15 ms·

>"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its

>"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes. i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.

pokstad 4mo ago
Exactly. The same way that selling alcohol doesn’t require a paper trail of every beer I’ve bought.
- SecretDreams 4mo ago
  To be fair, I buy my beers on CC. If someone really wanted to know the best IPAs and session able beers they could get, they could audit my CC records and then cross check to the breweries and pubs to see what I was buying. Just depends how much someone wants to learns bout good beer.
  - normie3000 4mo ago
    Anything under 4% should be sessionable IME.
  - pseudalopex 4mo ago
    Your point was what? No one should be allowed more privacy than you wanted?
    - SecretDreams 4mo ago
      My point was mostly a joke about drinking beer in response to the OP drinking beer. But the underlying darkness is that if you're paying for things using a CC, you've already given up on your privacy, but it's implicitly lost, rather than explicitly.
- win311fwg 4mo ago
  Not anymore, at least. In these parts your alcohol purchases did require a paper trail once upon a time.
- rationalist 4mo ago
  I don't know about this, stores around me are scanning people's IDs to verify their age. I guess I could make an ID (not a counterfeit government ID) that uses the same encoding for the birthday.
  - Tangurena2 4mo ago
    They are scanning the PDF 417 barcode on the back. Here are the specs for what appears on the driving license/ID and how to read the barcode: https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/99ac7057-0f4d-4461-b0a2-3a5532e1b35c/AAMVA-2020-DLID-Card-Design-Standard.pdf https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/99ac7057-0f4d-4461-b0a2-3a553... They issue a new spec every 4 years.
    - rationalist 4mo ago
      Thank you!
  - pseudalopex 4mo ago
    Stores collect not required customer information often.
  - xdennis 4mo ago
    After a while you age out of getting carded. The vast majority of alcohol is bought without ever showing any ID.
    - rationalist 4mo ago
      I aged out of getting carded a long time ago, but I'm seeing stores where their policy is to card everyone. I was behind an old man with white hair and a cane who was bewildered when he was carded.
- Aerroon 4mo ago
  And yet in practice they do. Well, not every beer but when you shop at Beers-R-Us they know.
hacker_88 4mo ago
They can track you with cookies , now they have age and identity signals .
kazinator 4mo ago
In tech, 10% unsuccessful today is 100% unsuccessful next week, when everyone learns how to join that 10% who got around it. The shit is horrible if 100% successful, and yet not worth doing if it isn't.
mindslight 4mo ago
Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing? To me, the entire problem is framing the issue as "age verification" in the first place - this implies the web company is responsible for knowing and controlling who uses their service. Whether this is a full-on demand for drivers' license / face scan / verification can, or whether there can be a technical process that obscures some details doesn't change this underlying dynamic! The other problem you're up against is in the low-friction online environment, 90% easily turns into a much lower percentage. Which will actually manifest itself as the initial methods that achieved "90%" being declared insufficient in favor of stronger methods of identity verification. I say this as a parent staring down having to deal with the dumpster fire that is the modern web in the next short year or two - the only sane way to address this problem is through client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc. There is indeed a market failure here, so the sensible regulation is to make websites over a certain size publish labels about the suitability of their content for age brackets, whether a site is social media, contains user generated content, has algorithmic feeds, and so on - affirmative assertions about the content that carry legal weight and liability for them not being true. Device manufacturers over a certain size would need to include parental control software that can be enabled during the setup process. If parental controls are enabled and a website has not published tags (too small, foreign jurisdiction, misconfiguration, etc), then it simply fails closed and refuses to display the site. This keeps decisions about content suitability in the hands of parents where it belongs, rather than putting it in the hands of corporate attorneys who will often make decisions directly contrary to what parents want! Remember this whole topic is being pushed by big tech to absolve themselves of liability for pushing harmful products!
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing? well, i mean, you put a decently reasonable one in your own comment: "client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc." another sibling comment mentions alcohol sales. government could issue a scratch card with UUID that's valid for some time, sold at anywhere alcohol/tobacco is already sold. most people are already comfortable with flashing an id at the beer store. read any other the other dozen similar threads with hundreds of comments, and there are a handful of other neat ideas usually voted pretty high up.
sharperguy 4mo ago
Doesn't _have_ to be except not enough voters can tell the difference which is exactly the goal.
sneak 4mo ago
This isn’t about kids at all. The ID requirement is the WHOLE POINT. That it is technically possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving way is thus entirely irrelevant. They want all online activity tied to ID so they can violently, illegally retaliate in the dark of night against protected expression online that they don’t like. That’s all this is. Privacy-preserving techniques are irrelevant because they do not accomplish this goal.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  There is also, separately from that, a need to protect kids from growing up into the people in Idiocracy.
