7 ms·

There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. [1] Modern versions of this technique allow one to associate metadata (like

by j2kun 3mo ago

There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. [1] Modern versions of this technique allow one to associate metadata (like a proof of age exceeding a threshold) in such a way that the verifier can't even correlate repeated requests across users. Governments that are serious about age verification and individual privacy (which, doubtful they truly are) should agree on a protocol and set up certificate issuers that are associated with a digital ID. Then age verification will not be an invasive procedure or risk data leaks or insider threats. [1]: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymous-credentials-an-illustrated-primer/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...

gruez 3mo ago
>Modern versions of this technique allow one to associate metadata (like a proof of age exceeding a threshold) in such a way that the verifier can't even correlate repeated requests across users. If it's unlinkable, what's preventing someone from setting up a site that hands out anonymous tokens for anyone to use?
- discodachshund 3mo ago
  Using cryptographic signatures from approved signers, like a government
  - gruez 3mo ago
    No, I'm meant me, using my 18+ ID to generate a bunch of tokens that can't be linked back to me, and then giving it to random < 18 year olds for the lulz.
    - quotemstr 3mo ago
      There are multiple approaches. One, which the Europeans use, hardware-locks the token. Each age attestation is unlinkable, but the cryptographic credentials you need to make the attestation aren't portable. Of course, this model requires a big statist apparatus that does implementation certification, but it does achieve the narrow goal of unlinkable, privacy-preserving age attestation that doesn't instantly decay to mass copying. Other approaches are possible. I'm particularly keen on ones that treat attestations as anonymous digital currency and use cryptographic penalties like slashing to discourage copying post-hoc instead of relying on EU-style implementation certification. There's a huge literature on the subject I don't want to reproduce here. The point is that yes, we do have the technology to do attestation without sacrificing privacy, which makes all the calls for non-privacy-preserving attestation awfully curious.
      - Terr_ 3mo ago
        > as anonymous digital currency and use cryptographic penalties like slashing Or make it so that tokens cannot be tested except by spending/burning them, which would significantly reduce (but not eliminate) a black market because it would be hard for any buyers to trust any sellers. The best outcome here is going to rest on getting people to agree that "good enough" is the best outcome. We want a system that gets the broad social results (e.g. less brain-rot in the kids) without being so impossibly strict and overbuilt that it leads to an even-worse problem (e.g. authoritarian hellhole tools.)
        mark336 3mo ago
        Yes "good enough" is right. At least until the issue become important enough to seek a full proof method.
        Terr_ 3mo ago
        > At least until the issue become important enough I'm not talking about minimizing effort or deferring decisions. What I mean is that there are conflicting and competing goals, where you need to accept that one of them must not be prioritized over all the others, because the overall outcome will be worse.
      - jszymborski 3mo ago
        I'm not familiar with this, but what your describing sounds similar to the hardware DRM keys used for protecting 4K streams from being downloaded from Netflix. If so, this stuff is already broken, and imagine it would be pretty simple to apply the same principles here. I'm probably wrong on this though I'm out of my depth
      - Aurornis 3mo ago
        > One, which the Europeans use, hardware-locks the token. I'm surprised anyone considers this viable. It would limit access to those sites to a limited set of acceptable devices and operating systems. I couldn't use my laptop, desktop, or a jailbroken phone.
    - paulddraper 3mo ago
      The verification service would tie the token to the IP address/geolocation. It would also throttle the number of identifications, or expire old ones. Yes, that can eventually be worked around, but not really that different than doing the verification today on someone else's device.
      - gruez 3mo ago
        >The verification service would tie the token to the IP address/geolocation "Use this exact tor/vpn server" >It would also throttle the number of identifications So I can only wank off 5 times a day, or grant access to porn sites for 5 kids?
      - Aurornis 3mo ago
