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This keeps coming up and we keep having the same debates about what Age Verification isn't. For the folks in the back row: Age Verification isn't about Kids o

by pksebben 10mo ago

This keeps coming up and we keep having the same debates about what Age Verification isn't. For the folks in the back row: Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance Without even reaching for my tinfoil hat, the strategy at work here is clear [0 1 2]. If we have to know that you're not a minor, then we also have to know who you are so we can make any techniques to obfuscate that illegal. By turning this from "keep an eye on your kids" to "prove you're not a kid" they've created the conditions to make privacy itself illegal. VPNs are next. Then PGP. Then anything else that makes it hard for them to know who you are, what you say, and who you say it to. Please, please don't fall into the trap and start discussing whether or not this is going to be effective to protect kids. It isn't, and that isn't the point. 0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpns-and-they-have-no-idea-what-theyre-doing https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn... 1 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-usage-at-risk-in-michigan-under-new-proposed-adult-content-law https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-usage... 2 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/57714CE6-0CE4-49F6-B028-E271D5100F7F/OnlineSafetyAct2023VirtualPrivateNetworks https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/57714...

knallfrosch 10mo ago
> If we have to know that you're not a minor, then we also have to know who you are That is untrue
- phyzome 10mo ago
  Are you aware of any age verification systems that do not have this property? (This includes being robust against law enforcement action, legal or otherwise.)
  - orblivion 10mo ago
    How about: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/opening-up-zero-knowledge-proof-technology-to-promote-privacy-in-age-assurance/ https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/opening-up-ze...
  - pksebben 10mo ago
    Like many mention in other comments on this post, it's possible to implement using ZKPs. There are likely other methods that would be effective without compromising privacy. None of them are part of the Age Verification discussion because kids are not the actual point of Age Verification. When I say "if we have to know you're not a kid, we have to know who you are" I'm not stating an actual truth, but the argument as it is playing out politically.
    - magicalhippo 10mo ago
      > None of them are part of the Age Verification discussion because kids are not the actual point of Age Verification. The EU age verification solution says implementations SHOULD implement[1] their ZKP protocol[2]. Not linking it to the user is stated as an explicit goal: Unlinkability: The goal of the solution is to prevent user profiling and tracking by avoiding linkable transactions. Initially, the solution will rely on batch issuance to protect users from colluding RPs. Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) mechanisms will be considered to offer protection. More details are provided in Section 7. [1]: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/docs/architecture-and-technical-specifications/#4-age-verification-solution-high-level-requirements https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d... [2]: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/docs/annexes/annex-B/annex-B-zkp/ https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
      - crote 10mo ago
        If privacy is an explicit goal, why isn't it a MUST? Why even bother with the initial batch issuance phase? And what's stopping them from silently adopting a batch size of 1?
        magicalhippo 10mo ago
        > Why even bother with the initial batch issuance phase? This is a solution that requires non-trivial interaction between many paries. It seems very reasonable to want to get the parties started on the implementation so they can iron out issues in the infrastructure they're building while they work on the details of the ZKP aspects.
  - knallfrosch 10mo ago
    1) Large social media companies know you better than your friends. That has been known for 10 years and they're way better now: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/facebook-knows-you-better-than-anyone-else.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/facebook-knows-yo... 2) Cigarette vending machines accept VISA cards and government IDs and they're offline. 3) A medium-sized social media network required photos (not scans) of GovIDs, where only year of birth and validity date need to visible. The rest could be blacked out physically. 4) You can guess users' age and only request solid proof only for those you are unsure about. The problem is that we technical users think of a one-size-fits-all technical approach that works, without a single fail, for all global users. That is bound to fail. It is only a law and you can break it big time or small time. Reddit's approach might proof way too weak, it'll be fined and given a year to improve. Others might leave the market. Others will be too strict and struggle to get users. Others might have weak enforcement and keep a low profile forever. Others will start small, below the radar and explode in popularity and then enforcement will have to improve. You can also request identity and then delete it. (Yes, some will fail to delete and get hacked.) Giving Facebook a free pass is stupid. They're selling your age cohort "10-11" within 0.0037ms for 0.$0003 to the highest bidder on their ad platform.
  - delusional 10mo ago
    Cool trick to tie in the libertarian idea of protecting yourself from legally sanctioned government actions.
    - phyzome 10mo ago
      To make this more concrete: There are a lot of "legally sanctioned" government actions happening in the US right now that are pretty dubious. That includes digging up old laws and giving them spicy new interpretations that legal experts agree are an abuse of power and not in the intent of the original law. Some of these are getting batted down by judges, so right now the category of "legal" is especially vague. That's why I phrased it like that. But also, we see cops just straight up stalking people using government tools. So that's another reason to be concerned about "legal" government actions. Nothing to do with libertarianism.
  - magicalhippo 10mo ago
