16 ms·

"Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit

252 points by Refreeze5224 1y ago

RajT88 1y ago
Also, water wet.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Muromec 1y ago
I'm confused. Author puts crypto backdors and IDP with ZKP into the same bucket and calls it "nerding harder". But why? You can have identity provider, several European countries do and you can have subcredentials. You literally can nerd harder here. Sure, there is a strong ideological argument why you should not have strong identities required in the internet in general (or even in offline) and on porn sites specifically, but the argument is not technical.
- thyristan 1y ago
  But it is. In those European countries, IDPs and certification authorities are one and the same entity. So the technical requirement of privacy evaporates, the government will always know who is proving their age to which porn site.
  - therein 1y ago
    I don't know why you are downvoted. And even more disappointingly, it is interesting how easily people overlook the fact that this is happening in lockstep across the globe, obviously the goal is to deanonymize the internet. I can't wait for the next generation that will enjoy "nerding out" on how to best patrol every neighborhood with drones. Let's put NFC tags on everyone at birth, we can then nerd out harder.
  - ivan_gammel 1y ago
    That’s easy to fix. The IdP and the checking service do not have to be the same. The checking service can be a 3rd party that works with IdP verifying facts on behalf of regulated services like porn sites. The job of IdP is to certify the facts and do KYC for checkers to ensure they don’t cheat. The regulated service can ask customer which checker do they use and then ask the checker. The customer may have a long term relationship with preferred checker on a market where multiple checkers exist and reputation matters for being competitive. This way checker is incentivized to maintain privacy and does not have conflicts of interest like the government. Government agencies can still investigate customers but they will need a court order to get the data from checkers.
    - raxxorraxor 1y ago
      In Germany police illegally accessed contact list from apps verifying your vaccination status for corona. I don't see it differently here and it is no use for victims if the courts are included later. The simple reality is that no state is adult enough to handle this responsibility. Why should I accept the berlin internet wall anywhere? Any ecosystem should fight back against such ambitions. If it really is about protecting kids, there could be some easy laws improving their privacy. These are not wanted. As well as there is no political will to restrict tracking for advertising and gambling.
    - crote 1y ago
      And how is the general public supposed to verify that the IdP and checking service aren't collaborating? If it is possible for a checking service to create a log, given how Big Tech has been treating user data, how can we ever trust that they aren't logging everyone's data? Reputation is irrelevant. Everyone is trustworthy - until they are not. The dark web is filled with data leaks from reputable parties.
      - ivan_gammel 1y ago
        How general public is supposed to believe that lawyers do not collaborate with prosecutors? The trust has to be somewhere, so it seems quite natural that the most trustworthy entity is the one whose sole reason to exist is to protect your data.
  - tzs 1y ago
    IDPs and certificate authorities can be the same with no problem if you design your protocol so that the porn sites do not see your certificates. E.g., IDP issues you signed identity credentials. To prove age to the porn site a ZKP is used to prove to the porn site that you have signed credentials that give you age as 18+ but without giving the porn site any information other than that. The ZKP approach is what the EU is doing. Note that in the article the objection to ZKP systems is not that they don't work correctly (because they do work). It is that it can be hard for some people to obtain IDs, it may cost to much for some sites, it could be hard to regulate IDPs effectively, and things like that.
    - Muromec 1y ago
      The point they are making is the privacy protection doesn't extend both ways. There are two ways the information can leak: - from the IDP to a port side, so the porn site will know what's your name (what a shame, how would I pretend it didn't happen after I close the tab); - from the porn site to the IDP -- now your government knows that you watch porn and maybe the exact type of porn, so they can charge you a different tax rate for being straight. Then of course, just by correlating ip addresses and timestamps in logs of the IDP and the porn site one can deanonimyze the visitors. Or just by ip in the logs itself because you don't pay your ISP in bitcoins.
      - tzs 1y ago
        Neither of those ways works in ZKP systems like the EU is in the process of doing or the one Google recently released open source libraries for. The way these work is that the IDP issues a signed digital ID that is stored in a hardware security module tied to you. Typically this would be in your smartphone but could be something else like a smart card. Let's go with a smartphone for the rest of this comment. Later, when you want to prove to a porn site that you are 18+ your smartphone can use a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) protocol to prove the porn site that your phone contains a signed ID from your IDP that shows your age is 18+. The ZKP proof reveals nothing else from your digital ID other than that the date of birth field is at least 18 years in the past. All the porn site finds out is that someone who has an ID from your IDP that says they are 18+ is trying to use the porn site. The IDP doesn't learn anything because they aren't involved in the age verification.
- torginus 1y ago
  These 'anonymity' technologies are laughably worthless - sure ZKP might provide mathematical proof that it's impossible to find out who the subject is, but embed a tracking cookie and fingerprinting script into both the porn site, and the online grocery - and there you go, you have irrefutable cryptographic evidence of how John Doe likes to spend his evenings.
  - ivan_gammel 1y ago
    As soon as fingerprinting becomes criminal offense, this will end quickly. Nobody big enough is going to risk that.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Hamuko 1y ago
      Isn't it basically illegal under the GDPR? You're not allowed to just collect data for the hell of it and need actual consent.
      - torginus 1y ago
        The GDPR is a fucking joke even on the best of days. If other laws were like it, they would be like: You're not allowed to steal (unless you really need to), but if you do, take as little as you can (as determined by you), and you have to give it back as soon as you can (again, according to you), and if the person you stole from wants it back, you have to (unless you have a good reason not to)
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - tzs 1y ago
    The porn site and the grocery can already embed a tracking cookie and do fingerprinting to match their visitors.
JanisErdmanis 1y ago
How would setting up a primary credential with an identity provider differ from the process of registering to vote for USA citizens? All the discrimination opportunities and accountability issues seem to apply equally there.
- lmz 1y ago
  The same people who argue this will also argue that voter ID rules are discriminatory.
  - sltkr 1y ago
    Are the laws that require you to show ID to buy alcohol, tobacco, fire arms, or gamble in casinos also discriminatory? Or is it only discriminatory when you prevent people without IDs from watching porn?
    - mattnewton 1y ago
      The definition of Porn by the state can change to include things that some people consider protected by the first amendment - right now there are a lot of state politicians or members of the house on record supporting classifying discussion of LGBTQ lifestyles as pornography for example. I think alcohol, tobacco and gambling here are mostly irrelevant, but the firearms is a better example because of the second amendment, where you have a clash between a very old right granted by the bill of rights clashing with modern societies beliefs.
    - 9rx 1y ago
      > Are the laws that require you to show ID to buy alcohol, tobacco, fire arms, or gamble in casinos also discriminatory? So long as it is done for a legitimate purpose and in good faith, generally no. As such, IDs are only expected where there is reasonable suspicion of possible violation. For example, there is no onus, with a few exceptions, to see an elderly person's ID to buy alcohol when there is no reason to think that they aren't below the minimum age. The exceptions haven't really been tested. It very well could be found discriminatory, and you could make a pretty good case that it is. Which is ultimately the same case being made earlier. Asking a no-question-about-it 50 year old to provide his ID to watch porn isn't really in good faith, is it?
charcircuit 1y ago