        > The verification service would tie the token to the IP address So I'm constantly grabbing new tokens from the government every time I go from work WiFi to my cellular internet to the train WiFi and then home? Sounds like a fantastic point for capturing more tracking data. > /geolocation. Which means I have to send my geolocation data to apps to confirm I can use my token? Don't want that either. > It would also throttle the number of identifications, And if I move around too much in one day or change networks too often, I'm unable to log into anything until tomorrow?
        Nursie 3mo ago
        > So I'm constantly grabbing new tokens from the government every time ... Every time you set up an account, would generally be the idea. So relatively infrequently.
        paulddraper 3mo ago
        [dead]
        paulddraper 3mo ago
        > Which means I have to send my geolocation data to apps to confirm I can use my token? No, you don't need to send it there.
    - worble 3mo ago
      What's to stop you, using your 18+ ID from buying crates of alcohol and giving it to random < 18 year olds for the lulz?
      - gruez 3mo ago
        For one, I have to do it in meatspace so it's easily traced back to me, whereas anonymous tokens can't be traced back to me by design.
      - Aurornis 3mo ago
        Because those <18 year olds will immediately flip and identify you to the cops to try to lighten their punishment. The anonymous crypto token scheme does not have any trace-back mechanism like this at all. If there's no way to track those tokens back to you, why not sell them for $1 each on the internet to make some extra money?
      - laughing_man 3mo ago
        The minute this scheme went into place, there would be sites based in one of the "stans" selling tokens for a couple bucks to whomever wanted to buy.
- Retr0id 3mo ago
  Yes, this breaks the whole scheme. Anyone promoting it as a solution is delusional. There's a triangle of "robust", "private", and "practical" and you can only pick two. This one omits robust. The various mitigations people might suggest in response will have to sacrifice one of the other dimensions.
- nitwit005 3mo ago
  Nothing proposed will succeed in preventing access if an adult is willing to help a kid get access. You don't need to do anything technical. Log in, and hand over your phone.
- dredmorbius 3mo ago
  Effectively, a straw purchase attack: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_purchase>
andy99 3mo ago
This seems to come up in every discussion, in practice it’s irrelevant both because it’s too complicated for normal people to understand, and because the point of all this nonsense really is identification so anything that defeats that will be a non starter.
- bluefirebrand 3mo ago
  It doesn't have to be too complicated for normal people to understand. Majority of people understand their SIN or SSN number or whatever, they understand they have a drivers license number. This could be built in such a way that it's basically just be another government issued "thing" that they have to know about and be able to produce when requested
  - Geezus_42 3mo ago
    Every government has been working on ways to identify and target individuals online since as long as the internet has existed. Governments are incentivized to continuously increase control. Why would you assume this is not yet another escalation towards their goal of being able to track and silence anyone who pushes back?
    - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
      I didn't comment at all on what the governments goals are Edit: I agree with you 100%, but the fact that governments want to track people online has no bearing on how technically possible it is to build a system where they can't An anonymous internet auth system (probably) won't get built, but it is possible to build
      - Geezus_42 3mo ago
        How is it possible to have something that both proves something about your identity but also does not allow ANYONE to deanonymize you?
        3mo ago
nemomarx 3mo ago
As you say, it's doubtful governments want it to be private. So we should expect them to not use these kind of elegant solutions, and the public is generally not sophisticated enough to distinguish between the options already.
- andai 3mo ago
  In what direction do the incentives point?
  - nemomarx 3mo ago
    There's two strong incentives - deanonymization for law enforcement is pretty useful so that's one. You want to make it easier to subpoena information about posters for various reasons, access to stores on different dates etc. Lots of reasons for that. And you want to satisfy voters who are worried about children online or have heard scary things about anonymous criminals. You want to be seen to do something about those. A distant third is that you want the system to be cheap and built up fast and relatively easy so voters don't complain about it. All together this leads you to something like "any time a site needs to verify your age (based on this broad list of requirements) put in your government ID number / picture". The infrastructure already exists for that, banks need it, social media needs it, and the current president has agitated for it a few times now. If you're really aiming high you set up some digital ID attached to it that's easier for the users.
