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According to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable

According to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months. It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked, which is a total no-go for privacy. These massive privacy issues have all been raised on their Github, and the team behind the wallet have been ignoring them.

Aurornis 7mo ago
Thanks for posting this. The inherent problem with all zero knowledge identity solutions is that they also prevent any of the safeguards that governments want for ID checking. A true zero knowledge ID check with blind signatures wouldn't work because it would only take a single leaked ID for everyone to authenticate their accounts with the same leaked ID. So the providers start putting in restrictions and logging and other features that defeat the zero knowledge part that everyone thought they were getting.
- jajuuka 7mo ago
  I mean that's kind of a problem with ANY solution. There will be workarounds and ways to break it. There is no perfect solution outside someone standing over you while on the internet. We need to look at this more like age checks on porn sites and gaming platforms where you just put in a birthdate. Obviously someone can lie, but that point isn't to be a perfect wall but a hurdle to clear to make sure users are aware of the content and that any sort of nanny software to block if set up.
  - Aurornis 7mo ago
    > I mean that's kind of a problem with ANY solution. There will be workarounds and ways to break it. That's unnecessarily reductive. Yes, every solution will have problems, but not all solutions have similar problems. If a solution has problems such that it can be immediately reduced to security theater and bypassed by any teenager who cares, it's just extra hassle and privacy degradation for the rest of us. These details matter. If a weak solution is regulated into law and the government discovers kids are easily bypassing it, they will immediately pivot into requiring more restrictions on it.
    - jajuuka 7mo ago
      Extra hassle is manageable. Sites or programs that want you to put in a birthday are extra hassle but objectively better than something like submitting an ID. Privacy degradation is also manageable as well. It just depends on the solution. We've had decades of age gating being "are you 18+ or not" yet it is only now that talks of something more enforceable are coming up. This discussion is largely about how one can create a sense of safety and protection. For the more extreme end it's face scans and submitting ID. Even though these are bypassed by any teenager who cares they are still being pushed seriously because it instills that sense of safety and protection for children. Security theater is just a part of managing the internet and not going away unfortunately.
  - EmbarrassedHelp 7mo ago
    > age checks on porn sites and gaming platforms where you just put in a birthdate That's the only solution that truly protects user privacy and security. Video games and especially mature content should not require age verification. People's lives can be permanently destroyed over perfectly legal sexual fantasies, and thus anything that increases the risk of the information being tracked is unacceptable.
- hiciu 7mo ago
  > A true zero knowledge ID check with blind signatures That is not true and "true zero knowledge ID check" + "age verification" with blind signatures is what's being implemented by the EU ID project. So someone's id leaks. It happens. In EUDI there are things called "cryptographic accumulators of non-revocation proofs". If your ID leaks it goes into the accumulator. Similar to the certificate revocation lists. During check, you include claims "im over 18" and "my id is not in the accumulator". This is included in the standard. This is also (I can only assume) one of the reasons why EUDI wallets require play integrity / attestation / secure element on the device. So your private key won't be easily leaked and no one can steal your ID.
  - Aurornis 7mo ago
    You're assuming the leak was accidental, the person knows about it, and they didn't intend for others to use it. What happens when someone sets up a marketplace where people can sell those blind signatures using their ID for $2 each? And then kids just pay $2 to have someone else blindly use their ID to validate the account, because supposedly the system is structured so that nobody can tell which ID was used or tie it back to the account?