  - sneak 4mo ago
    They already failed to do that by steadily eroding the educational system and its standards over the last 50-70 years. We’re already there. The electorate can’t locate the countries on a map in which the US is fighting multiple wars in their name. Banning Instagram ain’t gonna fix that. This is not in any way whatsoever about children.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      Is it possible that two or more things both harm children?
      - llbbdd 4mo ago
        Let's ban books and skateboards too
        inigyou 4mo ago
        I think they already did that.
  - sylos 4mo ago
    Getting children to not grow up into idiots requires intense parental interactions, healthy environments, and the ability to explore and get hurt. Identification isn't even on the list.
Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? I don't personally see a way to verify someone's age which doesn't involve either credit card verification, photo id verification, or some sort of facial recognition. If you know enough about someone to verify their age—even to a relatively low degree of accuracy—you probably know enough to pinpoint who they are in general. Heck—in most cases, we can't even tell the difference between humans and bots anymore! And it's true that we basically accept that some bots will slip through the cracks—but identifying bots also strikes me as significantly easier than identifying children.
- armchairhacker 4mo ago
  Make unrestricted devices like alcohol: you need ID to buy (but the box containing the device you’re sold is indistinguishable from any other, so the device may have a UUID but it can’t be traced to your ID); kids caught with unrestricted devices in school have them confiscated; maybe fine parents, but I think discouragement and banning in schools is enough. Kids can have restricted devices, distinguished from unrestricted by appearance in a way that’s hard to fake.
  - Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
    I don't know, treating general-purpose computers like alcohol seems a lot more dystopian to me. Does this extend to PC components? Can I build a machine and put Linux on it?
    - armchairhacker 4mo ago
      Do most kids have the ability and motivation to build their own machines? AFAIK you don’t need ID to buy juice, sugar, and yeast to make your own alcohol, so I think it should be the same for computer parts.
      - impure-aqua 4mo ago
        > Do most kids have the ability and motivation to build their own machines? I and pretty much everyone else in my childhood TeamSpeak server did at roughly 14 years of age.
XorNot 4mo ago
I am convinced that no one will make any progress on this issue so long as they refuse to understand that their aren't a group of shadowy figures pushing for this but rather a sizeable chunk of the general population, buoyed on by various moral outrage interest groups including a great many HNers who have been happily stoking the narrative that social media is the cause of every negative statistical ill. Who wants this? God damn everyone. And in so much as Facebook might do something with the data, what they really want is a legal moat of sufficient depth to drown possible competitors.
- bluebarbet 4mo ago
  In fairness (i.e. looking at the data with an open mind), social media does seem to be the cause of (or at least strongly correlated with) a bunch of ills.
  - akmiller 4mo ago
    That's true but has anyone studied the good things that have happened from younger people being able to find community or other positive aspects? Either way the solution again is not age gating, it's real meaningful data privacy laws that if enacted would have a huge effect on many companies today.
    - XorNot 4mo ago
      How do data privacy laws address the significant number of voters who are being told and believe that social media use is causing issues for children and want something done about it? This is exactly what I mean: you've rocked up and started talking about something else entirely.
      - akmiller 4mo ago
        I think you misunderstood me, I'm saying strong (very strong) data privacy laws make age gating unnecessary. This solution has far reaching benefits across all age groups.
akmiller 4mo ago
Doesn't 90% successful mean you are stepping on 10% toes???
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >Doesn't 90% successful mean you are stepping on 10% toes??? no, it means that <10% of kids under 16 or whatever age will still make it onto instagram
  - akmiller 4mo ago
    Wouldn't this mean we don't know what age these 10% are in?
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      No, it means Instagram doesn't know.
    - john_strinlai 4mo ago
      i dont know what point you are trying to make. there are laws against underage drinking and buying alcohol. some kids still get access to alcohol. the law is mostly successful, with an acceptable amount of failure rate. same concept.
      - akmiller 4mo ago
        Gating is not just for porn, they are talking about using for social media and various other things. You can imagine that many things end up age gated if this becomes legislation, as a preventative measure. Then your 10% becomes problematic because you are either restricting or granting access based on invalid information. So in your world here we then need ways for people who were incorrectly gated to reach out and be corrected somehow.
        Dylan16807 4mo ago
        You're mixing up false positives and false negatives. Nobody is going to be incorrectly blocked under this system unless they lost their ID, and the fix there is getting a new ID. Some kids skipping the block sometimes isn't catastrophic, especially because there won't be all this peer pressure to join adult social media when 90% or more are blocked.
Retr0id 4mo ago