    - laughing_man 3mo ago
      >There's two strong incentives - deanonymization for law enforcement is pretty useful so that's one. When you say it like that it sounds less scary than "deanoymization so the government can track down people saying things it doesn't like." Let's not forget the UK has more people in jail for things they said on the internet than Russia and China put together.
      - nemomarx 3mo ago
        Yeah the wording is a little broad, but the UK would call that law enforcement too. Depends on your state and laws and you can look around at how that's going - maybe you'll have brought a first aid kit to the wrong event or helped print some zines and they want to check up on you now.
JohnFen 3mo ago
The problem is that you still have to trust something you don't control and can't verify that the technological solutions are correctly implemented and applied.
rockskon 3mo ago
Zero Knowledge Proofs are worthless for this. Either they validate so little information that a single homeless person can authenticate the entire country or they validate so much information as to not have a significant privacy guarantee. There is no in-between for ZKP validating someone's age.
- teravor 3mo ago
  worthless is too strong. the truth is that the two extremes you listed can be titrated. if you use nullifiers you can trade some privacy for some security. basically you convert your true identity into a private token which you can use to authenticate aspects of yourself, the price being that the token can be tracked with some effort across services. better than just using your identity at least. if a token/nullifier is abused it can be revoked and then you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get another. there are some other trade offs that can be made.
  - rockskon 3mo ago
    Okay - so you verify age and what else? What combination of details can you validate on that is meaningfully privacy-preserving and couldn't result in wide-spread re-use of tokens? Additionally - what would prevent some kids from getting a homeless man in the city to hand them his ID, get a facial scan, and everything else you can think of to generate a token and then pass that token around? ZKP are a cryptography-nerd's joy but are are categorically unsuitable for the purpose of age verification. I stand by this without the slightest reservation.
    - teravor 3mo ago
      the same thing that prevents them from doing reuse right now: platform detection mechanisms. the difference is that right now the identity of the subject is known whereas with ZKP (nullifier approach) only the dirty token is known and where that token was used.
      - rockskon 3mo ago
_heimdall 3mo ago
I wouldn't trust governments, today or in the future, to keep such a system private and I don't see a foolproof way of building some kind of audit mechanism into it to make sure the data is always truely private. I've also always been curious how a truely anonymous identity verification could possibly work. At best for age verification, I could be given some kind of token that would still have to verify my age and be verifiable with a central authority to ensure my token is valid. The central authority could always keeper records of my token, revoke it whenever they please, and every entity that can verify the age associated with, or embedded into, the token knows at least some of my PII.
- vkou 3mo ago
  > I've also always been curious how a truely anonymous identity verification could possibly work. You go to a store. You show the clerk your id and give him a quarter. The clerk pulls a scratch-off ticket from the front of a ticket tape. The ticket contains a token identifier. It's anonymous. The clerk or his POS system knows your name and age, but doesn't know your number. The vendor providing the tape doesn't know your number or your name. The system accepting the token knows your number, but doesn't know your name. The token is only valid for a day after use, so loss and transfer isn't much of an issue. It's the exact same process by which you buy lottery tickets in a world where they don't need to verify your identity when you redeem them. The lottery has no idea who bought a particular ticket, only that a ticket was bought. The clerk knows you bought a ticket, but doesn't know which ticket. Obviously, Eavesdropping Eve looking over your shoulder knows both your name and your ticket number, but that's not a practical attack.
  - Aurornis 3mo ago