    > Are you aware of any age verification systems that do not have this property? As I understand it, it's the goal of OpenID4VP[1][2]. Using it a site can request to know if the user is over 18 say, and the user can return proof of just that one claim, I'm over 18, without sharing identifying information. The new EU age verification solution[3] builds on this for example. [1]: https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-presentations-1_0.html https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-presentations-1... [2]: https://docs.walt.id/concepts/data-exchange-protocols/openid4vp https://docs.walt.id/concepts/data-exchange-protocols/openid... [3]: https://ageverification.dev/ https://ageverification.dev/
    - stvltvs 10mo ago
      Can't read the specs at the moment, but what prevents the age verification service and the age-gated website from coluding and de-anonymizing your porn use?
      - magicalhippo 10mo ago
        Haven't either had time to fully wrap my head around the details. At least in the EU solution they say there would be multiple attestation serivices the user could choose to use. So that would be technically better than nothing.
      - rcxdude 10mo ago
        With zero-knowledge-proofs the age verification could look like this: you go to whatever age verification service and get a certificate that says you're over the age of 18 (which you only need to do once or at least once per whatever expiry period). You then go to the age-gated website and they ask for proof. You generate (on your own device) a zero-knowledge proof that you have the certificate, but neither the website nor the verification service can determine which certificate it is, and in fact the verification service doesn't even know you've used the certificate.
  - aidenn0 10mo ago
    GNU Taler has an age-verification extension.
  - triceratops 10mo ago
    I have one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223051
thinkingtoilet 10mo ago
I am someone who is very privacy focused. I've literally never had a social media account on any platform and I'm 42. From day one of facebook, I never wanted my information online. Like many here, I'm deeply concerned about privacy and surveillance. In real life, we think age verification is a good thing. Kids shouldn't buy porn. Teenagers shouldn't get into bars. etc... There has to be room somewhere for reasonable discussion about making sure children do not have access to things they shouldn't. I think it's important to note, that complete dismissal of this idea only turns away your allies and hurts our cause in the long run.
- pksebben 10mo ago
  I'm not dismissing that idea. It is a perfectly reasonable thing to think about, part of why we have age verification techniques that already work well in critical places like online vape shops. I'm even willing to talk about the possibility that we could use more robust systems deployed more broadly. A lot of folks here are talking about ZKPs in this regard, and that's not a bad idea at all. The issue I'm trying to sound the horn on is that the current push for AF in the US and EU has nothing to do with kids. I think you could put together a working group on ZKPs and Age Verification, write up a paper and run experiments, and when you bring it to the lawmakers they're gonna say something to the tune of: "yeah but that's not trustworthy enough and too technical for people to understand so we're just going to serve legal notices to VPN providers instead to tell them that they can't anymore" ...or something to that tune. I'm not a mind reader, I've just read the reports (by lawmakers) mentioning VPNs as an "area of concern". This is a political gambit and not a new one. The more we treat the current issue as having anything to do with protecting kids the more we legitimize what is an obvious grift.
  - bpt3 10mo ago
    How does age verification work for online vape shops?
  - tzs 10mo ago
    > The issue I'm trying to sound the horn on is that the current push for AF in the US and EU has nothing to do with kids. I think you could put together a working group on ZKPs and Age Verification, write up a paper and run experiments, and when you bring it to the lawmakers they're gonna say something to the tune of: The EU is currently doing large-scale field tries of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, which they have been working on for several years. It uses ZKPs for age verification. They expect to roll it out to the public near the end of 2026.
like_any_other 10mo ago
> Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance We know this because, instead of putting easy-to-use parental controls on new devices sold (and making it easy to install on old ones) with good defaults [1], they didn't even try that, and went directly for the most privacy-hostile solution. [1] So lazy parents with whatever censorship the government thinks is appropriate for kids, while involved parents can alter the filtering, or remove the software entirely.
- jacobgkau 10mo ago
  Parental control software has existed for decades. It hasn't worked. Over 70% of teenagers <18 today have watched porn [1]. We all know (many from experience) that kids easily get around whatever restrictions adults put on their computers. We all know the memes about "click here if you're 18" being far less effective than "click here if you're not a robot." Yes, there were other ways of trying to solve the problem. Governments could've mandated explicit websites (which includes a lot of mainstream social media these days) include the RTA rating tag instead of it being a voluntary thing, which social media companies still would've fought; and governments could've also mandated all devices come with parental control software to actually enforce that tag, which still would've been decried as overreach and possibly would've been easily circumventable for anyone who knows what they're doing (including kids). But at the end of the day, there was a legitimate problem, and governments are trying to solve the problem, ulterior motives aside. It's not legal for people to have sex on the street in broad daylight (and even that would arguably be healthier for society than growing up on staged porn is). This argument is much more about whether it's healthy for generations to be raised on porn than many detractors want to admit. [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/raising-kind-kids/202305/new-report-finds-most-teens-watch-online-pornography https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/raising-kind-kids/20...
  - pksebben 10mo ago