Where are these mythical sweet-spot solutions? Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset. Now that users have been conditioned to accept this, nobody seems very interested in figuring out how to collect less PII - only insulating themselves from liability by having the data processed by a third party.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >mythical sweet-spot solutions? there are thousands of comments on these threads every time it comes up. there's tons of what i consider reasonable solutions proposed. there's examples below, too, which don't require face scans. >Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents yeah, i agree that really sucks.
  - Retr0id 4mo ago
    I've yet to see one I consider reasonable.
    - john_strinlai 4mo ago
      if you think even the client-side "yes im 18" on OS setup proposals are unreasonable, i dont know what to say.
      - Retr0id 4mo ago
        Privacy-wise I think they're completely acceptable, but in terms of circumvention I don't think the politicians will be satisfied. It's barely a step up from the "I'm over 18" buttons on websites.
        john_strinlai 4mo ago
        >It's barely a step up from the "I'm over 18" buttons on websites. i think its a pretty decent step up from that, but i know what you mean. >I don't think the politicians will be satisfied. and that circles back to my original point. the politicians aren't satisfied with a "mostly effective" solution (e.g. OS-enforced age attestation) as they are with literally every other law, and instead are taking advantage of the issue to justify mass surveillance.
ordu 4mo ago
> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate I believe you are missing the point. "To protect kids" is just a cover, the nightmare dystopia is the real goal. So age verification have to be a nightmare dystopia or it would be useless for those, who push for it.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >I believe you are missing the point. "To protect kids" is just a cover, the nightmare dystopia is the real goal. did i miss the point? because my last sentence literally says this.
  - ordu 4mo ago
    Ah, well, no. Sorry, didn't read to the end of it. It is just I see no point at all to discuss other options, so sorta become bored reading about them.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
  Well, some who push it anyway. There is another group whose motive is to get rid of all porn.
shevy-java 4mo ago
> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking Personally I don't care how much age sniffing is mandatory in that I think it is inacceptable on any level. Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok? Because I can not buy into that premise. To me the whole assumption is wrong from the get go.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok? no, and you can read through other comments here and on the many threads of the same topic for proposals which have no tracking.
- solid_fuel 4mo ago
  > Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok? Everything is going to contribute to tracking, though. It's really hard to ensure that data doesn't leak. Example proposal: sites attach an X-AGE-RATING header to pages and browsers only render the page if X-AGE-RATING < USER_AGE. Exploitable Issue: Send multiple requests from one page for various style sheets with different X-AGE-RATING headers. The ones that get loaded give you all you need to find the user's age cohort. But, the unique combination of things like your screen dimensions, number of threads, charge percentage, default languages, available fonts, etc already makes tracking possible. I don't know if adding one more - carefully chosen feature - would really make the situation that much worse.
Aerroon 4mo ago
Yeah, and once you have the non-intrusive system in place you can just switch it out for the tracking one without the user knowing. Or there's probably some kind of correlation trail possible that will track you even with the anonymous systems.
dfxm12 4mo ago
i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out. Correct. The goal here isn't "to save kids". That's just one of the Horsemen of the Infocalypse [0] used to market taking away our freedom. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
63stack 4mo ago
What's the point in making this distinction? This is HN, 99% of the users here are aware of what zero knowledge proof is and that it's possible to implement it that way. The general consensus and what the article is alluding to is that it will be probably implemented in a way that allows individual tracking and identification.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >What's the point in making this distinction? we're on a discussion board, so i started a discussion. that was the point.
  - kemotep 4mo ago
    I also only learned about Zero-Knowledge Proofs from links to articles, blogs, and discussions here so someone has to bring it up.
- intended 4mo ago
  I don’t know? Maybe its the little give and take that helps build a solution that is mature and limits the kind of harms kid are facing, without sacrificing privacy? It’s also the very cool, nuanced and technical tooling that people here tend to enjoy figuring out, and building. It side steps the thought terminating tar pits of “privacy at all costs” or “save the children”.
jazz9k 4mo ago
It was never about the children. They are rolling this out, so online comments can be tracked to names and addresses. It's to suppress free speech and arrest people that post anything against the government's narrative. Many people have already been arrested in the UK for this. This is the next logical step.
blaze33 4mo ago
> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia But I feel there's not a lot of trust that whatever implementation we could end up with wouldn't be such a dystopia. The real world equivalent would be checkpoints at every intersection verifying the driver's age, the cashier who carded the 20 yo with a beer now does it for everyone, makes a copy of your ID and stores it in a big folder shared with their 427 "business partners". Imo we should scrap the whole idea of age verification. Kids get a kidPhone with kidOS, whitelist of age-appropriate resources & capabilities. You wouldn't let an 8 yo drive on the highway, yet they can have a supercar to drive unsupervised on the information highway, no biggie. Internet is full of adults doing all sort of stuff while kids need supervision and education: design safe spaces for children, not checkpoints at every corner.