>politicians all over the world demanded a kind of impossible encryption It's not impossible to design a cryptographic system where law enforcement is a party within it. The false dichotomy of encrypted or not encrypted in my opinion is used to shutdown the conversation since it's easy to argue why no encryption is bad. It's a strawman.
- thyristan 1y ago
  Then please prove the possibility by doing so. Up to now, there has only been intense wishful thinking by politicians, and strong "NOPE" by anyone with any kind of knowledge about cryptography. Either really everyone, including the likes of NSA, CIA and other spy services don't actually employ top cryptographers. Or they repeatedly tried and failed miserably. Or really nobody, including the spies, wants backdoored NOBUS encryption.
  - loglog 1y ago
    NSA does probably want it, and did probably standardized at least one such scheme in the past: Dual_EC_DRBG.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  It's impossible to design a cryptographic system that does end-to-end encryption and has a backdoor that can never be misused. No technical solution will address the fact that it's failing at its one job.
- jgeada 1y ago
  That is a bad faith argument. As soon as there is another untrusted party in the encryption, an in particular a party with a "skeleton key" that can decrypt anybody's message, then your encrypted communications are merely one leak away from being decoded by everybody else.
  - aaronmdjones 1y ago
    If there's one thing you can trust a government to do, it's to not be able to keep secrets for very long. https://www.vice.com/en/article/hackers-published-replicas-and-blueprints-to-tsa-master-luggage-keys/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/hackers-published-replicas-a...
Seattle3503 1y ago
To me it seems like Cory Doctorow is demanding perfection, and saying that because we can't achieve perfection in age verification, we can't do age verification at all. That isn't going to stop people from trying, and we will end up with a worse system overall. IMO this is a common pitfall of techno-idealists. Technologies like the mdl standard [1] can attest to age without revealing the users identity. As Cory points out, its still possible for kids to swipe someones ID and use that. There are probably practical solutions that are good enough. Android, iOS, and parents could work together to deal with the problem of stolen IDs. If mdl is implemented on devices such that they are managed by the device OS, that would lead to auditability. Parents can ask their child to see their phones ID app, which will show full roster of IDs on the child's device. If a parent sees an ID that shouldn't be there, they can have a conversation about it. In this way the law would be about empowering parents to shape their child's online experience. This is just a straw-man example solution, but there may be better ones. The other objections I saw could be worked through in a similarly pragmatic fashion. This is probably going to be good enough for most folks, and its probably a good thing to keep children away from pornography and such. And IMO coming up with a "good enough" solution will flush out all the bad actors who are hiding behind the excuse of "save the children" when really they want to build up an record of everyone's browsing history. But by denying any solution to a real problem, we let the bad actors hide amongst the well-intentioned folks who are trying to do the right thing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_driver%27s_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_driver%27s_license
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  All the govt needs to do is send fines to offenders and the industry will be forced to implement one or more solutions. The govt doesn't care how you verify age only that you don't sell to minors.
  - wmf 1y ago
    Experience with GDPR and DSA shows that the fines lag years behind the abuses.
  - crote 1y ago
dathinab 1y ago
> "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit it is possible if you accept that it only needs to be good enough - it's fully okay if it can be deceived in all kinds of ways - verifying only once per account is okay, if a adult passes their verified account to a child that their responsibility - legally not just forbid but criminalize (with required prison sentence) the storing of any data except is adult yes/no from a age verification process - allow a OS accounts to just tell applications (including websites) that "is 18", if a age verification was done in the account, also no singing or anything cryptographically, because again it's good enough no need to protect it against hacking, the main responsibility still lies with the parents so then you can do a single age verification per OS account, once, and be done with furthermore this verification could e.g. go through a process which might identify you identity but a) isn't allowed to pass anything but adult yes/no to anyone else b) isn't allowed to store that info c) on a storing it is a "criminal liability" level where a CTO ordering data collection would go to prison through if you live in a country where everyone has a passport with NFC chips (e.g. all of EU) just adding a "adult yes/no" function(1) to it + a transparent (open source, non profit) app per country to bridge it to accounts which need verification would do the job without needing the extra strict criminalize abuse part. Which brings us to the main problem: - requiring politicians to accept a "good enough" solution, accept that the main responsibility still lies with the parent - politicians not abusing it to spy on their population - make laws to prevent companies from ab-using "age verification" to collect private data and that seems indeed impossible --- (1): Technically I think it does exist, somewhat in many passes already. But practically it not viable as it (I think) discloses too much information and has too much issues wrt. integrating it (wrt. certificate nonsense)
- loglog 1y ago
  No cryptographic verification is required for content blocking. Make it easy to set up a slightly locked down "child" account (e.g. one behind a MITM proxy that only lets through HTTP(S) and blocks some domains) by requiring it from every OS vendor. Label existing devices/software without it "18+".
aktuel 1y ago
Not just age verification. The whole security circus is bs. Kids cannot go outside by themselves anymore. They have to wear helmets while being constantly monitored. None of it has brought us to a better place. Fuck it. Just fuck it.
torginus 1y ago
The problem is not only that it's impossible to make cryptography that's only secure when the good guys use it, it's that once cryptography is made insecure, it's insecure for everyone, forever. I'm not a privacy hardliner, and I think the socially acceptable tradeoff between privacy and security have been well established before the computer era - if the police has a well-enough established suspicion against you - they can get a warrant and search your home. That's due process. I would accept if there was a digital version of that which targeted not the encryption itself (which could be as strong as possible) - but the endpoints, like smartphones and computers. Let's say police had a device which they could plug into your phone, which would send a specially signed message - a digital warrant, containing all the info a real warrant would - which be permanently be burned into the ROM of your phone, after which the phone would surrender its encryption keys, and the police could dump your unencrypted disk. The phone would be then presented as evidence at the trial, and not following due process would be a cause for mistrial, no matter what they find there. The general public would be safe in the knowledge that as long as the police isn't hauling them in, their secrets are safe, and the government would get the tools for what they claimed they wanted - a way to catch bad guys with digital tools.
- buzer 1y ago
  > Let's say police had a device which they could plug into your phone, which would send a specially signed message - a digital warrant, containing all the info a real warrant would - which be permanently be burned into the ROM of your phone, after which the phone would surrender its encryption keys, and the police could dump your unencrypted disk. And when (not if) that device leaks whoever steals your phone will be able to get access all of the things in there.
  - torginus 1y ago
    I'd imagine such devices would be very tightly controlled, being hard to access for civilians, and lets say limited to 1 such device per 1m people(which would also give you an idea of what sort of frequency this is supposed to be used). The keys for every phone would be stored in a central repo, with a separate key for every phoneX every decryptor(which has its own private key). Meaning you'd need a device and the central repo to access users data. But lets say they manage to build a bootleg version, what would be the criminal gain for them? Reading the data doesn't mean they can impersonate you, as the device wouldn't give you access to private keys used for authentication (lets even say these are deleted), only encryption. The criminals could brick your phone and read your texts. There's only very niche cases when this would be worth it to them, like you're the subject of a highly targeted intelligence gathering op.