    Is porn the biggest problem here? What I've seen points the finger at social media as the worst offender for youth mental health. Also, access to porn isn't new with the internet. When we cleared out my grandpa's house we had to pry open a desk that was chock full of hustlers.
topkai22 10mo ago
Age verification is absolutely about kids. It’s also being used (or hijacked into) a vehicle for people who want increased surveillance. There is a ton of evidence that there are harms to unrestricted online access for kids and teens (the book The Anxious Generation is cultural touchstone for this topic at this point). There is a real, well reasoned, and valid movement to do something about this problem. The solutions proposed aren’t always well targeted and are often hijacked by the pro-surveillance movement, but it’s important to call out that these solutions aren’t well targeted instead of declaring the age verification push isn’t addressing a real problem and constituency.
- pksebben 10mo ago
  As many others have mentioned in this thread and others, there are ways - effective and straightforward ways - that we could be protecting our kids from the harms that come with the www. The harms are real. The solution is a Surveillance Wolf wearing a dead Save The Kids Sheep(tm). Solutions that might work - RTA headers [0]. More robust parental controls. Not this reimagining of the rules of the internet in service of a fairly vague and ineffective goal. It's like the whole AV concept was designed not to work in the current context at all - almost as if that was the point. Perhaps I'm going a little out on a limb. I don't think I am - but quick, tell me you need to know where I'm dialing from without asking me where I'm dialing in from. 0 - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php
  - anon291 10mo ago
    Yes all those things are great, but you'll notice that instead of explaining this to the non-technical crowd, technology focused privacy concerned individuals rarely attempt to educate about how these could work. Instead they simply seem to be against any sort of control on what children watch online. Given that it's also coming from a bunch of tech males, it comes across as extraordinarily creepy. This is not hard to understand.
    - pksebben 10mo ago
      If I believed that the efforts in question were in earnest, I would absolutely be talking through the finer points of how to do it right. I don't believe that, though. The veneer of legitimacy here is paper thin - we start with a very weatherbeaten conservative war drum (think of the children!) and immediately jump into "let's ruin privacy for everyone and I totally promise this isn't another Cambridge Analytica".
SilverElfin 10mo ago
Politicians in Washington State is proposing not just age verification but also health warnings on adult websites. How is either constitutional? https://www.xbiz.com/news/294260/washington-av-bill-jumps-on-health-warning-bandwagon https://www.xbiz.com/news/294260/washington-av-bill-jumps-on...
- bigstrat2003 10mo ago
  It's been illegal to sell porn to minors since approximately forever. If that is constitutional (not saying it is, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't since it's such an established practice), then I don't see how requiring age verification on porn sites wouldn't be. Requiring health warnings might be another matter, though. Not sure about that.
  - SilverElfin 10mo ago
    Does the “sell” part matter - like is it simply that the sale to minors can be regulated? If it is free isn’t it just transmission of information?
    - mikeyouse 10mo ago
      No, it's still illegal in most places to knowingly distribute pornography to minors - the law in my state starts; > A person who sells, gives away or in any way furnishes to a person under the age of 18 years a book, pamphlet, or other printed paper or other thing, containing obscene language, or obscene prints, pictures, figures or descriptions tending to corrupt the morals of youth
- TomatoCo 10mo ago
  I wonder how it relates to the health warnings on tobacco products?
idkfasayer 10mo ago
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thayne 10mo ago
I would much rather have laws that require that certain kinds of websites return machine-readable headers describing what kind of content is on them, and then browsers, web proxies, etc. could be configured by parents, schools, etc. to block undesirable sites.
- wkat4242 10mo ago
  And really, a locally running AI could make that assessment pretty easily even if it isn't declared. No need to destroy the whole world's privacy. Unless that was the goal to begin with, obviously.
- Terr_ 10mo ago
  Recycling a post about reasons to do it that way: > 1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature. > 2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon. > 3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding? > 4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
  - Gormo 10mo ago
    This is the exact argument that we had in the 1990s about content on television, and the solution ended up being exactly this -- TV networks started attaching ratings to their broadcasts, and TV sets started including "v-chips" that could be turned on and configured to block content that matched certain ratings. Once that solution was in place, the argument was settled, and the people trying to push for censorship in pursuit of ulterior motives didn't have a leg to stand on.
Razengan 10mo ago
People are complacent. Even me, even you. We're not going to get off our 21st-century comforts asses and actually do anything to disrupt anything. At best I may avoid using products from certain companies until I really have to, like Google and Microsoft's AIs, or clear cookies after signing into YouTube so it doesn't sign you into everything else, or write a comment here and there about how some Apple APIs like the iCloud Keychain allow Facebook etc to track you across devices and reinstalls, but I'm not ever going bother doing anything more that would actually challenge all this dystopian fuckiness.
Tannic 10mo ago
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zamadatix 10mo ago