    - hiciu 7mo ago
      That's where the google play integrity / attestation comes into the effect. In theory you cannot export your private key from the device (from the secure element), so for each $2 someone would have to quickly unlock their phone, scan code via the app and so on.
      - coppsilgold 7mo ago
        Private keys from secure elements leak all the time. There will be a flawed implementation that someone exploits, an insider will smuggle a key out etc. This is why true zero-knowledge systems for this sort of thing aren't practical and will never be. Because a SINGLE leak will break it and there will be no way to even detect it. The attestation systems you reference don't even allow true zero knowledge attestation, they involve a trusted intermediary to convert your burned-in private key to a temporary key which you use for attestation with a third party. And the temporary key isn't even a product of a blind signature. And it's rate limited. So if a service selling these temporary keys shows up they will be able to easily trace it to the burned-in key responsible - then revoke it and if possible initiate legal action. This also means that whenever you register to a service using one of these schemes you are registering with your real identity, it's only a question of how hard and how many parties need to collude to extract it. And in the event that they really do blindly sign tokens generated on your device, then their scheme will not survive adoption. As it gets adopted, the value of these blind signatures will rise and services that sell them will pop up. There will be no way of tracing the sold blind signature to the compromised/colluding device and rate limiting will merely necessitate a farm of such devices as opposed to a single leaked key. *Note that Blind Signatures are Zero Knowledge.
- dogcomplex 7mo ago
  This specific problem is solved by requiring that any anonymous ZK ID once used for an account be marked on an immutable ledger preventing multiple uses of the same ID. Sharing it would be pointless as multiple attempts to use it get burned. Yet none of those sites know who you are, only that you have a unique valid ID pass. They just have to check any login attempts against that ledger - easy enough.
  - donmcronald 7mo ago
    > They just have to check any login attempts against that ledger - easy enough. So like CT logs, but several orders of magnitude bigger? I thought centralized TLS revocation lists failed due to scale. How will this differ?
    - namibj 7mo ago
      Just crypto tie them to the server/site and let them do it, CRLs were an issue due to distribution to every device, not because of a hastable like sparse set structure being too much. Also this isn't every connection, but only every time you (attempt to) verify your age.
chrishare 7mo ago
Link?
- EmbarrassedHelp 7mo ago
  https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technical-specification https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic... https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2025/08/10/whos-afraid-of-privacy-focused-smartphones/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2025/08/10/who...
hiciu 7mo ago
> EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification EUDI wallets are connected to your government issued ID. There is no "highly invasive age verification". We are literally sending a request to our government's server to sign, with their private key, message "this john smith born on 1970-01-01 is aged over 18" + jwt iat. There are 3 claims in there. They are hashed with different salts. This all is signed by the government. You get it with the salts. When you want to prove you are 18+ you include salt for the "is aged over 18" claim, and the signed document with all the salts and the other side can validate if the document is signed and if your claim matches the document. No face scanning, no driver license uploading to god-knows-where, no anything. > to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months This is the fallback mechanism. You are supposed to use bbs+ signatures that are zero knowledge, are computed on the device and so on. It is supposed to provide the "unlinkability". I don't feel competent enough to explain how those work. > jailbreaking / "prevent tampering" This is true. The eidas