mzhaase 1y ago
So in Germany we have an ID card with a PIN, NFC and a government app. Website owners can request to be able to use this feature. They then get a certificate from the government that has the fields they are allowed to request stored within it. Websites can request data from the user by sending that certificate, it opens the app, it shows you the categories of data to be send, you hold your ID card to the phone, enter the PIN, and the certificate is uploaded to the ID card which verifies it. If its valid, the ID sends back the data that is specified in the certificate. You then get presented with exactly the data that is going to be sent to the website. You can then agree or disagree. So far that is only used to log in to government websites. This way the government does not know which sites you visit, and you only send your age to the website.
- fabian2k 1y ago
  It's even more restrictive than than, for age verification you only get back whether the person is above the age limit or not, it's a boolean response. So I think from that view the eID works pretty well, it provides the minimal necessary information. The bigger issue with something like this is if you use them to enforce real name policies or stuff like that.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
    That still results in the government knowing you connected to that website though. Edit: unless there’s a blind middleman that has tight data policies?
    - number6 1y ago
      I think it does not know. The app is open source and it just sends the Boolean. The government just gives out the id cards - they are not involved in the verification process
      - Hamuko 1y ago
        I know the whitelabel EU app is open source but are the derivatives going to be? As far as I understand it, every EU country will release its own version of the app.
kazinator 1y ago
If you're a web person who understands SSL, privacy-preserving age verification can be explained by analogy. It's a system which requires a central agency, probably a government agency, analogous to a certificate authority. You are authenticated with that agency; it has personal info about you. But you are externally identified by some impersonal identifier, not your name. The agency issues you a certificate binding this identifier to an assertion like "is over 18 years old". When you interact with a site that wants to know whether you are over 18 years old, you present the certificate. The site can see that it's signed by the authority and that it has the assertion that you are over 18. You can't just give that site someone else's certificate because it has to be the one tied to the abstract identity you are presenting (which contains no personal info; it's some kind of UUID or whatever). Plus the cert can be bound to a specific device and such. The cert has a private keys with which you can prove that you own that cert; or at least that you are the authenticated operator of a device to which that cert was issued. It's something like that. I may have some key details wrong. The main idea is that some brokerage that does have info about you can attest that you are over 18 without revealing any of the personal info via certificate-like objects. It sounds like, in theory, the system can achieve good privacy in age verification. But not perfect age verification; people will find ways around it. A grown up can certify themselves to be over 18 and then hand the device to a teenager; and such an operation can likely be scaled to some extent. And of course no cryptographic system can eliminate the possibility that minors are looking at the screen of a device operated by an adult, who may even step out of the way to let them operate it.
- LegionMammal978 1y ago
  > (which contains no personal info; it's some kind of UUID or whatever) And now all the websites have an uncircumventible and highly reliable fingerprinting scheme to track you across literally anywhere. Only identity thieves care about whatever data the agency would be safeguarding: linking up accounts between websites is more than enough for anyone else who would want to abuse that information.
  - kazinator 1y ago
    I'm pretty sure I don't have all the details right. There is a zero-knowledge proof which allows a browser session to assert that the user is over 18 without using any static bits that allow for fingerprinting.
irchans 1y ago
Even after reading the article, I think there are reasonable ways to set up a low cost system that uses zero-knowledge proofs to "prove" your age without disclosing your identity. I do think that you will need trusted entities and the system will only stop most, maybe 80 or 90 percent of children under 18 from seeing porn. But, if you do this, then maybe 99% of kids under the age of 14 will have a lot of difficulty viewing porn which is a good thing. There may be valid a slippery slope argument for not setting up the age validation system even if everything I said above is true.
- Seattle3503 1y ago
  Yeah, I think even if we only manage to delay the "age of first porn viewing" to something like 14-15, thats probably a win.
  - jofla_net 1y ago
    Maybe, but as a parent, I believe its an embarrassment to expect to radically retrofit a society in such ways as to make up for my own negligent lack of responsibility for my own children, which I do take quite seriously. Not to mention the myriad of resultant unintended consequences which invariably arise when such systems(of which i'm quite familiar) are brought to bear. Though I do speak from such a position of professional neutrality, as I would gain no benefit at all from implementing such a ubiquitously mandated system. Perhaps if things were different, I'd think otherwise.
    - doright 1y ago
      In my opinion "we need mandatory age verification" is an admission that we can't really address the overarching issue of parents that can't/won't parent at a good enough level. Narcissistic parenting without any added access to questionable content on a smartphone is still... narcissistic parenting. The definition of "parent better" differs between people and is often non-negotiable, even way before anything involving CPS occurs. Not to mention, the content being withheld will become available at adulthood anyway, and can still be harmful if the person has not been given the tools to navigate it well. Admittedly the bar is far higher with ubiquitous social media and smartphones. I'm not sure a parenting license system would ever work out in practice. Yet a lot of issues stemming from upbringing can cause irreversible harm and I don't feel like those root causes are brought up that much in the broader discussion about mental health symptoms. It pains me to think that some amount of debilitating childhood trauma is unavoidable, but content restriction at least sounds like an actionable problem that doesn't require uprooting the fabric of society to correct.
skybrian 1y ago
You’re probably better off just reading the paper he links to: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf I think it shows the difficulty of implementing it for everyone. But Apple and Google’s cell phone implementations would probably cover most people in some countries when finished, and then there will be a long tail of people who will need cheats and workarounds. You’d be screwed if you didn’t have any friends who could help you cheat.
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  We should be considering how to kick out Apple and Google out of most countries, not give them control over something so critical !
nayuki 1y ago
I think this would be a perfect use-case for blind signatures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature Let's say every citizen has an account with their federal government, and the account can be accessed securely in some reasonable way (password, 2FA, hardware token, etc.). The government can have a public-private RSA key pair specifically for "At least 18 years old". Once the user is authenticated, he can generate a nonce and a blinding factor, multiply them together to get a blinded random number, and upload that to the government for signing. He takes the signature and unblinds it, then submits the original nonce and unblinded signature to the adult website. The website confirms that the nonce and signature is valid according to the government's public key. This system raises many questions. For example, preventing replay attacks, so the adult website will reject any nonce being reused, or mandating that a timestamp be a subcomponent of the nonce. There is the un-answerable question of how to handle the case where a legitimate adult offers valid signatures for someone else to use. There is also the question of, to what extent the adult website should be able to keep track of the underlying users (even in a hashed format) to monitor abuse, suspicious users who have too much activity, etc.
- tzs 1y ago