As much as you (and I as well) don't want age verification to involve discussion about kids' access to content because we're more concerned about the surveillance push riding the popularity of that, repeating "it isn't about kids" loudly 3 times doesn't make the (extremely large) group of people pushing age verification for kids disappear. Telling that larger group their interest just isn't part of the conversation at all excludes _you_ from the conversation rather than changing the focus of the conversation to the other downsides instead of the primary interest others might have. There are also, concerningly IMO, an extremely large amount of people willing to accept severe surveillance or privacy downsides so long as it helps achieve the goal about kids. To them, the same would in reverse would be "why are you talking about surveillance, the real issue is the kids. Say it 3 times loud, for those in the back!" and the conversation gets nowhere because it's just people saying how they won't talk to anyone who disagrees what concerns should be considered.
- edgineer 10mo ago
  I'm sure those people exist, I just never happen to see anything they write online nor meet any of them in real life.
  - godelski 10mo ago
    We're all in bubbles. But it's good to expand them when you recognize you're in one.
    - nyc_data_geek1 10mo ago
      And the Internet also consists in large part of bots talking to bots. This is not to say that some people won't always promulgate the "Won't somebody please think of the children?" argument every time an expansion of the surveillance state apparatus is in question, but rather to say that we should not take for granted that every bad opinion we see online is one deeply held by any real people.
  - dietdrpeppr 10mo ago
    > There are also, concerningly IMO, an extremely large amount of people willing to accept severe surveillance or privacy downsides so long as it helps achieve the goal about kids. I’m alive. Nice to meet you. I “accept severe surveillance”, not in the sense that I agree with it, but because I know that it already exists and has existed and that people that are against it are screaming into the wind. Many large and small countries have long histories of surveillance. It’s not that you shouldn’t try to enforce privacy, in fact, the law requires it if you in some cases, and it’s a good idea in others. I’m certainly not against the EFF standing up for the rights of everyone not to be severely surveilled. But, realistically, the public cannot easily anonymize our activity and data. And if you try to do so, you’re painting yourself as a target. If you were trying to keep your country safe, wouldn’t you like the ability to infiltrate any major cloud, SaaS app, social media platform, bank, government, VPN/internal network, and OS? Similarly, if you were a big data or security company wouldn’t you also do everything you could to know everything it is to know about a person if you had the means and time and it made sense for your business? Following, if you were to have that power as a government, business, or other organization, wouldn’t it be critical to ensure that you restricted its use to ensure it wasn’t abused to the point that you’d lose it, even though the reality would be that you probably don’t have time to keep it as safe as you need to? I “accept severe surveillance” not because I promote it or want it, but because I understand how the world works and what it does. All these things will pass. If you have the focus and the mental capacity to do what is good, then do it. It likely helped the world in some way to learn about KGB wiretaps. But, in the U.S., as far as I can tell, the backlash against the CIA and NSA was just used for political gain and then to replace those that didn’t agree with the current administration. Was that helpful? And who are we really being manipulated by when we attack ourselves and install destabilizing leaders?
deleted 10mo ago
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miki123211 10mo ago
How do you know this? I see this argument repeated over and over on HN, with 0 evidence for it. Any "evidence" people cite is usually of the "politicians are evil, so this should be obvious by definition" kind, sometimes of the "they tried x in the past, so surely some unrelated y they're trying to pass in the future is also about x" kind. I haven't seen a single leak, a single admission from somebody trying to pass a law like this, that surveillance is actually the goal here. There are far too many politicians trying to pass laws like these, in very different countries across the world, for some kind of giant global conspiracy to stay undetected. Plain ignorance seems far easier to believe.
- wartywhoa23 10mo ago
  > There are far too many politicians trying to pass laws like these, in very different countries across the world, for some kind of giant global conspiracy to stay undetected. This is today's top agrument! "There are far too many gangsters each operating in their own district for some kind of notion of organized crime to be credible".
- throw_me_uwu 10mo ago
  You don't need conspiracy, you need the incentives. The state always thinks of self-preservation. Any bureaucrat is aligned to this goal by getting the benefits from the state. So, the more power it has over its citizens, which is the first threat it, the more safe it is and the less opinions of citizens matter. Understanding this, every citizen must think carefully about giving away more power to the state.
dottjt 10mo ago
Just because it's about surveillance doesn't mean it's a bad thing? The fact that you need a driver's licence to drive a car, or a document to identify yourself to open a bank account is also surveillance. Yet it seems perfectly reasonable?
phatfish 10mo ago
Dude, parents don't want their kids wading through porn and whatever social media throws at them before they are even teenagers. Childless digital nomad privacy freaks are a minority, age gates are coming. I don't care that they will never be 100%, if it provides cover for parents to stop their kids consuming trash internet "culture" until they are more mature they are already a great benefit to socitey.
- nulbyte 10mo ago
  If it's really that difficult for parents to engage their children and parent them, maybe that says more about a society that doesn't prepare parents for parenthood than it does about those who don't have children.
  - uh-quan 10mo ago
    There is no "good parenting" fix that will keep children from trying to access inappropriate content, forums where unhealthy conversation takes place, pornography, and worse. Being a good parent does not and cannot remove the curiosity, temptation, and ability to access bad content. This is a problem with the human condition, not bad parenting. As a parent myself (and, I hope, a good one), I have found it very difficult to effectively monitor and limit my children's ability to access these things. And I have more facility with technology than the average parent. It's a complex and frustrating problem and the stakes are high.