Bjartr 4mo ago
So let's see some of the champions of these systems acknowledge this downside and make the case that they should be built in a way that avoids it and not back down on that when it becomes inconvenient.
- vitally3643 4mo ago
  Why would they ever do that? The spying is the point.
pc86 4mo ago
> there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes. I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours. > i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out. Well there's plenty of idiots in power and I'm sure they have no idea. But there absolutely are evil ones who simply want more power and don't care what happens after they have it. If this were actually about protecting children, maybe you could get something passed that wasn't just ground work for a panopticon hellscape. But it's not about children at all - the people truly worried about that are just useful idiots - it's about power, and so you can't pass anything without having the surveillance infrastructure forced in.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours. based on what?
  - pc86 4mo ago
    My assumption (made admittedly with no evidence whatsoever) that you believe it's possible for someone to verify their age without giving up any anonymity or privacy, even temporarily.
    - john_strinlai 4mo ago
      one of the reasonable solutions i allude to is an over/under 18 age attestation at time of account creation on your OS. websites say "18+ content" and the OS either displays or doesn't display the content. there is ~0 privacy or anonymity concerns as 3rd parties don't get any communication about whether the content was shown.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
The so-called "social media" companies in the past have bragged to advertisers and the public about how much they know about their targets, also known as "users". Statements like, "We know more about you than your friends and family." Now, is this really true. Probably not. It's exaggeration. It's hype But these companies have learned that a 100% correct is not necessary to make money. For example, if they are correct 80% of the time, then maybe that's good enough A law that achieves an 80% reduction in youth ad targets might also be "good enough" The toes getting stepped on belong to the companies The kids who will still access these companies' websites come hell or high water, the 20%, are unlikely to complain Complaints come from the companies and those who rely on these companies to make money. Like the author of this blog post, they keep calling a handful of Big Tech websites/app endpoints "the internet" Their toes are going to get crushed "Social media" is not "the internet"
LudwigNagasena 4mo ago
The age verification that doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording is called parental controls and it already exists in most systems. It doesn't require any proof of ID, internet connection, complex distributed systems, and so on. And it has near 100% success rate.
terribleperson 4mo ago
It doesn't even need 'age verification'. Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see. That means all that's needed is a standard way for parents to make sure that websites know their children are children. They don't need identity, they don't need actual age, we don't even need a complicated cryptographic solution. California had the right idea - establish a standard way for a client to identify that the user isn't an adult (or you could do it the other way around, but that's less permissive), mandate that websites obey the flag, mandate that OSes include the feature and that browsers use it. In the end, anyone who owns a device can set their age group flag however they want it - it would be up to parents to make sure their children only use devices set the way they want. The parents could set their 8 year old's age group to whatever age group they want, and rest assured that websites would respect it.
- convolvatron 4mo ago
  or don't put the burden on the website at all, but let the parent choose whitelists of child-appropriate sites based on whatever criteria they want.
  - terribleperson 4mo ago
    This is already possible. There's not enough people doing it, so instead we get age verification schemes. The benefit of an age attestation scheme is that it makes it easy for parents, while also diffusing future attempts to use children as an excuse for control.
- cindyllm 4mo ago
  [dead]
- ibejoeb 4mo ago
  > Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see This is not even ostensibly the goal. Ostensibly, the goal is that the government controls what a child can do.
pendenthistory 4mo ago
Sweet summer child. This is not about age verification.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >Sweet summer child. my comment is only 81 words long, yet it seems that multiple people fail to make it to the end for some reason. ("full dystopia" should be a hint that i recognize the ulterior motive)
teddyh 4mo ago
This would be great and all, but all parties who are in a position to choose to implement this kind of system or to keep the status quo are already motivated to keep (and expand) the existing systems, for any number of reasons. Everybody (except the end users) loves to keep that juicy metadata and incidental logs of everything. (Repost from 2021: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560821>)
normalaccess 4mo ago
I don't think age verification is the actual goal... I believe complete surveillance and information control is the goal. Age verification is just the justification they are using to coat the poison pill in sugar.
xinayder 4mo ago
Age verification online shouldn't exist, period.