    > It's anonymous. The clerk or his POS system knows your name and age, but doesn't know your number. The vendor providing the tape doesn't know your number or your name. Where does this 3rd party identity token provider come from? For government-issued identity tokens, there are not separate parties. It's just the government, and they can choose to link whatever they want in their internal system if they decide it's in the interests of national security. You're also forgetting that lottery tickets are tracked. This is how they can announce which store sold the winning ticket before anyone steps forward with it. It would be trivial to match a buyer to the ticket if they wanted to inspect the records. In the case of a government identity token service, there isn't even a separation of parties providing the records. They do it all and can have all the data.
andrewla 3mo ago
The article talks about the possibilities of malicious cloning of these tokens by third parties, but fails to identify the much more common use case, and one that makes this scheme useless for age verification. It's one thing to be concerned about someone stealing my credential, but another to prevent the transfer of these credentials, especially if they are limited use credentials. The entire point of age verification systems is to prevent minors from accessing certain resources. I think we all know that this is basically impossible; but what these various governments and social media companies want to do is to make it high friction to do so. The highest friction version of this is that the credential ties to a real world identity somehow; maybe locked behind legal barriers, etc., but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor. Without the possibility of real world enforcement, none of these identity solutions can possibly work. Keep dreaming of a technological solution -- there is none that does not lead to the world that FIRE is warning about, except to accept that we can only make a solution "good enough" and leave it at that, without expanding into full on identity verification. The solution here is likely to just try to provide better abilities for parents to monitor and limit their children's use of the internet. Let individual parents decide on the level of harm that they are willing to accept, and accept that there will be ways to work around this even if parents are vigilant, but just try to reduce it on the margins.
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  Yes, this is the part of the issue that is so frequently ignored: Anonymous age verification schemes are easily defeated through proxying because there wouldn't be any consequences for selling your tokens. "Install this app on your phone and we'll pay you $1 per day" and it will mint your anonymous identity tokens and send them off to kids who want to buy them. If there's no way to track the tokens, there is no possibility of negative consequences. So the schemes always start introducing features to reduce the anonymity of the tokens or make them more trackable in some way: > The highest friction version of this is that the credential ties to a real world identity somehow; maybe locked behind legal barriers, etc., but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime Which requires that these identity tokens not be anonymous age-verification credentials. They become a traceable identity token tied to your government-issued ID.
johnc1 3mo ago
There is a much easier solution that already exists - parental controls on children's devices. I honestly don't understand why is it not solving the problem? Yes, parents are responsible to set this up. But parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns, condoms, etc., and many other things. Perhaps parental controls are not good enough? That's where the regulation could genuinely help - require child-certified devices to implement minimum set of parental controls, and make them easy to use.
- kaashif 3mo ago
  That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.
  - johnc1 3mo ago
    I know! What puzzles me is responses every such article gets even on HN - let's build some cool tech that 95% of the general population and 100% of politicians won't even understand not to mention agree to. Yes, government want to end anonymity and that's clear to some. But governments enjoy on a pretty broad support for this and many people supporting this believe it's a real problem. Suggesting to leave it unsolved or solve it in a way they can't trust or understand is only going to alienate them, making the government job easier. I think suggesting a simple, cheap and effective solution to this problem that has no impact on privacy is a way better way to counter that. I think local parental controls fits the bill.
    - subscribed 3mo ago
      People on average aren't very smart and will happily support programs objectively harmful to them and everyone else because the government and a nice lady from the breakfast TV says it's necessary to think of someone's else's children watching porn (this soundbite is gross. I don't understand how it's okay for the serious people to repeat it).
      - 3mo ago
onetimeusename 3mo ago
I don't think they are serious about privacy and even if they were I don't even want to distinguish between "children" and "adults" on the internet. Things seem to have worked fine up to this point, there doesn't appear to be a public demand for age verification, rather some murky corporations/NGOs/agencies pushing for this. I think it's pretty clear there is some other intention besides protecting children that is the goal here.