knallfrosch 10mo ago

> If we have to know that you're not a minor, then we also have to know who you are That is untrue

phyzome 10mo ago
Are you aware of any age verification systems that do not have this property? (This includes being robust against law enforcement action, legal or otherwise.)
- orblivion 10mo ago
  How about: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/opening-up-zero-knowledge-proof-technology-to-promote-privacy-in-age-assurance/ https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/opening-up-ze...
- pksebben 10mo ago
  Like many mention in other comments on this post, it's possible to implement using ZKPs. There are likely other methods that would be effective without compromising privacy. None of them are part of the Age Verification discussion because kids are not the actual point of Age Verification. When I say "if we have to know you're not a kid, we have to know who you are" I'm not stating an actual truth, but the argument as it is playing out politically.
  - magicalhippo 10mo ago
    > None of them are part of the Age Verification discussion because kids are not the actual point of Age Verification. The EU age verification solution says implementations SHOULD implement[1] their ZKP protocol[2]. Not linking it to the user is stated as an explicit goal: Unlinkability: The goal of the solution is to prevent user profiling and tracking by avoiding linkable transactions. Initially, the solution will rely on batch issuance to protect users from colluding RPs. Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) mechanisms will be considered to offer protection. More details are provided in Section 7. [1]: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/docs/architecture-and-technical-specifications/#4-age-verification-solution-high-level-requirements https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d... [2]: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/docs/annexes/annex-B/annex-B-zkp/ https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
    - crote 10mo ago
      If privacy is an explicit goal, why isn't it a MUST? Why even bother with the initial batch issuance phase? And what's stopping them from silently adopting a batch size of 1?
      - magicalhippo 10mo ago
        > Why even bother with the initial batch issuance phase? This is a solution that requires non-trivial interaction between many paries. It seems very reasonable to want to get the parties started on the implementation so they can iron out issues in the infrastructure they're building while they work on the details of the ZKP aspects.
- knallfrosch 10mo ago
  1) Large social media companies know you better than your friends. That has been known for 10 years and they're way better now: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/facebook-knows-you-better-than-anyone-else.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/facebook-knows-yo... 2) Cigarette vending machines accept VISA cards and government IDs and they're offline. 3) A medium-sized social media network required photos (not scans) of GovIDs, where only year of birth and validity date need to visible. The rest could be blacked out physically. 4) You can guess users' age and only request solid proof only for those you are unsure about. The problem is that we technical users think of a one-size-fits-all technical approach that works, without a single fail, for all global users. That is bound to fail. It is only a law and you can break it big time or small time. Reddit's approach might proof way too weak, it'll be fined and given a year to improve. Others might leave the market. Others will be too strict and struggle to get users. Others might have weak enforcement and keep a low profile forever. Others will start small, below the radar and explode in popularity and then enforcement will have to improve. You can also request identity and then delete it. (Yes, some will fail to delete and get hacked.) Giving Facebook a free pass is stupid. They're selling your age cohort "10-11" within 0.0037ms for 0.$0003 to the highest bidder on their ad platform.
- delusional 10mo ago
  Cool trick to tie in the libertarian idea of protecting yourself from legally sanctioned government actions.
  - phyzome 10mo ago
    To make this more concrete: There are a lot of "legally sanctioned" government actions happening in the US right now that are pretty dubious. That includes digging up old laws and giving them spicy new interpretations that legal experts agree are an abuse of power and not in the intent of the original law. Some of these are getting batted down by judges, so right now the category of "legal" is especially vague. That's why I phrased it like that. But also, we see cops just straight up stalking people using government tools. So that's another reason to be concerned about "legal" government actions. Nothing to do with libertarianism.
- magicalhippo 10mo ago
  > Are you aware of any age verification systems that do not have this property? As I understand it, it's the goal of OpenID4VP[1][2]. Using it a site can request to know if the user is over 18 say, and the user can return proof of just that one claim, I'm over 18, without sharing identifying information. The new EU age verification solution[3] builds on this for example. [1]: https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-presentations-1_0.html https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-presentations-1... [2]: https://docs.walt.id/concepts/data-exchange-protocols/openid4vp https://docs.walt.id/concepts/data-exchange-protocols/openid... [3]: https://ageverification.dev/ https://ageverification.dev/
  - stvltvs 10mo ago
    Can't read the specs at the moment, but what prevents the age verification service and the age-gated website from coluding and de-anonymizing your porn use?
    - magicalhippo 10mo ago
      Haven't either had time to fully wrap my head around the details. At least in the EU solution they say there would be multiple attestation serivices the user could choose to use. So that would be technically better than nothing.
    - rcxdude 10mo ago
      With zero-knowledge-proofs the age verification could look like this: you go to whatever age verification service and get a certificate that says you're over the age of 18 (which you only need to do once or at least once per whatever expiry period). You then go to the age-gated website and they ask for proof. You generate (on your own device) a zero-knowledge proof that you have the certificate, but neither the website nor the verification service can determine which certificate it is, and in fact the verification service doesn't even know you've used the certificate.
- aidenn0 10mo ago
  GNU Taler has an age-verification extension.
- triceratops 10mo ago
  I have one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223051