  The main problem with that approach I believe is that since proving your age to the porn site involves an interaction with the government site and the porn site which will occur at close to the same time. If the porn site and the government site both keep logs and someone is able to get the logs from both they might be able to match up timestamps to unmask some porn site users. A system that allows this is called "linkable". It might be possible to mitigate this by introducing delays and noise. Wait some random amount of time before giving the finishing the verification with the porn site. Have a process running on your computer that frequently generates nonces and has the government sign them. Probably better is to use a protocol that is unlinkable. There are ZKP systems that are unlinkable.
cogman10 1y ago
The big problem I have with laws like the UK has been that they solve a non-issue at the cost of large infrastructure and potential privacy problems. Teenagers have been looking at porn since forever. It's practically a trope of teens stealing their parents' porn mags. I don't think any of this has actually caused major societal issues. The proposed solutions merely require that a teen steal their parent's identification, briefly, to create a porn account and move on. Heck, they can probably buy that information online if they are innovative enough. They certainly will be selling access to their porn accounts to their classmates. And even if they don't go through all that trouble, getting a porn mag is still pretty possible in the UK. That makes this just a bad law. It doesn't meaningfully stop the problem it's meant to stop and it's expensive and intrusive. Even if privacy preserving age verification was bulletproof and perfect, you still have the access holes all over. And then there's the simple fact that other nations exist. Yes, mainstream sites will put up protections, but what about the sealand porn site? Unless the UK wants a great firewall (ala the chinese firewall), they simply aren't going to stop this problem. Even then, VPNs are common knowledge at this point due to streaming. Bad law, bad effects, and a pointless fight.
- owisd 1y ago
  Having a device in your pocket that you take everywhere with no stigma to being seen with it yet it has unlimited access to any genre of porn you can think of is hardly comparable to finding a 90s porn mag in a bush from time to time, so you can't really say this has been happening forever.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    Erotic novels have been discreet for a while. It's also not been usual to have a laptop in public since the 90s. There are definitely pictures of people perusing porn on trains (visible in reflections). Briefcases were also a thing as have been strip clubs since forever. Quick access to porn hasn't been a problem since the printing press was invented.
    - owisd 1y ago
andrewla 1y ago
Overall this article is completely correct and I agree with every point of it and have tried to make these arguments about the various ZKP proposers that I have encountered. But I almost gave up early because he can't resist the urge to take a dig: > For politicians to make good policy, they don't need to be technical experts: they need to have solid, independent, well-resourced expert agencies. Those would be the very agencies that Trump and Musk have DOGEd into oblivion ... And then in the next paragraph blithely engages in some Gell-Mann amnesia > But when it comes to tech policy, politicians get it all so goddamned wrong Expert agencies formulating clean water policies are emphatically not the reason that we have potable water. Experts in actually doing the work of producing clean water are the ones that push the standards upstream. It's a subtle but important difference. Look, it's not 2018 anymore, we survived a round of Trump and we'll survive this one and the world will not end and some things will get better and some things will get worse, but trying to tie everything back to how Trump has ruined everything is going to make your views look worse and worse as they age.
ratelimitsteve 1y ago
Remember when they passed a bunch of really strong anti-terrorism bills in the US after 9/11 and we were all super sure that it was a great idea because they promised us they'd show restraint and only use the powers they were giving themselves against the worst of the worst, then they declared vandalism to be terrorism (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-will-buy-new-tesla-show-support-musk-2025-03-11/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-will-buy-new-...)? That's how I expect "privacy-preserving age verification" to go. It's the narrow end of the wedge. Once privacy-preserving age verification is in place there will be some reason to get rid of the privacy, and we will have a fully tracked and identified internet.
lisbbb 1y ago
[flagged]
ncdm_stldr 1y ago
While I understand your point, I just wanted to point out that I am not sure if there is not technical solution to the problem. I wonder what can be done with a technology similar to this: https://huggingface.co/spaces/zama-fhe/encrypted_sentiment_analysis https://huggingface.co/spaces/zama-fhe/encrypted_sentiment_a... Or this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof Ok I didn't point the exact solution for the problem, but still it hints me that technical solutions may exist. Anyway, I am not in the side of control freaks, but still find the question interesting.
OkayPhysicist 1y ago
The key problem with this entire issue is that it's basically a morality law. There are classes of crimes that, over time, society has discovered simply do not have an enforcement mechanism less damaging than the harm they are seeking to prevent. An example is Adultery. Most people will agree that it is morally wrong to cheat on your spouse. The reason civilized countries no longer have adultery laws is not because a majority of people support the crime, it's that the level of control a government needs to exercise over its citizenry to actually enforce such a law is repugnant. The state must proscribe definitions of infidelity ( human sexuality being the mess it is, this alone is a massive headache), then engage the state apparatus to surveil people's intimate lives, and then provide a legal apparatus that prevents abuse via allegation. And for what? So that people's feelings are a little less hurt? The juice simply is not worth the squeeze. So it goes for age restrictions. Age verification creates massive potential for invasion of privacy, blackmail, censorship, and more, necessitating a massive state censorship apparatus to block foreign content, and for what? So that little Timmy's forced back into trading nudie mags at the bus stop? To save parents the onerous effort of telling their kids "no"? It's simply not worth it.
- amelius 1y ago
  Ok, but how long will it take the people in power to figure this out (again)?
  - smegger001 1y ago
    They won't (they veiw those as features not bugs) they need replaced with ones that already know.
- Illniyar 1y ago
  I think that's a bit of rationalizing. I don't thinks there's much evidence that Adultery is no longer a criminal offense because people were concerned about privacy or government control. It's that people became more secular, Adultery is considered a sin and not a crime, and modern countries instituted separation between religious and secular laws.
MattPalmer1086 1y ago
What a breathlessly overhyped post. Basically - yes we can do it technically, but there's big economic and social limitations on rolling something like it out. Hard for sure, but not bullshit. I actually found it hard to read the post - it could have been a third as long and more useful and measured. But I guess it gets clicks.
causality0 1y ago
From logical standpoint it seems pretty obvious that the person providing children access to porn is their parents when they give them an unfiltered internet connection, not the porn websites. God forbid we actually require parents to, you know, parent.
tim333 1y ago
>Others say they can estimate your age by using AI to analyze a picture of your face. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, not least of which is that biometric age estimation is notoriously unreliable when it comes to distinguishing, say, 16 or 17 year olds from 18 year olds. It doesn't matter it's unreliable telling 17 year olds from 18 year olds. This thing is to reduce the amount of porn kids are exposed to. It's not like issuing a passport or something. As long as it sort of has some positive effect. I actually did the face picture thing for Reddit. Seemed to work ok, although I'm 61 so not too near the cutoff.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Fuck national ID cards and big mother, especially in the rising tide of authoritarianism and fascism where they will be used to inventory, abduct, deport, banish, and/or disappear people.
Bender 1y ago
The only privacy preserving option is to add a single RTA header on the server side. Laws could have required any site or service that has adult or user generated content to simply add RTA [1] headers and require clients to make a best effort to detect the headers and trigger parental controls if enabled. That's it. Not perfect, nothing is. All the liability could have gone to the parents where it belongs. No third party traffic, nothing to leak, nothing to track. Simple as. Not everything has to be a service or a business model. [1] - www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
kirito1337 1y ago
Fr man, I got issues bc of that