directive requires that secret material lives in a dedicated hardware / secure element. It's really not much different than what a banking app would require. > You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked This is not true, the law requires core apps to be opensource. Polish EUDI wallet has been even decompiled by a youtuber to compare it with sources and check if the rumors about spying are true. So you can check yourself if the app tracks you. Also we can't have a meaningful discussion without expanding on definition of "tracking". Can the site owner track you when you verify if you are 18+? Not really, each token is unique, there should be no correlation here. Can the government track you? No, not alone. Can the site owner and the government collude to track you? Yes they can! Government can track all salts for your tokens, site can collect all salts, they can compare notes. There are so called policy mitigations currently: audits and requirements for governments to remove salts from memory the moment stuff is issued. Can they lie? Sure. Can the site owner and the government collude to track you if you are using bbs+? No. Math says no. Can they lie if you are using bbs+? Math says no.
- EmbarrassedHelp 7mo ago
  > This is not true, the law requires core apps to be opensource. Polish EUDI wallet has been even decompiled by a youtuber to compare it with sources and check if the rumors about spying are true. So you can check yourself if the app tracks you. The "open source" apps connect to proprietary backends run by a third party that you have to blindly trust. If EUDI wallets were truly open source and free from blindly trusting any authority, then you could simply remove that requirement and issue your own tokens without the use of potentially malicious third party.
godelski 7mo ago
> It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". Regulatory capture at its finest. Such a ruling gives Apple and Google a duopoly over the market. Maybe worse, it encourages the push of personal computers to be more mobile like (the fact that we treat phones as different from computers is already a silly concept). So when are we going to build a new internet? Anyone playing around with things like Reticulum? LoRA? Mesh networks?
- forgetfreeman 7mo ago
  A new internet to do what? What is the proposed goal of a new network?
  - verisimi 7mo ago
    I would assume it would be not be regulated by government, so without constraints on age, restrictions on what you can do - you know, like reality. And I know that government attempts to regulate reality too, but if you drive at 35 where the limit is 30, or speak to someone dodgy to get some marijuana or whatever, and get away with these and other heinous crimes, you're good! The distinction really is whether you bake regulation into the technology or not. And it seems that technology is actually the new legal system. Or perhaps that should be the 'pre-legal system' as it won't allow you to do those things it determines as 'wrong'. Which is absolutely fine if you think government really does know best, or hell on earth for everyone else.
    - forgetfreeman 7mo ago
      The last 35 years have very vividly demonstrated that there needs to be some adults in the room. Without exception every major tech company has implemented practices so overtly hostile to the userbase that the government has been more or less forced to get involved, mostly in the form of fines that have done very little to disincentivize whatever problematic bullshit the company in question was originally caught at. Suggesting that even less regulation would somehow magically cause tech firms to align goals with their userbase seems baseless to say the least.
StopDisinfo910 7mo ago
> It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". The EUDI spec is tech neutral. What the EUDI mandates is a high level of assurance under the eIDAS 2.0 regulation and the use of a secure element or a trusted execution environment to store the key.
- raxxorraxor 7mo ago
  my users .ssh folder is secure enough. Take it or leave it.
KoolKat23 7mo ago
I'm sorry to say it but the fact it bans jailbreaking/rooting your device really makes me believe "think of the children" isn't their real goal. There's some clever kids out there but come on.
Vinnl 7mo ago
> It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". IIRC that was only for a prototype or reference implementation.