thinkingtoilet 10mo ago

I am someone who is very privacy focused. I've literally never had a social media account on any platform and I'm 42. From day one of facebook, I never wanted my information online. Like many here, I'm deeply concerned about privacy and surveillance. In real life, we think age verification is a good thing. Kids shouldn't buy porn. Teenagers shouldn't get into bars. etc... There has to be room somewhere for reasonable discussion about making sure children do not have access to things they shouldn't. I think it's important to note, that complete dismissal of this idea only turns away your allies and hurts our cause in the long run.

pksebben 10mo ago
I'm not dismissing that idea. It is a perfectly reasonable thing to think about, part of why we have age verification techniques that already work well in critical places like online vape shops. I'm even willing to talk about the possibility that we could use more robust systems deployed more broadly. A lot of folks here are talking about ZKPs in this regard, and that's not a bad idea at all. The issue I'm trying to sound the horn on is that the current push for AF in the US and EU has nothing to do with kids. I think you could put together a working group on ZKPs and Age Verification, write up a paper and run experiments, and when you bring it to the lawmakers they're gonna say something to the tune of: "yeah but that's not trustworthy enough and too technical for people to understand so we're just going to serve legal notices to VPN providers instead to tell them that they can't anymore" ...or something to that tune. I'm not a mind reader, I've just read the reports (by lawmakers) mentioning VPNs as an "area of concern". This is a political gambit and not a new one. The more we treat the current issue as having anything to do with protecting kids the more we legitimize what is an obvious grift.
- bpt3 10mo ago
  How does age verification work for online vape shops?
- tzs 10mo ago
  > The issue I'm trying to sound the horn on is that the current push for AF in the US and EU has nothing to do with kids. I think you could put together a working group on ZKPs and Age Verification, write up a paper and run experiments, and when you bring it to the lawmakers they're gonna say something to the tune of: The EU is currently doing large-scale field tries of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, which they have been working on for several years. It uses ZKPs for age verification. They expect to roll it out to the public near the end of 2026.

like_any_other 10mo ago

> Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance We know this because, instead of putting easy-to-use parental controls on new devices sold (and making it easy to install on old ones) with good defaults [1], they didn't even try that, and went directly for the most privacy-hostile solution. [1] So lazy parents with whatever censorship the government thinks is appropriate for kids, while involved parents can alter the filtering, or remove the software entirely.

jacobgkau 10mo ago
Parental control software has existed for decades. It hasn't worked. Over 70% of teenagers <18 today have watched porn [1]. We all know (many from experience) that kids easily get around whatever restrictions adults put on their computers. We all know the memes about "click here if you're 18" being far less effective than "click here if you're not a robot." Yes, there were other ways of trying to solve the problem. Governments could've mandated explicit websites (which includes a lot of mainstream social media these days) include the RTA rating tag instead of it being a voluntary thing, which social media companies still would've fought; and governments could've also mandated all devices come with parental control software to actually enforce that tag, which still would've been decried as overreach and possibly would've been easily circumventable for anyone who knows what they're doing (including kids). But at the end of the day, there was a legitimate problem, and governments are trying to solve the problem, ulterior motives aside. It's not legal for people to have sex on the street in broad daylight (and even that would arguably be healthier for society than growing up on staged porn is). This argument is much more about whether it's healthy for generations to be raised on porn than many detractors want to admit. [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/raising-kind-kids/202305/new-report-finds-most-teens-watch-online-pornography https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/raising-kind-kids/20...
- pksebben 10mo ago
  Is porn the biggest problem here? What I've seen points the finger at social media as the worst offender for youth mental health. Also, access to porn isn't new with the internet. When we cleared out my grandpa's house we had to pry open a desk that was chock full of hustlers.

topkai22 10mo ago

Age verification is absolutely about kids. It’s also being used (or hijacked into) a vehicle for people who want increased surveillance. There is a ton of evidence that there are harms to unrestricted online access for kids and teens (the book The Anxious Generation is cultural touchstone for this topic at this point). There is a real, well reasoned, and valid movement to do something about this problem. The solutions proposed aren’t always well targeted and are often hijacked by the pro-surveillance movement, but it’s important to call out that these solutions aren’t well targeted instead of declaring the age verification push isn’t addressing a real problem and constituency.