- skybrian 3mo ago
  We should only need to distinguish devices with parental controls turned on from other devices, and rely on parents to set up the devices accordingly.
- citruscomputing 3mo ago
  they want to isolate gay and trans children from other gay and trans people. don't you know, there's social contagion afoot, but if we protect y^Wour children from this inherently sexual (and thus adult) content, we can prevent it. this is enough to make me oppose age verification wholesale. I don't care if there's fancy ZKPs, it's still going to be used to isolate and harm hundreds of thousands of vulnerable trans kids, who are already experiencing astronomically elevated suicide rates over the past few years. they don't need more of this.
kaurimu 3mo ago
[dead]
coldtea 3mo ago
>There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. Technological solutions for what problem?
sneak 3mo ago
No. The point of these initiatives IS TO GET ID, not to protect children. Anonymous credentials don’t allow the state to retaliate in the dark of night against protected expression that they don’t like. Anonymous credentials do not allow for that, so they are irrelevant.
Nursie 3mo ago
Yep, there are a variety of ways this can work well, but the overwhelming 'vibe' here at HN is a) that the tech is too complex and b) that governments actually want to end privacy anyway for their own nefarious reasons. I find 'a' amusing as we'll often see in the same conversation that users appeal to parents to take responsibility and lock down their kids' access to things, as if that's trivial for non-tech folk and foolproof. It's also silly because the user interface to such a system doesn't need to show all that complexity. And 'b' is often supported by some out of context quote that at first glance looks incriminating but doesn't actually mean much. The saddest thing is that the article you link addresses most of the objections people have brought up in the thread, but few have read it.
CGMthrowaway 3mo ago
> There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. Identity verification is busy being rolled out across the entire developed world right now, and I have yet to see or hear about even one single mention of anonymous credentials in the discussion of any of the laws.
whywhywhywhy 3mo ago
None of this is really about age verification, the goal is for it to be invasive so a real ID can be connected to every piece of speech online.
isodev 3mo ago
> There are at least some technological solutions I think the main takeaway is that the concept of such verifications is fundamentally incompatible with privacy. Today we have a simple "are you an adult" check but who is to say we wouldn't want further levels of segmentation (legal age to drive, age to allow health insurance etc)? And this just one signal. Nobody likes the EU cookie/consent prompts but what they've shown us is that most websites are perfectly happy to fingerprint you the moment you step on their pages, and then share/broker your activity with hundreds and thousands of "legitimate interest" partners of theirs. So the real-world equivalent of this situation is that you walk on the street and whenever you need to wait for a traffic light, board a bus or the tube, go into a shop, etc... you have a security person who needs to faceID(or fingerprint) you and make you wait until they find a match of your profile... and then they ask you to present your ID (which you have to carry at all times) but hey, it's private because you need to enter your PIN for them to read the chip.
stingraycharles 3mo ago
Governments are serious about knowing who’s doing what online, and all this age verification is just an excuse. It will also raise the barrier to entry for newcomers in the market, so it’s convenient for platform owners as well.
- groceries8192 3mo ago
  Let's remember that this will greatly help ad attribution as well, enriching the platform owners. This reveals that their incentives are aligned against privacy.
cloverich 3mo ago
Both Governments and industry players are, in actuality, interested in and moving in this direction, for some use cases. ex https://docs.withpersona.com/relay https://docs.withpersona.com/relay
ktosobcy 3mo ago
EU is (trying at least) go in that direction with Zero Knowledge Proof: https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/architecture-and-technical-specifications/ https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/archit...
gaze 3mo ago
I've noticed that tech people will respond to an encroachment on civil rights with a technological alternative. I think this is a mistake, because the excuse is presented in bad faith, and to present an alternative is to accept their framing. The correct response is something to the effect of "I know what you're trying to do, fuck off."

