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Age verification as mass surveillance infrastructure
- tom-blk 7mo agoThere have been pushes to implement similar instances of this for a while now. If this turns out to not be successful, expect futher efforts in a similar guise
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- direwolf20 7mo agoDon't confuse the passport ID check with the "are you over 18?" checkbox. Both types of laws exist.
- pixxel 7mo ago[dead]
- jeremie_strand 7mo ago[dead]
- alliao 7mo agowhat do governments get out of this? Like I get it from ad/commercial perspective, but I don't see how this is highly unpopular from governments and still being implemented
- Noaidi 7mo agoIt depends on the type of government. A totalitarian government gets control out of it.
- andai 7mo agoThe normalization of the nanny state.
- Gigachad 7mo agoIt’s not highly unpopular. When polled, the Australian public were in favour of banning kids from social media. The harms of big tech, social media, and addiction mechanics are a lot more tangible to the average person than the anonymity aspect.
- elric 7mo agoAge Verification and "banning kids from social media" are two different things. The former being an overzealous method of achieving the latter. Parental responsibility and better parental controls would be a MUCH better way of going about this. Of course, the polling public is blissfully unaware of the wide ranging consequences of such an Age Verification implementation. People will continue to pave the road to fascist hell with good intentions.
- Gigachad 7mo agoWhat the public perceives it to be is the only thing that matters though. The OP question was asking how governments are getting this through, and the answer is the majority approve of what they see to be happening. The average person is not thinking about the ability for journalists and whistleblowers to create anonymous Facebook accounts, they are thinking about Mark Zuckerberg trying to sell sex chatbots to their kids and discord pedo servers.
- farfatched 7mo ago> Parental responsibility and better parental controls would be a MUCH better way of going about this. Call we do all three? Also, what about the irresponsible parents, or parents who don't have time/opportunity to be responsible over this issue?
- crest 7mo agoYou have to understand children are only cute little extensions of their parents until they 18, but on that day they better be ready for the real world™. /s
- seb1204 7mo agoHold on a minute. Australians are for kids and teens social media ban. They have not been asked if their minors are all face catalogued by pop up companies that these social media companies externalise the verification process to. Insta and others simply opened the need for such 3rd party verification services, it's a way to limit their liability and risk. For Insta and co it's not their problem if these new 3rd party services become the next identity database of minors. I hate it.
- gnfargbl 7mo agoAge verification is highly unpopular amongst heavily online users, but the voting population overall is in favour: https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20250731-91334-2 https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20250731-91334-2
- stingraycharles 7mo agoSeems like even under young voters more people support it than being against it; 30% of people aged 18-23 are strongly in favor, 57% of people in that age group supports it. I wonder why? Maybe these types of surveys don’t consider the implementation / what you need to give up in order to have age verification?
- SkyeCA 7mo ago> I wonder why? Because the internet, for all it's good, has caused society and individuals some pretty serious problems. I don't like the idea of mandatory age verification, but having unrestricted internet access as a kid was objectively bad for me and many of the people I know.
- righthand 7mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- palmotea 7mo ago> That is your parent’s fault that it was bad for you. So don’t punish me or anyone else because you never learned control. I think you're suffering from a lack of empathy. That doesn't mean OS age verification should be implemented or not, but that you're going to be insufferable and pretty ignorant about what's going on. IMHO, the popularity of age-verification is due to the increasing awareness of the harms of much online activity, plus the impracticality of putting the whole burden of mitigating that for children onto the shoulders of parents. If you flippantly and contemptuously ignore those concerns, people will be happy to ignore your concerns. And since you brought it up: honestly, I wouldn't feel bad "punishing" you with this policy, just because of the attitude displayed in your comment. It's needlessly aggressive and making contemptuous assumptions. Your comment actually shoots your position in the foot.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- palata 7mo agoDisclaimer: talking about functioning democratic governments (obviously authoritarian governments are different). We do regulate a lot of things to protect the people, especially the children. It's common to make it illegal for children to drink alcohol, smoke stuff and drive vehicles, and it seems completely natural for many of us. We usually don't say "it should be legal for a schools to sell cigarettes and whisky to kids, because it's the responsibility of the parents to educate their kids". The same applies to the Internet: just like we don't want children to be able to buy porn in a store, we don't want them to be able to access porn on the Internet. Or, more recently, social media. So the obvious idea to prevent that is to do what we do in store: age verification. The problem on the Internet is mass surveillance, and done incorrectly, age verification adds to that. Technically, we can do age verification in a privacy-preserving way, but: - Politicians are generally not competent to understand "the right technical way", and the tech giants do benefit from surveillance. Even if they mean well, it's hard for them to take the right decision out of incompetence. - In some big countries that tend to set the technical norms (e.g. the US), many people completely distrust the government. But private companies have no interest in implementing the privacy-preserving solution, so the only viable way is with the help of government regulations (I would argue that the government should be the ones owning the service). - The vast majority of people, including the vast majority of politicians, do not understand and do not give a damn about surveillance capitalism. It just does not exist for them. And in those conditions, there is of course no reason to even consider a privacy-preserving solution, because it is technically more complex. I strongly believe that in many countries they mean to do well. They are just not competent to understand the problem, and they turn to tech giants who do understand it, but have an interest in making sure that the politicians implement it wrongly.