pksebben 10mo ago
As many others have mentioned in this thread and others, there are ways - effective and straightforward ways - that we could be protecting our kids from the harms that come with the www. The harms are real. The solution is a Surveillance Wolf wearing a dead Save The Kids Sheep(tm). Solutions that might work - RTA headers [0]. More robust parental controls. Not this reimagining of the rules of the internet in service of a fairly vague and ineffective goal. It's like the whole AV concept was designed not to work in the current context at all - almost as if that was the point. Perhaps I'm going a little out on a limb. I don't think I am - but quick, tell me you need to know where I'm dialing from without asking me where I'm dialing in from. 0 - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php
- anon291 10mo ago
  Yes all those things are great, but you'll notice that instead of explaining this to the non-technical crowd, technology focused privacy concerned individuals rarely attempt to educate about how these could work. Instead they simply seem to be against any sort of control on what children watch online. Given that it's also coming from a bunch of tech males, it comes across as extraordinarily creepy. This is not hard to understand.
  - pksebben 10mo ago
    If I believed that the efforts in question were in earnest, I would absolutely be talking through the finer points of how to do it right. I don't believe that, though. The veneer of legitimacy here is paper thin - we start with a very weatherbeaten conservative war drum (think of the children!) and immediately jump into "let's ruin privacy for everyone and I totally promise this isn't another Cambridge Analytica".

SilverElfin 10mo ago

Politicians in Washington State is proposing not just age verification but also health warnings on adult websites. How is either constitutional? https://www.xbiz.com/news/294260/washington-av-bill-jumps-on-health-warning-bandwagon https://www.xbiz.com/news/294260/washington-av-bill-jumps-on...

bigstrat2003 10mo ago
It's been illegal to sell porn to minors since approximately forever. If that is constitutional (not saying it is, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't since it's such an established practice), then I don't see how requiring age verification on porn sites wouldn't be. Requiring health warnings might be another matter, though. Not sure about that.
- SilverElfin 10mo ago
  Does the “sell” part matter - like is it simply that the sale to minors can be regulated? If it is free isn’t it just transmission of information?
  - mikeyouse 10mo ago
    No, it's still illegal in most places to knowingly distribute pornography to minors - the law in my state starts; > A person who sells, gives away or in any way furnishes to a person under the age of 18 years a book, pamphlet, or other printed paper or other thing, containing obscene language, or obscene prints, pictures, figures or descriptions tending to corrupt the morals of youth
TomatoCo 10mo ago
I wonder how it relates to the health warnings on tobacco products?

idkfasayer 10mo ago

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thayne 10mo ago

I would much rather have laws that require that certain kinds of websites return machine-readable headers describing what kind of content is on them, and then browsers, web proxies, etc. could be configured by parents, schools, etc. to block undesirable sites.

wkat4242 10mo ago
And really, a locally running AI could make that assessment pretty easily even if it isn't declared. No need to destroy the whole world's privacy. Unless that was the goal to begin with, obviously.
Terr_ 10mo ago
Recycling a post about reasons to do it that way: > 1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature. > 2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon. > 3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding? > 4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
- Gormo 10mo ago
  This is the exact argument that we had in the 1990s about content on television, and the solution ended up being exactly this -- TV networks started attaching ratings to their broadcasts, and TV sets started including "v-chips" that could be turned on and configured to block content that matched certain ratings. Once that solution was in place, the argument was settled, and the people trying to push for censorship in pursuit of ulterior motives didn't have a leg to stand on.

Razengan 10mo ago

People are complacent. Even me, even you. We're not going to get off our 21st-century comforts asses and actually do anything to disrupt anything. At best I may avoid using products from certain companies until I really have to, like Google and Microsoft's AIs, or clear cookies after signing into YouTube so it doesn't sign you into everything else, or write a comment here and there about how some Apple APIs like the iCloud Keychain allow Facebook etc to track you across devices and reinstalls, but I'm not ever going bother doing anything more that would actually challenge all this dystopian fuckiness.