252 points by Refreeze5224 1y ago

RajT88 1y ago

Also, water wet.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Muromec 1y ago

I'm confused. Author puts crypto backdors and IDP with ZKP into the same bucket and calls it "nerding harder". But why? You can have identity provider, several European countries do and you can have subcredentials. You literally can nerd harder here. Sure, there is a strong ideological argument why you should not have strong identities required in the internet in general (or even in offline) and on porn sites specifically, but the argument is not technical.

thyristan 1y ago
But it is. In those European countries, IDPs and certification authorities are one and the same entity. So the technical requirement of privacy evaporates, the government will always know who is proving their age to which porn site.
- therein 1y ago
  I don't know why you are downvoted. And even more disappointingly, it is interesting how easily people overlook the fact that this is happening in lockstep across the globe, obviously the goal is to deanonymize the internet. I can't wait for the next generation that will enjoy "nerding out" on how to best patrol every neighborhood with drones. Let's put NFC tags on everyone at birth, we can then nerd out harder.
- ivan_gammel 1y ago
  That’s easy to fix. The IdP and the checking service do not have to be the same. The checking service can be a 3rd party that works with IdP verifying facts on behalf of regulated services like porn sites. The job of IdP is to certify the facts and do KYC for checkers to ensure they don’t cheat. The regulated service can ask customer which checker do they use and then ask the checker. The customer may have a long term relationship with preferred checker on a market where multiple checkers exist and reputation matters for being competitive. This way checker is incentivized to maintain privacy and does not have conflicts of interest like the government. Government agencies can still investigate customers but they will need a court order to get the data from checkers.
  - raxxorraxor 1y ago
    In Germany police illegally accessed contact list from apps verifying your vaccination status for corona. I don't see it differently here and it is no use for victims if the courts are included later. The simple reality is that no state is adult enough to handle this responsibility. Why should I accept the berlin internet wall anywhere? Any ecosystem should fight back against such ambitions. If it really is about protecting kids, there could be some easy laws improving their privacy. These are not wanted. As well as there is no political will to restrict tracking for advertising and gambling.
  - crote 1y ago
    And how is the general public supposed to verify that the IdP and checking service aren't collaborating? If it is possible for a checking service to create a log, given how Big Tech has been treating user data, how can we ever trust that they aren't logging everyone's data? Reputation is irrelevant. Everyone is trustworthy - until they are not. The dark web is filled with data leaks from reputable parties.
    - ivan_gammel 1y ago
      How general public is supposed to believe that lawyers do not collaborate with prosecutors? The trust has to be somewhere, so it seems quite natural that the most trustworthy entity is the one whose sole reason to exist is to protect your data.
- tzs 1y ago
  IDPs and certificate authorities can be the same with no problem if you design your protocol so that the porn sites do not see your certificates. E.g., IDP issues you signed identity credentials. To prove age to the porn site a ZKP is used to prove to the porn site that you have signed credentials that give you age as 18+ but without giving the porn site any information other than that. The ZKP approach is what the EU is doing. Note that in the article the objection to ZKP systems is not that they don't work correctly (because they do work). It is that it can be hard for some people to obtain IDs, it may cost to much for some sites, it could be hard to regulate IDPs effectively, and things like that.
  - Muromec 1y ago
    The point they are making is the privacy protection doesn't extend both ways. There are two ways the information can leak: - from the IDP to a port side, so the porn site will know what's your name (what a shame, how would I pretend it didn't happen after I close the tab); - from the porn site to the IDP -- now your government knows that you watch porn and maybe the exact type of porn, so they can charge you a different tax rate for being straight. Then of course, just by correlating ip addresses and timestamps in logs of the IDP and the porn site one can deanonimyze the visitors. Or just by ip in the logs itself because you don't pay your ISP in bitcoins.
    - tzs 1y ago
      Neither of those ways works in ZKP systems like the EU is in the process of doing or the one Google recently released open source libraries for. The way these work is that the IDP issues a signed digital ID that is stored in a hardware security module tied to you. Typically this would be in your smartphone but could be something else like a smart card. Let's go with a smartphone for the rest of this comment. Later, when you want to prove to a porn site that you are 18+ your smartphone can use a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) protocol to prove the porn site that your phone contains a signed ID from your IDP that shows your age is 18+. The ZKP proof reveals nothing else from your digital ID other than that the date of birth field is at least 18 years in the past. All the porn site finds out is that someone who has an ID from your IDP that says they are 18+ is trying to use the porn site. The IDP doesn't learn anything because they aren't involved in the age verification.
torginus 1y ago
These 'anonymity' technologies are laughably worthless - sure ZKP might provide mathematical proof that it's impossible to find out who the subject is, but embed a tracking cookie and fingerprinting script into both the porn site, and the online grocery - and there you go, you have irrefutable cryptographic evidence of how John Doe likes to spend his evenings.
- ivan_gammel 1y ago
  As soon as fingerprinting becomes criminal offense, this will end quickly. Nobody big enough is going to risk that.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Hamuko 1y ago
    Isn't it basically illegal under the GDPR? You're not allowed to just collect data for the hell of it and need actual consent.
    - torginus 1y ago
      The GDPR is a fucking joke even on the best of days. If other laws were like it, they would be like: You're not allowed to steal (unless you really need to), but if you do, take as little as you can (as determined by you), and you have to give it back as soon as you can (again, according to you), and if the person you stole from wants it back, you have to (unless you have a good reason not to)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- tzs 1y ago
  The porn site and the grocery can already embed a tracking cookie and do fingerprinting to match their visitors.

JanisErdmanis 1y ago

How would setting up a primary credential with an identity provider differ from the process of registering to vote for USA citizens? All the discrimination opportunities and accountability issues seem to apply equally there.

lmz 1y ago
The same people who argue this will also argue that voter ID rules are discriminatory.
- sltkr 1y ago
  Are the laws that require you to show ID to buy alcohol, tobacco, fire arms, or gamble in casinos also discriminatory? Or is it only discriminatory when you prevent people without IDs from watching porn?
  - mattnewton 1y ago
    The definition of Porn by the state can change to include things that some people consider protected by the first amendment - right now there are a lot of state politicians or members of the house on record supporting classifying discussion of LGBTQ lifestyles as pornography for example. I think alcohol, tobacco and gambling here are mostly irrelevant, but the firearms is a better example because of the second amendment, where you have a clash between a very old right granted by the bill of rights clashing with modern societies beliefs.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > Are the laws that require you to show ID to buy alcohol, tobacco, fire arms, or gamble in casinos also discriminatory? So long as it is done for a legitimate purpose and in good faith, generally no. As such, IDs are only expected where there is reasonable suspicion of possible violation. For example, there is no onus, with a few exceptions, to see an elderly person's ID to buy alcohol when there is no reason to think that they aren't below the minimum age. The exceptions haven't really been tested. It very well could be found discriminatory, and you could make a pretty good case that it is. Which is ultimately the same case being made earlier. Asking a no-question-about-it 50 year old to provide his ID to watch porn isn't really in good faith, is it?