- gausswho 7mo agoIn the case of government representatives' role, I think you've reached for Hanlon's razor incorrectly. Malice better explains what is happening here than ignorance. The actual representatives are cardboard with makeup - they each have a whole team of folks doing the detailed diligence on this stuff. That team knows there's a privacy-preserving way to do this. There's a reason those solutions are not the ones on offer. Corporate regulatory capture is behind all of this.
- raincole 7mo agoThis is highly unpopular... on HN. Which heuristically implies it's popular in the real world.
- apples_oranges 7mo agoSo to avoid it all I have to do is stop using social media? LGTM
- c7b 7mo agoAnd operating systems...
- Noaidi 7mo ago....and email....
- musha68k 7mo agoCreeping normalcy into the substrate: >Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. [MERGED] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/24/foss_age_verification/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/24/foss_age_verification... As a parent: the hard-won lesson is that most of this threat surface shrinks when you're genuinely present (listen/talk/educate).
- p2detar 7mo ago> Every copy of the Persona SDK contains a hardcoded AES-256-GCM encryption key in TrackingEventUtilsKt.java line 22 Seems like a pretty big fuck up, if so. I wonder why did they not use asymmetric encryption.
- novachen 7mo ago[dead]
- kungito 7mo agothe internet is not the same as it was 20 years ago. the average person is now online, but they werent before. they dont understand where they are and need protection. there is still space on the internet, or whatever the next place will be, for the enthusiasts and other minorities. if we lose internet, something new will pop up. also, 20 years ago i didnt care so much about privacy on the internet, i just needed a cultural filter for the community im engaging with. privacy has always been a game of cat and mouse. 0 chance things stay the same for long
- bdhdjdkdkdk 7mo ago[dead]
- Findecanor 7mo agoI wonder if not private age verification could not be solved with the right cryptographic protocol. You would have to register using a digital ID with a government agency, to get a age certificate. Most European countries already have digital IDs, used for all sorts of things: such as taxes, online banking etc. Then that certificate could be used in some sort of challenge-response protocol with web sites to verify your age, creating a new user ID in each session but without divulging anything that identifies that particular certificate. I'm afraid that the alternative would be that social media would instead require login with the digital ID directly.
- verisimi 7mo agoAlways with the increasing government control. Heaven forbid people go online without training wheels. We need safety nets everywhere - a grazed knee means the state failed.
- the_real_cher 7mo agoIn my opinion public private key is the base of all identification should be done. You keep your own private key and the government has your public key.
- rmnclmnt 7mo agoAgreed. But would mean having to educate people on security, privacy and computing in general… Pretty sure most government like having most people uneducated on such things
- the_real_cher 7mo agoI feel like you could do it in an app or a card with an NFC chip. People don't have to know security or cryptography to do their banking online. Either way it would be infinitely better than the current social security number situation we have.
- rmnclmnt 7mo ago
- progval 7mo agoI wish people would stop sharing this website, their research is massively written by LLMs and looks good at a glance, but it goes in every direction at the same time and lacks logical connections. And the claims don't really match their sources. Their initial publication was backed by a Git repository with hundreds of pages of documents written in just three days (https://web.archive.org/web/20260314224623/https://tboteproject.com/git/hekate/attestation-findings/src/branch/main#readme https://web.archive.org/web/20260314224623/https://tboteproj...). It also contained nonsense like an "anomaly report" with recommendations from the LLM agent to itself, which covers an analysis of contributors to Linux's BPF, Android's Gerrit, and parser errors in using legislative databases. https://web.archive.org/web/20260314103202/https://tboteproject.com/git/hekate/attestation-findings/src/branch/main/output/reports/anomaly_report.md https://web.archive.org/web/20260314103202/https://tboteproj... . The repository was rewritten since, though. This post follows their usual pattern. The second source they link to has been a dead link for 11 months (https://web.archive.org/web/20250501000000*/https://www.palantir.com/impact/grupo-globo/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250501000000*/https://www.pala...). There's a lot about Persona's design, MCPs, vulnerabilities, data leaks, but nothing proving they use it for mass surveillance. The entire case for it being mass surveillance rests on two points: that they interact with AI companies and they offer MCP endpoints (section titled "Persona's Surveillance Architecture")
- caaqil 7mo agoIt's currently #1 on the front page too. HN drowning in AI slop, what a sight to behold.