Tannic 10mo ago

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zamadatix 10mo ago

As much as you (and I as well) don't want age verification to involve discussion about kids' access to content because we're more concerned about the surveillance push riding the popularity of that, repeating "it isn't about kids" loudly 3 times doesn't make the (extremely large) group of people pushing age verification for kids disappear. Telling that larger group their interest just isn't part of the conversation at all excludes _you_ from the conversation rather than changing the focus of the conversation to the other downsides instead of the primary interest others might have. There are also, concerningly IMO, an extremely large amount of people willing to accept severe surveillance or privacy downsides so long as it helps achieve the goal about kids. To them, the same would in reverse would be "why are you talking about surveillance, the real issue is the kids. Say it 3 times loud, for those in the back!" and the conversation gets nowhere because it's just people saying how they won't talk to anyone who disagrees what concerns should be considered.

edgineer 10mo ago
I'm sure those people exist, I just never happen to see anything they write online nor meet any of them in real life.
- godelski 10mo ago
  We're all in bubbles. But it's good to expand them when you recognize you're in one.
  - nyc_data_geek1 10mo ago
    And the Internet also consists in large part of bots talking to bots. This is not to say that some people won't always promulgate the "Won't somebody please think of the children?" argument every time an expansion of the surveillance state apparatus is in question, but rather to say that we should not take for granted that every bad opinion we see online is one deeply held by any real people.
- dietdrpeppr 10mo ago
  > There are also, concerningly IMO, an extremely large amount of people willing to accept severe surveillance or privacy downsides so long as it helps achieve the goal about kids. I’m alive. Nice to meet you. I “accept severe surveillance”, not in the sense that I agree with it, but because I know that it already exists and has existed and that people that are against it are screaming into the wind. Many large and small countries have long histories of surveillance. It’s not that you shouldn’t try to enforce privacy, in fact, the law requires it if you in some cases, and it’s a good idea in others. I’m certainly not against the EFF standing up for the rights of everyone not to be severely surveilled. But, realistically, the public cannot easily anonymize our activity and data. And if you try to do so, you’re painting yourself as a target. If you were trying to keep your country safe, wouldn’t you like the ability to infiltrate any major cloud, SaaS app, social media platform, bank, government, VPN/internal network, and OS? Similarly, if you were a big data or security company wouldn’t you also do everything you could to know everything it is to know about a person if you had the means and time and it made sense for your business? Following, if you were to have that power as a government, business, or other organization, wouldn’t it be critical to ensure that you restricted its use to ensure it wasn’t abused to the point that you’d lose it, even though the reality would be that you probably don’t have time to keep it as safe as you need to? I “accept severe surveillance” not because I promote it or want it, but because I understand how the world works and what it does. All these things will pass. If you have the focus and the mental capacity to do what is good, then do it. It likely helped the world in some way to learn about KGB wiretaps. But, in the U.S., as far as I can tell, the backlash against the CIA and NSA was just used for political gain and then to replace those that didn’t agree with the current administration. Was that helpful? And who are we really being manipulated by when we attack ourselves and install destabilizing leaders?

deleted 10mo ago

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miki123211 10mo ago

How do you know this? I see this argument repeated over and over on HN, with 0 evidence for it. Any "evidence" people cite is usually of the "politicians are evil, so this should be obvious by definition" kind, sometimes of the "they tried x in the past, so surely some unrelated y they're trying to pass in the future is also about x" kind. I haven't seen a single leak, a single admission from somebody trying to pass a law like this, that surveillance is actually the goal here. There are far too many politicians trying to pass laws like these, in very different countries across the world, for some kind of giant global conspiracy to stay undetected. Plain ignorance seems far easier to believe.

wartywhoa23 10mo ago
> There are far too many politicians trying to pass laws like these, in very different countries across the world, for some kind of giant global conspiracy to stay undetected. This is today's top agrument! "There are far too many gangsters each operating in their own district for some kind of notion of organized crime to be credible".
throw_me_uwu 10mo ago
You don't need conspiracy, you need the incentives. The state always thinks of self-preservation. Any bureaucrat is aligned to this goal by getting the benefits from the state. So, the more power it has over its citizens, which is the first threat it, the more safe it is and the less opinions of citizens matter. Understanding this, every citizen must think carefully about giving away more power to the state.

dottjt 10mo ago

Just because it's about surveillance doesn't mean it's a bad thing? The fact that you need a driver's licence to drive a car, or a document to identify yourself to open a bank account is also surveillance. Yet it seems perfectly reasonable?

phatfish 10mo ago

Dude, parents don't want their kids wading through porn and whatever social media throws at them before they are even teenagers. Childless digital nomad privacy freaks are a minority, age gates are coming. I don't care that they will never be 100%, if it provides cover for parents to stop their kids consuming trash internet "culture" until they are more mature they are already a great benefit to socitey.

nulbyte 10mo ago
If it's really that difficult for parents to engage their children and parent them, maybe that says more about a society that doesn't prepare parents for parenthood than it does about those who don't have children.
- uh-quan 10mo ago
  There is no "good parenting" fix that will keep children from trying to access inappropriate content, forums where unhealthy conversation takes place, pornography, and worse. Being a good parent does not and cannot remove the curiosity, temptation, and ability to access bad content. This is a problem with the human condition, not bad parenting. As a parent myself (and, I hope, a good one), I have found it very difficult to effectively monitor and limit my children's ability to access these things. And I have more facility with technology than the average parent. It's a complex and frustrating problem and the stakes are high.