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Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?

• jagoff 11mo ago
  It's not about age verification and it never was, that is a distraction at best and a delusion at worst. This is about tying your real name to all of your online activities, and about getting the current generation of children used to it and accepting of it before they reach voting age.
  • taylodl 11mo ago
    BINGO!!!
  • Simulacra 11mo ago
    I would counter that they already have that. Would go so far to say that the government knows pretty much everything you do online by name. What they can't control, it's access. I think the reason for this is for an eventual license to get on the Internet. The same way you need a license to drive a car, you will need a license tied to your real identity, to use the Internet.
  • minusLik 11mo ago
    This. The German government issues electronic IDs which can provide proof of age in a privacy-saving way, but I've never seen that being used in the wild.
• magicalhippo 11mo ago
  Discussion on the mentioned age verification hub here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223389
• rzerowan 11mo ago
  Paradoxically this is one of those features/requirements that i feel should be on the end-user-device with zero knowledge proof. It would make sense to have the enduser verification ondevice with a simple reply to any online property : Passed age verification/or not. Otherwise the centralization and eventual leak of this data is a can of worms in waiting.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
    • onetokeoverthe 11mo ago
      [dead]
  • Bender 11mo ago
    Here [1] is the zero knowledge solution. It has existed for ages but not adopted likely due to not providing a name, SSN, location and credit card. No third parties, no dependency on CDN's, no sharing or leaking ... anything. Given that solution is unlikely to be legislated into action I would suggest people are just going to share adult content on Usenet, Tor, P2P, within G/PG rated video games by plonking down a virtual theater and streaming from a throw-away VM and fully automating syncing with LFTP+mirror+SFTP, sharing USB NVME drives, mobile ephemeral websites over WiFi and other methods when people get tired of this Top/Bottom relationship lobbyists want us to participate in. As a plus side, driving people underground means zero tracking, rules, taxes, obligations, leaking email addresses, etc... [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074
  • simion314 11mo ago
    Exactly, on my Play Station I setup for my son I enter his real birthday, then Sony knows what can he do in the Store or chat etc. So we could have the big tech Apple, Google, Microsoft, Canonical ensure to make an idiot prof setup screen and the parent is responsible to set the age of the birthday of the child if they give a device to them . Then the store can be filtered and the browser can have a standard way of adding in the headers an age range or something. Big tech did not want to cooperate to do this for some weird reason so now we get a much more complicated solution. Yes I know that if your kid uses a live USB stick he could watch porn on his laptop but IMO is much easier for such a smart kid to find a website that does not respect the browser headers and torrent adult content.
  • vermon 11mo ago
    EU implementation of age verification is actually base don zero knowledge proofs https://ageverification.dev/ https://ageverification.dev/
• hexbin010 11mo ago
  Look at the Overton window rapidly shrinking. Thanks EFF!
• miguelbemartin 11mo ago
  In my opinion, access to internet should always be behind a device controlled by an adult. And it should be this adult's responsibility to set appropriate restrictions for minors.
  • johnnienaked 11mo ago
    You want parents to parent? God speed and good luck
    • saghm 11mo ago
      No, I think what they want is not to have the rest of us have to jump through hoops (and sacrifice privacy) to achieve the same thing. Some of us don't have kids (or live in a household with any), so passing a law that potentially limits our internet access to solve a "problem" that already is dubious is ridiculous.
      • johnnienaked 11mo ago
        I couldn't agree more
        • saghm 11mo ago
          Fair enough! I misunderstood your previous comment as implying that measures like this were needed due to the unlikelihood of parents enforcing this. (There's probably a joke somewhere in here about "parent" comments as well, but I'm not clever enough to figure it out at the moment).
