursework requiring online access, but I maintain that perhaps we should declare it lost at sea and try again. Because the practical reality here is, like, porn is the big scary word, but the actual danger to kids is *other people.* Other addictions still exist. Removing one vice without solving the underlying systemic problem merely shifts the goalposts, and everyone is up in arms about what a slippery slope that is for good reason. EDIT: Clarity here because I phrased that badly in a hurry: I'm in disfavor of internet access being a requirement for schoolwork, but I failed to set that context initially. If parents trust their kids enough with access, once they've reached a certain point of maturity, that's fine. I'm against technological age gates and I'm against removal of bad content from the net at large. Parents should decide when their kids are ready, and guide them appropriately. I will leave my original remarks unedited so the remaining discussion is sensible. (Sorry!)

sillysaurusx 1y ago
Couldn’t disagree more. I watched my first beheading video at 13, let alone porn. I still remember it, Nick Berg. I think I turned out ok. My online freedom was largely why I became who I am. As for other people being the danger, there’s some truth to that for women. I have a daughter, so this will be a concern. But you know, she won’t die. Everyone goes through trauma. The key here is to make sure she feels comfortable enough to talk to me and to my wife before doing anything (too) stupid. I snuck out of my parents’ house to go see a girl when I was 16. Took my dad’s station wagon. On the way, some car tried to pass me and ended up hitting a big truck on the side. Truck was fine, I was fine, that fella was not. He ended up on the side of the road. Me and trucker just kept going. I still think about that guy a lot, because obviously the correct thing to do would have been to call 911, but I was a dumb 16yo who was out past midnight to go see a girl. Point is, if things went a little differently, I could have been the one who crashed, or even dead. But that doesn’t mean that the girl I was going to go see was somehow a threat to me. It means I was doing something dangerous. Again, this is easy to say as a man. The threat model for women is different. But prohibiting minors from the internet without supervision is totally absurd, and I feel bad for any parent who helicopters their kids like that. Ultimately your kid will grow up and have their own life. Do you want to be remembered as the parent who had them under lock and key in the name of safety, or as a parent who monitored from a distance and occasionally let them do stupid things so that they could learn from it? For me, the latter is far more preferable.

washadjeffmad 1y ago

It seems reversed, that the default is legal eligibility, and that minors should need to prove their status. They're the ones who need policing, after all, not us. For instance, it's not illegal for me to be served alcohol. If I'm not carded when being sold a drink, nothing illegal has taken place. If the lawmakers are being cowards and not saying they want to round up and ID all the children from birth until they are eligible to participate in the adult world, that's their battle to fight and not our burden.

wkat4242 1y ago

If they could have stopped BitTorrent they would have long ago. So no, this is totally ineffective. And it's not like there's actually a problem. There's no crisis of messed up kids or young adults. We all had access to porn in some form and we all turned out fine. I used to watch the late night pay tv which was just 'scrambled' by removing the sync signal. It was easy to put that back with some electronics chops. I saw my share of gangbangs and cumshots and I did not get messed up or get weird ideas. In fact I often get compliments I'm a sensitive and caring lover. I never do or push for the dirty porn tropes (unless she asks for them :) So did most of my school friends. Also video tapes got passed on at school and later CDroms (when the writable DVD came I was already an adult). We all had plenty. This is all to mitigate a "crisis" which doesn't actually exist.

druskacik 1y ago
There's a difference between passing on video tapes and having a pocket machine with an unlimited amount of adult content. Just my opinion, but I think it's worrying kids can access it in basically a few clicks. But I agree, forcing verification will not be effective enough, kids will find their way. The real solution is more education on this topic from younger age.
- Aachen 1y ago
  Some porn videos were shared via Bluetooth in my school. From my perception, things you get from real people makes you more likely to think it's something real you ought to know about and not just an internet thing. Seems much better to me that kids can discover it on their own terms and know it for what it is
  - OJFord 1y ago
    Every six months or so I'm amused remember that Bluetooth used to be synonymous with file transfer, verbified even.
- const_cast 1y ago
  Then don't give your kid a smartphone. Even with a safety argument - a regular cell phone does that. The smartphone is just not necessary at a young age. It's a choice and it comes with consequences. Parents can step up if they so choose - the problem is they don't choose. If even the exact parents a child don't care, why should I? They've decided it's okay, and it's their kid. I'm inclined to just agree with them and move on.

ozgrakkurt 1y ago

So they are doing this to block the children that are able to “hack” their phones, from watching porn. Don’t know how to describe how insane this is

drtgh 1y ago

> Essentially, the core user journey is a privacy preserving "over 18" check. You can not check the age without breaking the privacy, technically it is Not possible; this is like a religious faith exercise, not science. What one read in the specification is, firstly you install an official software in your device, the device becomes identified "as you" the first time you verify your ID and receive your unique internet ID hash, linked to your personal data at the identifier platform. In addition, your unique internet ID hash will become you, and each time a Non-porn-related platform ask for it, you will leave track of who are you -as internet ID- to the platform (finger printing), and also what you visit to the identifier platform. Yeah, I said Non-porn-related platform, literally, because what we are reading here is about an Internet digital ID hash for each EU citizen, Lets be clear, if it were to protect the children from porn, it would say "verify with the personal internet ID only for porn sites", in company with all the adjectives derived from porn, exclusively, with specificity, nothing more. But what we are seeing here about this matter is deliberately open to interpretation, they say "platform that can be considered to be accessible to minors"... boom, What does this mean, News for adults? Criticise a corrupt government for adults? In my village this is called a back door trojan, because when they want they redact the directives, laws, with precision. Anyway, I invite the reader to take a look to the Digital ID directive on its own, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1183/ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1183/ (2024) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/ (2022) After this, they only have to define progressively, frog cooking time, and increase the affected Internet platforms with obligatory identification, and then we will think that the Great Chinese Firewall was a children game compared with this. The "it's to protect the children" political tactic to break privacy is quite old. In addition we should remember the other EU law about breaking the encryptions. My humble opinion. PS: Ironically no more of two months ago I was saying that as I was European I have freedom and I didn't need a tooling for circumvent something like the Russian and Chinese censure. Oh my... If I were know this, I was absolutely blind about what someones try to cook.