pokstad 4mo ago

Exactly. The same way that selling alcohol doesn’t require a paper trail of every beer I’ve bought.

SecretDreams 4mo ago
To be fair, I buy my beers on CC. If someone really wanted to know the best IPAs and session able beers they could get, they could audit my CC records and then cross check to the breweries and pubs to see what I was buying. Just depends how much someone wants to learns bout good beer.
- normie3000 4mo ago
  Anything under 4% should be sessionable IME.
- pseudalopex 4mo ago
  Your point was what? No one should be allowed more privacy than you wanted?
  - SecretDreams 4mo ago
    My point was mostly a joke about drinking beer in response to the OP drinking beer. But the underlying darkness is that if you're paying for things using a CC, you've already given up on your privacy, but it's implicitly lost, rather than explicitly.
win311fwg 4mo ago
Not anymore, at least. In these parts your alcohol purchases did require a paper trail once upon a time.
rationalist 4mo ago
I don't know about this, stores around me are scanning people's IDs to verify their age. I guess I could make an ID (not a counterfeit government ID) that uses the same encoding for the birthday.
- Tangurena2 4mo ago
  They are scanning the PDF 417 barcode on the back. Here are the specs for what appears on the driving license/ID and how to read the barcode: https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/99ac7057-0f4d-4461-b0a2-3a5532e1b35c/AAMVA-2020-DLID-Card-Design-Standard.pdf https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/99ac7057-0f4d-4461-b0a2-3a553... They issue a new spec every 4 years.
  - rationalist 4mo ago
    Thank you!
- pseudalopex 4mo ago
  Stores collect not required customer information often.
- xdennis 4mo ago
  After a while you age out of getting carded. The vast majority of alcohol is bought without ever showing any ID.
  - rationalist 4mo ago
    I aged out of getting carded a long time ago, but I'm seeing stores where their policy is to card everyone. I was behind an old man with white hair and a cane who was bewildered when he was carded.
Aerroon 4mo ago
And yet in practice they do. Well, not every beer but when you shop at Beers-R-Us they know.

hacker_88 4mo ago

They can track you with cookies , now they have age and identity signals .

kazinator 4mo ago

In tech, 10% unsuccessful today is 100% unsuccessful next week, when everyone learns how to join that 10% who got around it. The shit is horrible if 100% successful, and yet not worth doing if it isn't.

mindslight 4mo ago

Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing? To me, the entire problem is framing the issue as "age verification" in the first place - this implies the web company is responsible for knowing and controlling who uses their service. Whether this is a full-on demand for drivers' license / face scan / verification can, or whether there can be a technical process that obscures some details doesn't change this underlying dynamic! The other problem you're up against is in the low-friction online environment, 90% easily turns into a much lower percentage. Which will actually manifest itself as the initial methods that achieved "90%" being declared insufficient in favor of stronger methods of identity verification. I say this as a parent staring down having to deal with the dumpster fire that is the modern web in the next short year or two - the only sane way to address this problem is through client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc. There is indeed a market failure here, so the sensible regulation is to make websites over a certain size publish labels about the suitability of their content for age brackets, whether a site is social media, contains user generated content, has algorithmic feeds, and so on - affirmative assertions about the content that carry legal weight and liability for them not being true. Device manufacturers over a certain size would need to include parental control software that can be enabled during the setup process. If parental controls are enabled and a website has not published tags (too small, foreign jurisdiction, misconfiguration, etc), then it simply fails closed and refuses to display the site. This keeps decisions about content suitability in the hands of parents where it belongs, rather than putting it in the hands of corporate attorneys who will often make decisions directly contrary to what parents want! Remember this whole topic is being pushed by big tech to absolve themselves of liability for pushing harmful products!

john_strinlai 4mo ago
>Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing? well, i mean, you put a decently reasonable one in your own comment: "client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc." another sibling comment mentions alcohol sales. government could issue a scratch card with UUID that's valid for some time, sold at anywhere alcohol/tobacco is already sold. most people are already comfortable with flashing an id at the beer store. read any other the other dozen similar threads with hundreds of comments, and there are a handful of other neat ideas usually voted pretty high up.

sharperguy 4mo ago

Doesn't _have_ to be except not enough voters can tell the difference which is exactly the goal.

sneak 4mo ago

This isn’t about kids at all. The ID requirement is the WHOLE POINT. That it is technically possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving way is thus entirely irrelevant. They want all online activity tied to ID so they can violently, illegally retaliate in the dark of night against protected expression online that they don’t like. That’s all this is. Privacy-preserving techniques are irrelevant because they do not accomplish this goal.

inigyou 4mo ago
There is also, separately from that, a need to protect kids from growing up into the people in Idiocracy.
- sneak 4mo ago
  They already failed to do that by steadily eroding the educational system and its standards over the last 50-70 years. We’re already there. The electorate can’t locate the countries on a map in which the US is fighting multiple wars in their name. Banning Instagram ain’t gonna fix that. This is not in any way whatsoever about children.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    Is it possible that two or more things both harm children?
    - llbbdd 4mo ago
      Let's ban books and skateboards too
      - inigyou 4mo ago
        I think they already did that.
- sylos 4mo ago
  Getting children to not grow up into idiots requires intense parental interactions, healthy environments, and the ability to explore and get hurt. Identification isn't even on the list.