          • johnnienaked 11mo ago
            Absolutely not im never verifying my ID ever on the internet and I think it's not only an extreme overreach but will end up being ineffective as well. While I think children need to be protected online, this won't but neither will trying to get parents to parent better
  • 11mo ago
• 3rodents 11mo ago
  I don’t like this article. Irrelevant technical nuance is comingled with a philosophical opposition. The technical issues are all solvable. The free speech argument is foolish too: if limiting who can jerk off to pornography is an issue of free speech, surely so is limiting who can enter a bar and converse with the patrons. Opposition to ID checks because you believe the internet should be open and free is reasonable but this article twists itself into knots throwing everything at the wall. And it is reasonable to believe it is a free speech issue. But we can’t say, at the same time, that the same arguments don’t apply outside of the internet. (Convenience stores scan ID, bars scan ID, hotels take copies of passports…)
  • Ajedi32 11mo ago
    The free speech argument is that these ID checks aren't just being applied to porn sites; there's a push to make social media websites (probably the largest hubs of free speech in the modern world) do them too. That's a much bigger deal. It'd be like if you had to show your ID to a police officer in order to enter exit your front door.
  • cwmoore 11mo ago
    I am not that fond of stores scanning my ID data either. I’m over 21, there’s no question about it. Per policy, they’ll have my name and address in some log too, and with my photos and gait on camera and probably my license plates. What does all of that do for me? Are you safer because I am being recorded? I like the (disputed) comment elsewhere on this page, requiring parents to parent. They aren’t my kids.
    • morgan814 11mo ago
      If you have the money definitely get yourself a passport card. Stores can’t scan them and they only contain a pointer to personal info in some government database.
  • pessimizer 11mo ago
    > Convenience stores scan ID, bars scan ID These are new things, not old things. The idea that stores and bars should be able to record for all eternity the identities of the people who have purchased things from them is just as much of a horror. They can sell that information to anyone. > hotels take copies of passports… This is not really a new thing, although it is a fairly new thing (i.e. within the last 40 years, since cheap enough photocopiers.) But it comes from laws about keeping track of who is staying in temporary accommodation, 100 years ago you would have had to sign the register.
• johnnienaked 11mo ago
  I'm never verifying my ID to access anything on the internet. I'll just stop using it.
  • catapart 11mo ago
    That's kind of the point of all this. They force websites to enact the verification because they have leverage over businesses that they don't have over citizens, and then they expect that the citizens will hate it so much that they don't go to the "bad" sites at all. "Thank you for your cooperation!" ETA: (accidental submit; sorry) I'm in the same boat! Not entering my ID information into any website, much less ones they've got on the list. And so they've successfully boxed us in. At least for me, I intend to raise hell about it aside from just not sharing PIA, but I don't have any delusions of it's effect.
    • johnnienaked 11mo ago
      The internet as well as Facebook and most AI all used to be DARPA/CIA/InQTel projects so this isn't surprising
• zug_zug 11mo ago
  Cryptographically there are techniques that let you prove you're one of the several hundred million adults in the US that don't reveal anything about which adult you are. It's much less complicated than bitcoin. I'm bringing this up because it's the perfect litmus test to show whether you really care about age verification, or if you want personal trackability for all internet behavior. I'd be okay with this for certain situations (e.g. a forum that doesn't want to foreign agitators to pretend they are US voters), but the whole porn thing is a ridiculous farce because there are still going to always be millions of non-us porn sites that don't enforce US laws.
  • jraby3 11mo ago
    Can you send a link or explain how this can be done? As a not super tech savvy parent I find it impossible to keep my son off screens. He always finds a workaround. So I'm a fan of age verification especially after reading The Anxious Generation, despite all the hate it gets from hacker news.
    • swid 11mo ago
      He’s talking about zero knowledge proofs - it’s a neat use of graph coloring where you send an encrypted proof that a graph can be colored with three colors and no neighbors with the same color. The verifier makes a challenge to prove two nodes don’t have the same color, and the prover provides a key to decrypted just those two nodes. This process is repeated a number of times (with new colored graphs) until the verifier approaches certainty that the prover will always be able to show all nodes have neighbors with different colors. This coloring problem is NP complete and somehow the thing the prover is proving is encoded in the graph structure. At the end of the day, the only thing the verifier is sure of is that the prover can make the three colored graph, 1 bit that corresponds to the thing the verifier wants to know (eg - does the prover have a token that can show they are over 18).