charcircuit 1y ago

>politicians all over the world demanded a kind of impossible encryption It's not impossible to design a cryptographic system where law enforcement is a party within it. The false dichotomy of encrypted or not encrypted in my opinion is used to shutdown the conversation since it's easy to argue why no encryption is bad. It's a strawman.

thyristan 1y ago
Then please prove the possibility by doing so. Up to now, there has only been intense wishful thinking by politicians, and strong "NOPE" by anyone with any kind of knowledge about cryptography. Either really everyone, including the likes of NSA, CIA and other spy services don't actually employ top cryptographers. Or they repeatedly tried and failed miserably. Or really nobody, including the spies, wants backdoored NOBUS encryption.
- loglog 1y ago
  NSA does probably want it, and did probably standardized at least one such scheme in the past: Dual_EC_DRBG.
JoshTriplett 1y ago
It's impossible to design a cryptographic system that does end-to-end encryption and has a backdoor that can never be misused. No technical solution will address the fact that it's failing at its one job.
jgeada 1y ago
That is a bad faith argument. As soon as there is another untrusted party in the encryption, an in particular a party with a "skeleton key" that can decrypt anybody's message, then your encrypted communications are merely one leak away from being decoded by everybody else.
- aaronmdjones 1y ago
  If there's one thing you can trust a government to do, it's to not be able to keep secrets for very long. https://www.vice.com/en/article/hackers-published-replicas-and-blueprints-to-tsa-master-luggage-keys/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/hackers-published-replicas-a...

Seattle3503 1y ago

To me it seems like Cory Doctorow is demanding perfection, and saying that because we can't achieve perfection in age verification, we can't do age verification at all. That isn't going to stop people from trying, and we will end up with a worse system overall. IMO this is a common pitfall of techno-idealists. Technologies like the mdl standard [1] can attest to age without revealing the users identity. As Cory points out, its still possible for kids to swipe someones ID and use that. There are probably practical solutions that are good enough. Android, iOS, and parents could work together to deal with the problem of stolen IDs. If mdl is implemented on devices such that they are managed by the device OS, that would lead to auditability. Parents can ask their child to see their phones ID app, which will show full roster of IDs on the child's device. If a parent sees an ID that shouldn't be there, they can have a conversation about it. In this way the law would be about empowering parents to shape their child's online experience. This is just a straw-man example solution, but there may be better ones. The other objections I saw could be worked through in a similarly pragmatic fashion. This is probably going to be good enough for most folks, and its probably a good thing to keep children away from pornography and such. And IMO coming up with a "good enough" solution will flush out all the bad actors who are hiding behind the excuse of "save the children" when really they want to build up an record of everyone's browsing history. But by denying any solution to a real problem, we let the bad actors hide amongst the well-intentioned folks who are trying to do the right thing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_driver%27s_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_driver%27s_license

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
All the govt needs to do is send fines to offenders and the industry will be forced to implement one or more solutions. The govt doesn't care how you verify age only that you don't sell to minors.
- wmf 1y ago
  Experience with GDPR and DSA shows that the fines lag years behind the abuses.
- crote 1y ago

dathinab 1y ago

> "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit it is possible if you accept that it only needs to be good enough - it's fully okay if it can be deceived in all kinds of ways - verifying only once per account is okay, if a adult passes their verified account to a child that their responsibility - legally not just forbid but criminalize (with required prison sentence) the storing of any data except is adult yes/no from a age verification process - allow a OS accounts to just tell applications (including websites) that "is 18", if a age verification was done in the account, also no singing or anything cryptographically, because again it's good enough no need to protect it against hacking, the main responsibility still lies with the parents so then you can do a single age verification per OS account, once, and be done with furthermore this verification could e.g. go through a process which might identify you identity but a) isn't allowed to pass anything but adult yes/no to anyone else b) isn't allowed to store that info c) on a storing it is a "criminal liability" level where a CTO ordering data collection would go to prison through if you live in a country where everyone has a passport with NFC chips (e.g. all of EU) just adding a "adult yes/no" function(1) to it + a transparent (open source, non profit) app per country to bridge it to accounts which need verification would do the job without needing the extra strict criminalize abuse part. Which brings us to the main problem: - requiring politicians to accept a "good enough" solution, accept that the main responsibility still lies with the parent - politicians not abusing it to spy on their population - make laws to prevent companies from ab-using "age verification" to collect private data and that seems indeed impossible --- (1): Technically I think it does exist, somewhat in many passes already. But practically it not viable as it (I think) discloses too much information and has too much issues wrt. integrating it (wrt. certificate nonsense)

loglog 1y ago
No cryptographic verification is required for content blocking. Make it easy to set up a slightly locked down "child" account (e.g. one behind a MITM proxy that only lets through HTTP(S) and blocks some domains) by requiring it from every OS vendor. Label existing devices/software without it "18+".

aktuel 1y ago

Not just age verification. The whole security circus is bs. Kids cannot go outside by themselves anymore. They have to wear helmets while being constantly monitored. None of it has brought us to a better place. Fuck it. Just fuck it.

torginus 1y ago

The problem is not only that it's impossible to make cryptography that's only secure when the good guys use it, it's that once cryptography is made insecure, it's insecure for everyone, forever. I'm not a privacy hardliner, and I think the socially acceptable tradeoff between privacy and security have been well established before the computer era - if the police has a well-enough established suspicion against you - they can get a warrant and search your home. That's due process. I would accept if there was a digital version of that which targeted not the encryption itself (which could be as strong as possible) - but the endpoints, like smartphones and computers. Let's say police had a device which they could plug into your phone, which would send a specially signed message - a digital warrant, containing all the info a real warrant would - which be permanently be burned into the ROM of your phone, after which the phone would surrender its encryption keys, and the police could dump your unencrypted disk. The phone would be then presented as evidence at the trial, and not following due process would be a cause for mistrial, no matter what they find there. The general public would be safe in the knowledge that as long as the police isn't hauling them in, their secrets are safe, and the government would get the tools for what they claimed they wanted - a way to catch bad guys with digital tools.

buzer 1y ago
> Let's say police had a device which they could plug into your phone, which would send a specially signed message - a digital warrant, containing all the info a real warrant would - which be permanently be burned into the ROM of your phone, after which the phone would surrender its encryption keys, and the police could dump your unencrypted disk. And when (not if) that device leaks whoever steals your phone will be able to get access all of the things in there.
- torginus 1y ago
  I'd imagine such devices would be very tightly controlled, being hard to access for civilians, and lets say limited to 1 such device per 1m people(which would also give you an idea of what sort of frequency this is supposed to be used). The keys for every phone would be stored in a central repo, with a separate key for every phoneX every decryptor(which has its own private key). Meaning you'd need a device and the central repo to access users data. But lets say they manage to build a bootleg version, what would be the criminal gain for them? Reading the data doesn't mean they can impersonate you, as the device wouldn't give you access to private keys used for authentication (lets even say these are deleted), only encryption. The criminals could brick your phone and read your texts. There's only very niche cases when this would be worth it to them, like you're the subject of a highly targeted intelligence gathering op.