Wowfunhappy 4mo ago

Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? I don't personally see a way to verify someone's age which doesn't involve either credit card verification, photo id verification, or some sort of facial recognition. If you know enough about someone to verify their age—even to a relatively low degree of accuracy—you probably know enough to pinpoint who they are in general. Heck—in most cases, we can't even tell the difference between humans and bots anymore! And it's true that we basically accept that some bots will slip through the cracks—but identifying bots also strikes me as significantly easier than identifying children.

armchairhacker 4mo ago
Make unrestricted devices like alcohol: you need ID to buy (but the box containing the device you’re sold is indistinguishable from any other, so the device may have a UUID but it can’t be traced to your ID); kids caught with unrestricted devices in school have them confiscated; maybe fine parents, but I think discouragement and banning in schools is enough. Kids can have restricted devices, distinguished from unrestricted by appearance in a way that’s hard to fake.
- Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
  I don't know, treating general-purpose computers like alcohol seems a lot more dystopian to me. Does this extend to PC components? Can I build a machine and put Linux on it?
  - armchairhacker 4mo ago
    Do most kids have the ability and motivation to build their own machines? AFAIK you don’t need ID to buy juice, sugar, and yeast to make your own alcohol, so I think it should be the same for computer parts.
    - impure-aqua 4mo ago
      > Do most kids have the ability and motivation to build their own machines? I and pretty much everyone else in my childhood TeamSpeak server did at roughly 14 years of age.

XorNot 4mo ago

I am convinced that no one will make any progress on this issue so long as they refuse to understand that their aren't a group of shadowy figures pushing for this but rather a sizeable chunk of the general population, buoyed on by various moral outrage interest groups including a great many HNers who have been happily stoking the narrative that social media is the cause of every negative statistical ill. Who wants this? God damn everyone. And in so much as Facebook might do something with the data, what they really want is a legal moat of sufficient depth to drown possible competitors.

bluebarbet 4mo ago
In fairness (i.e. looking at the data with an open mind), social media does seem to be the cause of (or at least strongly correlated with) a bunch of ills.
- akmiller 4mo ago
  That's true but has anyone studied the good things that have happened from younger people being able to find community or other positive aspects? Either way the solution again is not age gating, it's real meaningful data privacy laws that if enacted would have a huge effect on many companies today.
  - XorNot 4mo ago
    How do data privacy laws address the significant number of voters who are being told and believe that social media use is causing issues for children and want something done about it? This is exactly what I mean: you've rocked up and started talking about something else entirely.
    - akmiller 4mo ago
      I think you misunderstood me, I'm saying strong (very strong) data privacy laws make age gating unnecessary. This solution has far reaching benefits across all age groups.

akmiller 4mo ago

Doesn't 90% successful mean you are stepping on 10% toes???

john_strinlai 4mo ago
>Doesn't 90% successful mean you are stepping on 10% toes??? no, it means that <10% of kids under 16 or whatever age will still make it onto instagram
- akmiller 4mo ago
  Wouldn't this mean we don't know what age these 10% are in?
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    No, it means Instagram doesn't know.
  - john_strinlai 4mo ago
    i dont know what point you are trying to make. there are laws against underage drinking and buying alcohol. some kids still get access to alcohol. the law is mostly successful, with an acceptable amount of failure rate. same concept.
    - akmiller 4mo ago
      Gating is not just for porn, they are talking about using for social media and various other things. You can imagine that many things end up age gated if this becomes legislation, as a preventative measure. Then your 10% becomes problematic because you are either restricting or granting access based on invalid information. So in your world here we then need ways for people who were incorrectly gated to reach out and be corrected somehow.
      - Dylan16807 4mo ago
        You're mixing up false positives and false negatives. Nobody is going to be incorrectly blocked under this system unless they lost their ID, and the fix there is getting a new ID. Some kids skipping the block sometimes isn't catastrophic, especially because there won't be all this peer pressure to join adult social media when 90% or more are blocked.