Aurornis 7mo ago

Thanks for posting this. The inherent problem with all zero knowledge identity solutions is that they also prevent any of the safeguards that governments want for ID checking. A true zero knowledge ID check with blind signatures wouldn't work because it would only take a single leaked ID for everyone to authenticate their accounts with the same leaked ID. So the providers start putting in restrictions and logging and other features that defeat the zero knowledge part that everyone thought they were getting.

jajuuka 7mo ago
I mean that's kind of a problem with ANY solution. There will be workarounds and ways to break it. There is no perfect solution outside someone standing over you while on the internet. We need to look at this more like age checks on porn sites and gaming platforms where you just put in a birthdate. Obviously someone can lie, but that point isn't to be a perfect wall but a hurdle to clear to make sure users are aware of the content and that any sort of nanny software to block if set up.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  > I mean that's kind of a problem with ANY solution. There will be workarounds and ways to break it. That's unnecessarily reductive. Yes, every solution will have problems, but not all solutions have similar problems. If a solution has problems such that it can be immediately reduced to security theater and bypassed by any teenager who cares, it's just extra hassle and privacy degradation for the rest of us. These details matter. If a weak solution is regulated into law and the government discovers kids are easily bypassing it, they will immediately pivot into requiring more restrictions on it.
  - jajuuka 7mo ago
    Extra hassle is manageable. Sites or programs that want you to put in a birthday are extra hassle but objectively better than something like submitting an ID. Privacy degradation is also manageable as well. It just depends on the solution. We've had decades of age gating being "are you 18+ or not" yet it is only now that talks of something more enforceable are coming up. This discussion is largely about how one can create a sense of safety and protection. For the more extreme end it's face scans and submitting ID. Even though these are bypassed by any teenager who cares they are still being pushed seriously because it instills that sense of safety and protection for children. Security theater is just a part of managing the internet and not going away unfortunately.
- EmbarrassedHelp 7mo ago
  > age checks on porn sites and gaming platforms where you just put in a birthdate That's the only solution that truly protects user privacy and security. Video games and especially mature content should not require age verification. People's lives can be permanently destroyed over perfectly legal sexual fantasies, and thus anything that increases the risk of the information being tracked is unacceptable.
hiciu 7mo ago
> A true zero knowledge ID check with blind signatures That is not true and "true zero knowledge ID check" + "age verification" with blind signatures is what's being implemented by the EU ID project. So someone's id leaks. It happens. In EUDI there are things called "cryptographic accumulators of non-revocation proofs". If your ID leaks it goes into the accumulator. Similar to the certificate revocation lists. During check, you include claims "im over 18" and "my id is not in the accumulator". This is included in the standard. This is also (I can only assume) one of the reasons why EUDI wallets require play integrity / attestation / secure element on the device. So your private key won't be easily leaked and no one can steal your ID.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  You're assuming the leak was accidental, the person knows about it, and they didn't intend for others to use it. What happens when someone sets up a marketplace where people can sell those blind signatures using their ID for $2 each? And then kids just pay $2 to have someone else blindly use their ID to validate the account, because supposedly the system is structured so that nobody can tell which ID was used or tie it back to the account?
  - hiciu 7mo ago
    That's where the google play integrity / attestation comes into the effect. In theory you cannot export your private key from the device (from the secure element), so for each $2 someone would have to quickly unlock their phone, scan code via the app and so on.
    - coppsilgold 7mo ago
      Private keys from secure elements leak all the time. There will be a flawed implementation that someone exploits, an insider will smuggle a key out etc. This is why true zero-knowledge systems for this sort of thing aren't practical and will never be. Because a SINGLE leak will break it and there will be no way to even detect it. The attestation systems you reference don't even allow true zero knowledge attestation, they involve a trusted intermediary to convert your burned-in private key to a temporary key which you use for attestation with a third party. And the temporary key isn't even a product of a blind signature. And it's rate limited. So if a service selling these temporary keys shows up they will be able to easily trace it to the burned-in key responsible - then revoke it and if possible initiate legal action. This also means that whenever you register to a service using one of these schemes you are registering with your real identity, it's only a question of how hard and how many parties need to collude to extract it. And in the event that they really do blindly sign tokens generated on your device, then their scheme will not survive adoption. As it gets adopted, the value of these blind signatures will rise and services that sell them will pop up. There will be no way of tracing the sold blind signature to the compromised/colluding device and rate limiting will merely necessitate a farm of such devices as opposed to a single leaked key. *Note that Blind Signatures are Zero Knowledge.
dogcomplex 7mo ago
This specific problem is solved by requiring that any anonymous ZK ID once used for an account be marked on an immutable ledger preventing multiple uses of the same ID. Sharing it would be pointless as multiple attempts to use it get burned. Yet none of those sites know who you are, only that you have a unique valid ID pass. They just have to check any login attempts against that ledger - easy enough.
- donmcronald 7mo ago
  > They just have to check any login attempts against that ledger - easy enough. So like CT logs, but several orders of magnitude bigger? I thought centralized TLS revocation lists failed due to scale. How will this differ?
  - namibj 7mo ago
    Just crypto tie them to the server/site and let them do it, CRLs were an issue due to distribution to every device, not because of a hastable like sparse set structure being too much. Also this isn't every connection, but only every time you (attempt to) verify your age.

chrishare 7mo ago

Link?