by j2kun 3mo ago

gruez 3mo ago

>Modern versions of this technique allow one to associate metadata (like a proof of age exceeding a threshold) in such a way that the verifier can't even correlate repeated requests across users. If it's unlinkable, what's preventing someone from setting up a site that hands out anonymous tokens for anyone to use?

discodachshund 3mo ago
Using cryptographic signatures from approved signers, like a government
- gruez 3mo ago
  No, I'm meant me, using my 18+ ID to generate a bunch of tokens that can't be linked back to me, and then giving it to random < 18 year olds for the lulz.
  - quotemstr 3mo ago
    There are multiple approaches. One, which the Europeans use, hardware-locks the token. Each age attestation is unlinkable, but the cryptographic credentials you need to make the attestation aren't portable. Of course, this model requires a big statist apparatus that does implementation certification, but it does achieve the narrow goal of unlinkable, privacy-preserving age attestation that doesn't instantly decay to mass copying. Other approaches are possible. I'm particularly keen on ones that treat attestations as anonymous digital currency and use cryptographic penalties like slashing to discourage copying post-hoc instead of relying on EU-style implementation certification. There's a huge literature on the subject I don't want to reproduce here. The point is that yes, we do have the technology to do attestation without sacrificing privacy, which makes all the calls for non-privacy-preserving attestation awfully curious.
    - Terr_ 3mo ago
      > as anonymous digital currency and use cryptographic penalties like slashing Or make it so that tokens cannot be tested except by spending/burning them, which would significantly reduce (but not eliminate) a black market because it would be hard for any buyers to trust any sellers. The best outcome here is going to rest on getting people to agree that "good enough" is the best outcome. We want a system that gets the broad social results (e.g. less brain-rot in the kids) without being so impossibly strict and overbuilt that it leads to an even-worse problem (e.g. authoritarian hellhole tools.)
      - mark336 3mo ago
        Yes "good enough" is right. At least until the issue become important enough to seek a full proof method.
        Terr_ 3mo ago
        > At least until the issue become important enough I'm not talking about minimizing effort or deferring decisions. What I mean is that there are conflicting and competing goals, where you need to accept that one of them must not be prioritized over all the others, because the overall outcome will be worse.
    - jszymborski 3mo ago
      I'm not familiar with this, but what your describing sounds similar to the hardware DRM keys used for protecting 4K streams from being downloaded from Netflix. If so, this stuff is already broken, and imagine it would be pretty simple to apply the same principles here. I'm probably wrong on this though I'm out of my depth
    - Aurornis 3mo ago
      > One, which the Europeans use, hardware-locks the token. I'm surprised anyone considers this viable. It would limit access to those sites to a limited set of acceptable devices and operating systems. I couldn't use my laptop, desktop, or a jailbroken phone.
  - paulddraper 3mo ago
    The verification service would tie the token to the IP address/geolocation. It would also throttle the number of identifications, or expire old ones. Yes, that can eventually be worked around, but not really that different than doing the verification today on someone else's device.
    - gruez 3mo ago
      >The verification service would tie the token to the IP address/geolocation "Use this exact tor/vpn server" >It would also throttle the number of identifications So I can only wank off 5 times a day, or grant access to porn sites for 5 kids?
    - Aurornis 3mo ago
      > The verification service would tie the token to the IP address So I'm constantly grabbing new tokens from the government every time I go from work WiFi to my cellular internet to the train WiFi and then home? Sounds like a fantastic point for capturing more tracking data. > /geolocation. Which means I have to send my geolocation data to apps to confirm I can use my token? Don't want that either. > It would also throttle the number of identifications, And if I move around too much in one day or change networks too often, I'm unable to log into anything until tomorrow?
      - Nursie 3mo ago
        > So I'm constantly grabbing new tokens from the government every time ... Every time you set up an account, would generally be the idea. So relatively infrequently.
      - paulddraper 3mo ago
        [dead]
      - paulddraper 3mo ago
        > Which means I have to send my geolocation data to apps to confirm I can use my token? No, you don't need to send it there.
  - worble 3mo ago
    What's to stop you, using your 18+ ID from buying crates of alcohol and giving it to random < 18 year olds for the lulz?
    - gruez 3mo ago
      For one, I have to do it in meatspace so it's easily traced back to me, whereas anonymous tokens can't be traced back to me by design.
    - Aurornis 3mo ago
      Because those <18 year olds will immediately flip and identify you to the cops to try to lighten their punishment. The anonymous crypto token scheme does not have any trace-back mechanism like this at all. If there's no way to track those tokens back to you, why not sell them for $1 each on the internet to make some extra money?
    - laughing_man 3mo ago
      The minute this scheme went into place, there would be sites based in one of the "stans" selling tokens for a couple bucks to whomever wanted to buy.
Retr0id 3mo ago
Yes, this breaks the whole scheme. Anyone promoting it as a solution is delusional. There's a triangle of "robust", "private", and "practical" and you can only pick two. This one omits robust. The various mitigations people might suggest in response will have to sacrifice one of the other dimensions.
nitwit005 3mo ago
Nothing proposed will succeed in preventing access if an adult is willing to help a kid get access. You don't need to do anything technical. Log in, and hand over your phone.
dredmorbius 3mo ago
Effectively, a straw purchase attack: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_purchase>

andy99 3mo ago

This seems to come up in every discussion, in practice it’s irrelevant both because it’s too complicated for normal people to understand, and because the point of all this nonsense really is identification so anything that defeats that will be a non starter.