mzhaase 1y ago

So in Germany we have an ID card with a PIN, NFC and a government app. Website owners can request to be able to use this feature. They then get a certificate from the government that has the fields they are allowed to request stored within it. Websites can request data from the user by sending that certificate, it opens the app, it shows you the categories of data to be send, you hold your ID card to the phone, enter the PIN, and the certificate is uploaded to the ID card which verifies it. If its valid, the ID sends back the data that is specified in the certificate. You then get presented with exactly the data that is going to be sent to the website. You can then agree or disagree. So far that is only used to log in to government websites. This way the government does not know which sites you visit, and you only send your age to the website.

fabian2k 1y ago
It's even more restrictive than than, for age verification you only get back whether the person is above the age limit or not, it's a boolean response. So I think from that view the eID works pretty well, it provides the minimal necessary information. The bigger issue with something like this is if you use them to enforce real name policies or stuff like that.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
  That still results in the government knowing you connected to that website though. Edit: unless there’s a blind middleman that has tight data policies?
  - number6 1y ago
    I think it does not know. The app is open source and it just sends the Boolean. The government just gives out the id cards - they are not involved in the verification process
    - Hamuko 1y ago
      I know the whitelabel EU app is open source but are the derivatives going to be? As far as I understand it, every EU country will release its own version of the app.

kazinator 1y ago

If you're a web person who understands SSL, privacy-preserving age verification can be explained by analogy. It's a system which requires a central agency, probably a government agency, analogous to a certificate authority. You are authenticated with that agency; it has personal info about you. But you are externally identified by some impersonal identifier, not your name. The agency issues you a certificate binding this identifier to an assertion like "is over 18 years old". When you interact with a site that wants to know whether you are over 18 years old, you present the certificate. The site can see that it's signed by the authority and that it has the assertion that you are over 18. You can't just give that site someone else's certificate because it has to be the one tied to the abstract identity you are presenting (which contains no personal info; it's some kind of UUID or whatever). Plus the cert can be bound to a specific device and such. The cert has a private keys with which you can prove that you own that cert; or at least that you are the authenticated operator of a device to which that cert was issued. It's something like that. I may have some key details wrong. The main idea is that some brokerage that does have info about you can attest that you are over 18 without revealing any of the personal info via certificate-like objects. It sounds like, in theory, the system can achieve good privacy in age verification. But not perfect age verification; people will find ways around it. A grown up can certify themselves to be over 18 and then hand the device to a teenager; and such an operation can likely be scaled to some extent. And of course no cryptographic system can eliminate the possibility that minors are looking at the screen of a device operated by an adult, who may even step out of the way to let them operate it.

LegionMammal978 1y ago
> (which contains no personal info; it's some kind of UUID or whatever) And now all the websites have an uncircumventible and highly reliable fingerprinting scheme to track you across literally anywhere. Only identity thieves care about whatever data the agency would be safeguarding: linking up accounts between websites is more than enough for anyone else who would want to abuse that information.
- kazinator 1y ago
  I'm pretty sure I don't have all the details right. There is a zero-knowledge proof which allows a browser session to assert that the user is over 18 without using any static bits that allow for fingerprinting.

irchans 1y ago

Even after reading the article, I think there are reasonable ways to set up a low cost system that uses zero-knowledge proofs to "prove" your age without disclosing your identity. I do think that you will need trusted entities and the system will only stop most, maybe 80 or 90 percent of children under 18 from seeing porn. But, if you do this, then maybe 99% of kids under the age of 14 will have a lot of difficulty viewing porn which is a good thing. There may be valid a slippery slope argument for not setting up the age validation system even if everything I said above is true.

Seattle3503 1y ago
Yeah, I think even if we only manage to delay the "age of first porn viewing" to something like 14-15, thats probably a win.
- jofla_net 1y ago
  Maybe, but as a parent, I believe its an embarrassment to expect to radically retrofit a society in such ways as to make up for my own negligent lack of responsibility for my own children, which I do take quite seriously. Not to mention the myriad of resultant unintended consequences which invariably arise when such systems(of which i'm quite familiar) are brought to bear. Though I do speak from such a position of professional neutrality, as I would gain no benefit at all from implementing such a ubiquitously mandated system. Perhaps if things were different, I'd think otherwise.
  - doright 1y ago
    In my opinion "we need mandatory age verification" is an admission that we can't really address the overarching issue of parents that can't/won't parent at a good enough level. Narcissistic parenting without any added access to questionable content on a smartphone is still... narcissistic parenting. The definition of "parent better" differs between people and is often non-negotiable, even way before anything involving CPS occurs. Not to mention, the content being withheld will become available at adulthood anyway, and can still be harmful if the person has not been given the tools to navigate it well. Admittedly the bar is far higher with ubiquitous social media and smartphones. I'm not sure a parenting license system would ever work out in practice. Yet a lot of issues stemming from upbringing can cause irreversible harm and I don't feel like those root causes are brought up that much in the broader discussion about mental health symptoms. It pains me to think that some amount of debilitating childhood trauma is unavoidable, but content restriction at least sounds like an actionable problem that doesn't require uprooting the fabric of society to correct.

skybrian 1y ago

You’re probably better off just reading the paper he links to: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf I think it shows the difficulty of implementing it for everyone. But Apple and Google’s cell phone implementations would probably cover most people in some countries when finished, and then there will be a long tail of people who will need cheats and workarounds. You’d be screwed if you didn’t have any friends who could help you cheat.

BlueTemplar 1y ago
We should be considering how to kick out Apple and Google out of most countries, not give them control over something so critical !

nayuki 1y ago

I think this would be a perfect use-case for blind signatures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature Let's say every citizen has an account with their federal government, and the account can be accessed securely in some reasonable way (password, 2FA, hardware token, etc.). The government can have a public-private RSA key pair specifically for "At least 18 years old". Once the user is authenticated, he can generate a nonce and a blinding factor, multiply them together to get a blinded random number, and upload that to the government for signing. He takes the signature and unblinds it, then submits the original nonce and unblinded signature to the adult website. The website confirms that the nonce and signature is valid according to the government's public key. This system raises many questions. For example, preventing replay attacks, so the adult website will reject any nonce being reused, or mandating that a timestamp be a subcomponent of the nonce. There is the un-answerable question of how to handle the case where a legitimate adult offers valid signatures for someone else to use. There is also the question of, to what extent the adult website should be able to keep track of the underlying users (even in a hashed format) to monitor abuse, suspicious users who have too much activity, etc.

tzs 1y ago
The main problem with that approach I believe is that since proving your age to the porn site involves an interaction with the government site and the porn site which will occur at close to the same time. If the porn site and the government site both keep logs and someone is able to get the logs from both they might be able to match up timestamps to unmask some porn site users. A system that allows this is called "linkable". It might be possible to mitigate this by introducing delays and noise. Wait some random amount of time before giving the finishing the verification with the porn site. Have a process running on your computer that frequently generates nonces and has the government sign them. Probably better is to use a protocol that is unlinkable. There are ZKP systems that are unlinkable.