- sieabahlpark 7mo ago[dead]
- Esophagus4 7mo agoIt seems like there are a few stories HN will really bite on: - age verification - chat control - RTO vs. remote work - AI bubble - ditching American tech
- armchairhacker 7mo ago
- shrubble 7mo ago[flagged]
- villgax 7mo agoIt’s good that for non SFW stuff you do the need the internet anymore, just 72GB VRAM for all modalities. Public internet only for news/payments. Everything else can be offline, no more npm or React garbage needed either for frontend.
- ck2 7mo agoThere is a very simple alternative to age verification WHO IS PROVIDING INTERNET TO A CHILD they are liable there's no such thing as free open access internet without someone paying the bill unless it can be demonstrated the child stole internet somehow, hacking, etc. then the person providing the internet is liable for the child's activity Same if you aren't going to supervise your child and they come home for hours after school and watch porn on the TV They don't age verify to get cable TV If you have a credit card, you are an adult Someone is paying the bill, they are the adult, they are responsible
- farfatched 7mo agoWhat if the parent is not responsible? Should society help the child, by making it more difficult for them to access harmful material, in the same way we age verify alcohol? What if the parent is responsible, but finds themselves in a situation where they don't have the time/ability to either educate or set up robust controls? Should we make their responsibilities easier?
- toenail 7mo agoWith this line of reasoning you can just take away any agency from individuals and put it into the hands of the state, which leads to totalitarianism.
- farfatched 7mo agoPublic policy seems tricky if we must take every line of reasoning to its extreme.
- toenail 7mo agoThe idea that the state should decide which way of parenting is responsible is extreme.
- bingoMen 7mo agoInstead of controlling the children, we should control the source. Perhaps we should ban harmful content from the internet. Not the government. But we, as users, need content to be reviewed by moderators. People should decide what is harmful. I’m sure we all know what is harmful, not just for children. Psychology shows us what goes on in an adult’s brain, it is exactly the same as what goes on in a child’s brain.
- razodactyl 7mo agoLLM feedback loops are scary because they self-reinforce by training over their own data drift and vulnerable people interface with the noise and follow the downward spiral.
- incomingpain 7mo agoTo ban 16 and younger from social media will require every user to be identified. The social media also cant just do it themselves with a box, "are you over 16, yes no" they will require to identify against the government. Essentially this makes it so that every user's actual ID is being tracked. Fully intended to control speech online.
- waNpyt-menrew 7mo agoMore slop. To think this site used to be extremely high signal to noise
- edoceo 7mo agoIt's easy-ish to verify someone is human and of-age without needing any intrusive agent. One big problem is that the folk pushing for surveillance via verification hate that model and have capital to crush the idea. Another is adoption of some system that works; where the perfect blocks what's good which results in no progress.
- shevy-java 7mo agoThis makes a lot more sense than merely assuming that Meta pushes for it. There are several actors here and none of them have the good of the people in mind. This is why Age Sniffing, labeled "Age Verification", must be abolished. It's an entry door of evil actors here. It has nothing to do with age "verification" yet alone "protecting the chilren" - that's just a lie. I am noticing this more and more, e. g. if you claim to want to protect children, but then you have underage people on youtube create content? So how does that make sense if you want to restrict them on the one hand (or, everyone else, in addition to that) but then let the de-facto censorship here be "loose"? In fact - why are any children viewable on youtube to begin with? That contradicts those age sniffing entities.
- ac50hz 7mo agoShare an attribute, not an identifier, https://yivi.app/en/for_developers/ https://yivi.app/en/for_developers/
- seb1204 7mo agoThis is what I think a gov org should offer, not yet another corporate entity.
- grigio 7mo agoThanks for sharing
- nedt 7mo agoReally seems to be a government issue. I have an app on my phone where I can generate a QR code which proves my age. Nothing else is transmitted - no birthdate or name. And it's based on an open standard. You can read any verify everything yourself. You just can't fake it as you can't sign it without the private key.