      • evgen 11mo ago
        For simple yes/no questions ("Is over 18?", "Is US resident?") then you should look back to David Chaum's blind signatures and the work that came out of that back in the 90s. The math is super-simple to understand and there are a ton of even easier metaphors with envelopes and carbon paper that you can use to explain to your grandmother. Once you get someone to grok blind signatures it is easy to lead them to zero-knowledge proofs.
• delusional 11mo ago
  Are we to assume that the people at the EFF haven't heard of how European nations, like Denmark, are building government infrastructure to verify your age without disclosing sensitive information? Are we also at assume that the EFF fail to see the similarity of age-gating porn websites and age-gating entrance to strip clubs? That doesn't seem likely to me, and I find it way more likely that the EFF is purposefully excluding the best argument against their chosen position.
• Havoc 11mo ago
  This tries to make a logical argument against an attack that isn’t that - it’s linked to age and „think of the children“ precisely because it isn’t really disprovable and anyone daring to take a stance against it can be hit with a „oh so you’re against protecting children“. Scratch out the age in „online age verification“ and you get to real reason
• brewcejener 11mo ago
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• brewcejener 11mo ago
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• GlobalFrog 11mo ago
  The core issue here, as often, is that it pits ethical and economic concerns against one another. There has been a systemic choice by web/tech companies to prioritize maximum profit, often at the expense of necessary user support and compliance. Because of that, user support/relations are deficient and there is little accountability for what they're doing, even if, as we often read here, a tech company cancels user accounts, projects, or monetary accounts, without anyone or anywhere to appeal. Age verification presents the same problem. If companies maintained a professional, human-centered user relations function, they could implement a non-intrusive, real-time validation process. If we were in the real world, with for example a barman needing an ID, that single person could confirm the age without copying or indefinitely keeping the ID card. The digital equivalent would be a decent support representative who could conduct a live brief video interaction to confirm a user's age, without even storing a copy of the ID, and who could even require the parents to be there with the minors signing in. That would address both the need for verification and the data minimization problem. Yes, that would cost the companies a lot of money, but that would solve both problems at the same time: verifying the user's age and ensuring privacy. And guess what, the same person could also serve as an entry point for other issues that no one can really appeal against now, like the frozen accounts and other horror stories mentioned above. Yes, parental control is necessary, but it is insufficient. Zero-Knowledge Proof thingies could allow a device to validate parts of the process, but the possibilities of circumventing this are so enormous and endless that they look to me as completely insecure (and using a third party validating this adds another layer of trouble). The most effective way would be to reintroduce a human element in the process, but we have already given up, because we are at the mercy of the web companies due to their free tools. The governments trying to introduce some ethics to those processes are not the problem at all, they should be commended for that. We are the problem because we accept that what should be the web companies' responsibilities is not being fulfilled because we don't want them to make less money as we would lose some freebies. That's on us, not on the laws. So the answer to "Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?" is : because we collectively accept it is not exactly showing our ID in person.
• earlyreturns 11mo ago
  Just make the isp the gateway. Nobody under 18 needs the internet. If a parent lets their kid onto the internet, prosecute the parent. It’s pretty simple really. People just want to pretend it’s harder than it is because they have some conflict because removing under 18 from the net cuts into profits or makes it harder to parent. Boo hoo.
• Palmik 11mo ago
  If age verification has to be a thing (which isn't necessarily clear), then it should be up to the client to provide age indication to the server. It could be through a header, or something like this: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-origin-trial https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or... However, I have the feeling that none of these solutions will get wide enough buy in and adoption to be a viable solution to website owners.