cogman10 1y ago

The big problem I have with laws like the UK has been that they solve a non-issue at the cost of large infrastructure and potential privacy problems. Teenagers have been looking at porn since forever. It's practically a trope of teens stealing their parents' porn mags. I don't think any of this has actually caused major societal issues. The proposed solutions merely require that a teen steal their parent's identification, briefly, to create a porn account and move on. Heck, they can probably buy that information online if they are innovative enough. They certainly will be selling access to their porn accounts to their classmates. And even if they don't go through all that trouble, getting a porn mag is still pretty possible in the UK. That makes this just a bad law. It doesn't meaningfully stop the problem it's meant to stop and it's expensive and intrusive. Even if privacy preserving age verification was bulletproof and perfect, you still have the access holes all over. And then there's the simple fact that other nations exist. Yes, mainstream sites will put up protections, but what about the sealand porn site? Unless the UK wants a great firewall (ala the chinese firewall), they simply aren't going to stop this problem. Even then, VPNs are common knowledge at this point due to streaming. Bad law, bad effects, and a pointless fight.

owisd 1y ago
Having a device in your pocket that you take everywhere with no stigma to being seen with it yet it has unlimited access to any genre of porn you can think of is hardly comparable to finding a 90s porn mag in a bush from time to time, so you can't really say this has been happening forever.
- cogman10 1y ago
  Erotic novels have been discreet for a while. It's also not been usual to have a laptop in public since the 90s. There are definitely pictures of people perusing porn on trains (visible in reflections). Briefcases were also a thing as have been strip clubs since forever. Quick access to porn hasn't been a problem since the printing press was invented.
  - owisd 1y ago

andrewla 1y ago

Overall this article is completely correct and I agree with every point of it and have tried to make these arguments about the various ZKP proposers that I have encountered. But I almost gave up early because he can't resist the urge to take a dig: > For politicians to make good policy, they don't need to be technical experts: they need to have solid, independent, well-resourced expert agencies. Those would be the very agencies that Trump and Musk have DOGEd into oblivion ... And then in the next paragraph blithely engages in some Gell-Mann amnesia > But when it comes to tech policy, politicians get it all so goddamned wrong Expert agencies formulating clean water policies are emphatically not the reason that we have potable water. Experts in actually doing the work of producing clean water are the ones that push the standards upstream. It's a subtle but important difference. Look, it's not 2018 anymore, we survived a round of Trump and we'll survive this one and the world will not end and some things will get better and some things will get worse, but trying to tie everything back to how Trump has ruined everything is going to make your views look worse and worse as they age.

ratelimitsteve 1y ago

Remember when they passed a bunch of really strong anti-terrorism bills in the US after 9/11 and we were all super sure that it was a great idea because they promised us they'd show restraint and only use the powers they were giving themselves against the worst of the worst, then they declared vandalism to be terrorism (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-will-buy-new-tesla-show-support-musk-2025-03-11/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-will-buy-new-...)? That's how I expect "privacy-preserving age verification" to go. It's the narrow end of the wedge. Once privacy-preserving age verification is in place there will be some reason to get rid of the privacy, and we will have a fully tracked and identified internet.

lisbbb 1y ago

[flagged]

ncdm_stldr 1y ago

While I understand your point, I just wanted to point out that I am not sure if there is not technical solution to the problem. I wonder what can be done with a technology similar to this: https://huggingface.co/spaces/zama-fhe/encrypted_sentiment_analysis https://huggingface.co/spaces/zama-fhe/encrypted_sentiment_a... Or this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof Ok I didn't point the exact solution for the problem, but still it hints me that technical solutions may exist. Anyway, I am not in the side of control freaks, but still find the question interesting.

OkayPhysicist 1y ago

The key problem with this entire issue is that it's basically a morality law. There are classes of crimes that, over time, society has discovered simply do not have an enforcement mechanism less damaging than the harm they are seeking to prevent. An example is Adultery. Most people will agree that it is morally wrong to cheat on your spouse. The reason civilized countries no longer have adultery laws is not because a majority of people support the crime, it's that the level of control a government needs to exercise over its citizenry to actually enforce such a law is repugnant. The state must proscribe definitions of infidelity ( human sexuality being the mess it is, this alone is a massive headache), then engage the state apparatus to surveil people's intimate lives, and then provide a legal apparatus that prevents abuse via allegation. And for what? So that people's feelings are a little less hurt? The juice simply is not worth the squeeze. So it goes for age restrictions. Age verification creates massive potential for invasion of privacy, blackmail, censorship, and more, necessitating a massive state censorship apparatus to block foreign content, and for what? So that little Timmy's forced back into trading nudie mags at the bus stop? To save parents the onerous effort of telling their kids "no"? It's simply not worth it.

amelius 1y ago
Ok, but how long will it take the people in power to figure this out (again)?
- smegger001 1y ago
  They won't (they veiw those as features not bugs) they need replaced with ones that already know.
Illniyar 1y ago
I think that's a bit of rationalizing. I don't thinks there's much evidence that Adultery is no longer a criminal offense because people were concerned about privacy or government control. It's that people became more secular, Adultery is considered a sin and not a crime, and modern countries instituted separation between religious and secular laws.

MattPalmer1086 1y ago

What a breathlessly overhyped post. Basically - yes we can do it technically, but there's big economic and social limitations on rolling something like it out. Hard for sure, but not bullshit. I actually found it hard to read the post - it could have been a third as long and more useful and measured. But I guess it gets clicks.

causality0 1y ago

From logical standpoint it seems pretty obvious that the person providing children access to porn is their parents when they give them an unfiltered internet connection, not the porn websites. God forbid we actually require parents to, you know, parent.

tim333 1y ago

>Others say they can estimate your age by using AI to analyze a picture of your face. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, not least of which is that biometric age estimation is notoriously unreliable when it comes to distinguishing, say, 16 or 17 year olds from 18 year olds. It doesn't matter it's unreliable telling 17 year olds from 18 year olds. This thing is to reduce the amount of porn kids are exposed to. It's not like issuing a passport or something. As long as it sort of has some positive effect. I actually did the face picture thing for Reddit. Seemed to work ok, although I'm 61 so not too near the cutoff.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Fuck national ID cards and big mother, especially in the rising tide of authoritarianism and fascism where they will be used to inventory, abduct, deport, banish, and/or disappear people.

Bender 1y ago

The only privacy preserving option is to add a single RTA header on the server side. Laws could have required any site or service that has adult or user generated content to simply add RTA [1] headers and require clients to make a best effort to detect the headers and trigger parental controls if enabled. That's it. Not perfect, nothing is. All the liability could have gone to the parents where it belongs. No third party traffic, nothing to leak, nothing to track. Simple as. Not everything has to be a service or a business model. [1] - www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single

kirito1337 1y ago

Fr man, I got issues bc of that