Retr0id 4mo ago

Where are these mythical sweet-spot solutions? Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset. Now that users have been conditioned to accept this, nobody seems very interested in figuring out how to collect less PII - only insulating themselves from liability by having the data processed by a third party.

john_strinlai 4mo ago
>mythical sweet-spot solutions? there are thousands of comments on these threads every time it comes up. there's tons of what i consider reasonable solutions proposed. there's examples below, too, which don't require face scans. >Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents yeah, i agree that really sucks.
- Retr0id 4mo ago
  I've yet to see one I consider reasonable.
  - john_strinlai 4mo ago
    if you think even the client-side "yes im 18" on OS setup proposals are unreasonable, i dont know what to say.
    - Retr0id 4mo ago
      Privacy-wise I think they're completely acceptable, but in terms of circumvention I don't think the politicians will be satisfied. It's barely a step up from the "I'm over 18" buttons on websites.
      - john_strinlai 4mo ago
        >It's barely a step up from the "I'm over 18" buttons on websites. i think its a pretty decent step up from that, but i know what you mean. >I don't think the politicians will be satisfied. and that circles back to my original point. the politicians aren't satisfied with a "mostly effective" solution (e.g. OS-enforced age attestation) as they are with literally every other law, and instead are taking advantage of the issue to justify mass surveillance.

ordu 4mo ago

> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate I believe you are missing the point. "To protect kids" is just a cover, the nightmare dystopia is the real goal. So age verification have to be a nightmare dystopia or it would be useless for those, who push for it.

john_strinlai 4mo ago
>I believe you are missing the point. "To protect kids" is just a cover, the nightmare dystopia is the real goal. did i miss the point? because my last sentence literally says this.
- ordu 4mo ago
  Ah, well, no. Sorry, didn't read to the end of it. It is just I see no point at all to discuss other options, so sorta become bored reading about them.
amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
Well, some who push it anyway. There is another group whose motive is to get rid of all porn.

shevy-java 4mo ago

> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking Personally I don't care how much age sniffing is mandatory in that I think it is inacceptable on any level. Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok? Because I can not buy into that premise. To me the whole assumption is wrong from the get go.

john_strinlai 4mo ago
>Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok? no, and you can read through other comments here and on the many threads of the same topic for proposals which have no tracking.
solid_fuel 4mo ago
> Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok? Everything is going to contribute to tracking, though. It's really hard to ensure that data doesn't leak. Example proposal: sites attach an X-AGE-RATING header to pages and browsers only render the page if X-AGE-RATING < USER_AGE. Exploitable Issue: Send multiple requests from one page for various style sheets with different X-AGE-RATING headers. The ones that get loaded give you all you need to find the user's age cohort. But, the unique combination of things like your screen dimensions, number of threads, charge percentage, default languages, available fonts, etc already makes tracking possible. I don't know if adding one more - carefully chosen feature - would really make the situation that much worse.

Aerroon 4mo ago

Yeah, and once you have the non-intrusive system in place you can just switch it out for the tracking one without the user knowing. Or there's probably some kind of correlation trail possible that will track you even with the anonymous systems.

dfxm12 4mo ago

i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out. Correct. The goal here isn't "to save kids". That's just one of the Horsemen of the Infocalypse [0] used to market taking away our freedom. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

63stack 4mo ago

What's the point in making this distinction? This is HN, 99% of the users here are aware of what zero knowledge proof is and that it's possible to implement it that way. The general consensus and what the article is alluding to is that it will be probably implemented in a way that allows individual tracking and identification.

john_strinlai 4mo ago
>What's the point in making this distinction? we're on a discussion board, so i started a discussion. that was the point.
- kemotep 4mo ago
  I also only learned about Zero-Knowledge Proofs from links to articles, blogs, and discussions here so someone has to bring it up.
intended 4mo ago
I don’t know? Maybe its the little give and take that helps build a solution that is mature and limits the kind of harms kid are facing, without sacrificing privacy? It’s also the very cool, nuanced and technical tooling that people here tend to enjoy figuring out, and building. It side steps the thought terminating tar pits of “privacy at all costs” or “save the children”.

jazz9k 4mo ago

It was never about the children. They are rolling this out, so online comments can be tracked to names and addresses. It's to suppress free speech and arrest people that post anything against the government's narrative. Many people have already been arrested in the UK for this. This is the next logical step.

blaze33 4mo ago

> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia But I feel there's not a lot of trust that whatever implementation we could end up with wouldn't be such a dystopia. The real world equivalent would be checkpoints at every intersection verifying the driver's age, the cashier who carded the 20 yo with a beer now does it for everyone, makes a copy of your ID and stores it in a big folder shared with their 427 "business partners". Imo we should scrap the whole idea of age verification. Kids get a kidPhone with kidOS, whitelist of age-appropriate resources & capabilities. You wouldn't let an 8 yo drive on the highway, yet they can have a supercar to drive unsupervised on the information highway, no biggie. Internet is full of adults doing all sort of stuff while kids need supervision and education: design safe spaces for children, not checkpoints at every corner.