EmbarrassedHelp 7mo ago
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technical-specification https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic... https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2025/08/10/whos-afraid-of-privacy-focused-smartphones/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2025/08/10/who...

hiciu 7mo ago

> EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification EUDI wallets are connected to your government issued ID. There is no "highly invasive age verification". We are literally sending a request to our government's server to sign, with their private key, message "this john smith born on 1970-01-01 is aged over 18" + jwt iat. There are 3 claims in there. They are hashed with different salts. This all is signed by the government. You get it with the salts. When you want to prove you are 18+ you include salt for the "is aged over 18" claim, and the signed document with all the salts and the other side can validate if the document is signed and if your claim matches the document. No face scanning, no driver license uploading to god-knows-where, no anything. > to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months This is the fallback mechanism. You are supposed to use bbs+ signatures that are zero knowledge, are computed on the device and so on. It is supposed to provide the "unlinkability". I don't feel competent enough to explain how those work. > jailbreaking / "prevent tampering" This is true. The eidas directive requires that secret material lives in a dedicated hardware / secure element. It's really not much different than what a banking app would require. > You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked This is not true, the law requires core apps to be opensource. Polish EUDI wallet has been even decompiled by a youtuber to compare it with sources and check if the rumors about spying are true. So you can check yourself if the app tracks you. Also we can't have a meaningful discussion without expanding on definition of "tracking". Can the site owner track you when you verify if you are 18+? Not really, each token is unique, there should be no correlation here. Can the government track you? No, not alone. Can the site owner and the government collude to track you? Yes they can! Government can track all salts for your tokens, site can collect all salts, they can compare notes. There are so called policy mitigations currently: audits and requirements for governments to remove salts from memory the moment stuff is issued. Can they lie? Sure. Can the site owner and the government collude to track you if you are using bbs+? No. Math says no. Can they lie if you are using bbs+? Math says no.

EmbarrassedHelp 7mo ago
> This is not true, the law requires core apps to be opensource. Polish EUDI wallet has been even decompiled by a youtuber to compare it with sources and check if the rumors about spying are true. So you can check yourself if the app tracks you. The "open source" apps connect to proprietary backends run by a third party that you have to blindly trust. If EUDI wallets were truly open source and free from blindly trusting any authority, then you could simply remove that requirement and issue your own tokens without the use of potentially malicious third party.

godelski 7mo ago

> It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". Regulatory capture at its finest. Such a ruling gives Apple and Google a duopoly over the market. Maybe worse, it encourages the push of personal computers to be more mobile like (the fact that we treat phones as different from computers is already a silly concept). So when are we going to build a new internet? Anyone playing around with things like Reticulum? LoRA? Mesh networks?

forgetfreeman 7mo ago
A new internet to do what? What is the proposed goal of a new network?
- verisimi 7mo ago
  I would assume it would be not be regulated by government, so without constraints on age, restrictions on what you can do - you know, like reality. And I know that government attempts to regulate reality too, but if you drive at 35 where the limit is 30, or speak to someone dodgy to get some marijuana or whatever, and get away with these and other heinous crimes, you're good! The distinction really is whether you bake regulation into the technology or not. And it seems that technology is actually the new legal system. Or perhaps that should be the 'pre-legal system' as it won't allow you to do those things it determines as 'wrong'. Which is absolutely fine if you think government really does know best, or hell on earth for everyone else.
  - forgetfreeman 7mo ago
    The last 35 years have very vividly demonstrated that there needs to be some adults in the room. Without exception every major tech company has implemented practices so overtly hostile to the userbase that the government has been more or less forced to get involved, mostly in the form of fines that have done very little to disincentivize whatever problematic bullshit the company in question was originally caught at. Suggesting that even less regulation would somehow magically cause tech firms to align goals with their userbase seems baseless to say the least.

StopDisinfo910 7mo ago

> It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". The EUDI spec is tech neutral. What the EUDI mandates is a high level of assurance under the eIDAS 2.0 regulation and the use of a secure element or a trusted execution environment to store the key.

raxxorraxor 7mo ago
my users .ssh folder is secure enough. Take it or leave it.

KoolKat23 7mo ago

I'm sorry to say it but the fact it bans jailbreaking/rooting your device really makes me believe "think of the children" isn't their real goal. There's some clever kids out there but come on.

Vinnl 7mo ago

> It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". IIRC that was only for a prototype or reference implementation.