Bjartr 4mo ago

So let's see some of the champions of these systems acknowledge this downside and make the case that they should be built in a way that avoids it and not back down on that when it becomes inconvenient.

vitally3643 4mo ago
Why would they ever do that? The spying is the point.

pc86 4mo ago

> there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes. I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours. > i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out. Well there's plenty of idiots in power and I'm sure they have no idea. But there absolutely are evil ones who simply want more power and don't care what happens after they have it. If this were actually about protecting children, maybe you could get something passed that wasn't just ground work for a panopticon hellscape. But it's not about children at all - the people truly worried about that are just useful idiots - it's about power, and so you can't pass anything without having the surveillance infrastructure forced in.

john_strinlai 4mo ago
>I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours. based on what?
- pc86 4mo ago
  My assumption (made admittedly with no evidence whatsoever) that you believe it's possible for someone to verify their age without giving up any anonymity or privacy, even temporarily.
  - john_strinlai 4mo ago
    one of the reasonable solutions i allude to is an over/under 18 age attestation at time of account creation on your OS. websites say "18+ content" and the OS either displays or doesn't display the content. there is ~0 privacy or anonymity concerns as 3rd parties don't get any communication about whether the content was shown.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago

The so-called "social media" companies in the past have bragged to advertisers and the public about how much they know about their targets, also known as "users". Statements like, "We know more about you than your friends and family." Now, is this really true. Probably not. It's exaggeration. It's hype But these companies have learned that a 100% correct is not necessary to make money. For example, if they are correct 80% of the time, then maybe that's good enough A law that achieves an 80% reduction in youth ad targets might also be "good enough" The toes getting stepped on belong to the companies The kids who will still access these companies' websites come hell or high water, the 20%, are unlikely to complain Complaints come from the companies and those who rely on these companies to make money. Like the author of this blog post, they keep calling a handful of Big Tech websites/app endpoints "the internet" Their toes are going to get crushed "Social media" is not "the internet"

LudwigNagasena 4mo ago

The age verification that doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording is called parental controls and it already exists in most systems. It doesn't require any proof of ID, internet connection, complex distributed systems, and so on. And it has near 100% success rate.

terribleperson 4mo ago

It doesn't even need 'age verification'. Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see. That means all that's needed is a standard way for parents to make sure that websites know their children are children. They don't need identity, they don't need actual age, we don't even need a complicated cryptographic solution. California had the right idea - establish a standard way for a client to identify that the user isn't an adult (or you could do it the other way around, but that's less permissive), mandate that websites obey the flag, mandate that OSes include the feature and that browsers use it. In the end, anyone who owns a device can set their age group flag however they want it - it would be up to parents to make sure their children only use devices set the way they want. The parents could set their 8 year old's age group to whatever age group they want, and rest assured that websites would respect it.

convolvatron 4mo ago
or don't put the burden on the website at all, but let the parent choose whitelists of child-appropriate sites based on whatever criteria they want.
- terribleperson 4mo ago
  This is already possible. There's not enough people doing it, so instead we get age verification schemes. The benefit of an age attestation scheme is that it makes it easy for parents, while also diffusing future attempts to use children as an excuse for control.
cindyllm 4mo ago
[dead]
ibejoeb 4mo ago
> Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see This is not even ostensibly the goal. Ostensibly, the goal is that the government controls what a child can do.

pendenthistory 4mo ago

Sweet summer child. This is not about age verification.

john_strinlai 4mo ago
>Sweet summer child. my comment is only 81 words long, yet it seems that multiple people fail to make it to the end for some reason. ("full dystopia" should be a hint that i recognize the ulterior motive)

teddyh 4mo ago

This would be great and all, but all parties who are in a position to choose to implement this kind of system or to keep the status quo are already motivated to keep (and expand) the existing systems, for any number of reasons. Everybody (except the end users) loves to keep that juicy metadata and incidental logs of everything. (Repost from 2021: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560821>)

normalaccess 4mo ago

I don't think age verification is the actual goal... I believe complete surveillance and information control is the goal. Age verification is just the justification they are using to coat the poison pill in sugar.

xinayder 4mo ago

Age verification online shouldn't exist, period.