bluefirebrand 3mo ago
It doesn't have to be too complicated for normal people to understand. Majority of people understand their SIN or SSN number or whatever, they understand they have a drivers license number. This could be built in such a way that it's basically just be another government issued "thing" that they have to know about and be able to produce when requested
- Geezus_42 3mo ago
  Every government has been working on ways to identify and target individuals online since as long as the internet has existed. Governments are incentivized to continuously increase control. Why would you assume this is not yet another escalation towards their goal of being able to track and silence anyone who pushes back?
  - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
    I didn't comment at all on what the governments goals are Edit: I agree with you 100%, but the fact that governments want to track people online has no bearing on how technically possible it is to build a system where they can't An anonymous internet auth system (probably) won't get built, but it is possible to build
    - Geezus_42 3mo ago
      How is it possible to have something that both proves something about your identity but also does not allow ANYONE to deanonymize you?
      - 3mo ago

nemomarx 3mo ago

As you say, it's doubtful governments want it to be private. So we should expect them to not use these kind of elegant solutions, and the public is generally not sophisticated enough to distinguish between the options already.

andai 3mo ago
In what direction do the incentives point?
- nemomarx 3mo ago
  There's two strong incentives - deanonymization for law enforcement is pretty useful so that's one. You want to make it easier to subpoena information about posters for various reasons, access to stores on different dates etc. Lots of reasons for that. And you want to satisfy voters who are worried about children online or have heard scary things about anonymous criminals. You want to be seen to do something about those. A distant third is that you want the system to be cheap and built up fast and relatively easy so voters don't complain about it. All together this leads you to something like "any time a site needs to verify your age (based on this broad list of requirements) put in your government ID number / picture". The infrastructure already exists for that, banks need it, social media needs it, and the current president has agitated for it a few times now. If you're really aiming high you set up some digital ID attached to it that's easier for the users.
  - laughing_man 3mo ago
    >There's two strong incentives - deanonymization for law enforcement is pretty useful so that's one. When you say it like that it sounds less scary than "deanoymization so the government can track down people saying things it doesn't like." Let's not forget the UK has more people in jail for things they said on the internet than Russia and China put together.
    - nemomarx 3mo ago
      Yeah the wording is a little broad, but the UK would call that law enforcement too. Depends on your state and laws and you can look around at how that's going - maybe you'll have brought a first aid kit to the wrong event or helped print some zines and they want to check up on you now.

JohnFen 3mo ago

The problem is that you still have to trust something you don't control and can't verify that the technological solutions are correctly implemented and applied.

rockskon 3mo ago

Zero Knowledge Proofs are worthless for this. Either they validate so little information that a single homeless person can authenticate the entire country or they validate so much information as to not have a significant privacy guarantee. There is no in-between for ZKP validating someone's age.

teravor 3mo ago
worthless is too strong. the truth is that the two extremes you listed can be titrated. if you use nullifiers you can trade some privacy for some security. basically you convert your true identity into a private token which you can use to authenticate aspects of yourself, the price being that the token can be tracked with some effort across services. better than just using your identity at least. if a token/nullifier is abused it can be revoked and then you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get another. there are some other trade offs that can be made.
- rockskon 3mo ago
  Okay - so you verify age and what else? What combination of details can you validate on that is meaningfully privacy-preserving and couldn't result in wide-spread re-use of tokens? Additionally - what would prevent some kids from getting a homeless man in the city to hand them his ID, get a facial scan, and everything else you can think of to generate a token and then pass that token around? ZKP are a cryptography-nerd's joy but are are categorically unsuitable for the purpose of age verification. I stand by this without the slightest reservation.
  - teravor 3mo ago
    the same thing that prevents them from doing reuse right now: platform detection mechanisms. the difference is that right now the identity of the subject is known whereas with ZKP (nullifier approach) only the dirty token is known and where that token was used.
    - rockskon 3mo ago

_heimdall 3mo ago

I wouldn't trust governments, today or in the future, to keep such a system private and I don't see a foolproof way of building some kind of audit mechanism into it to make sure the data is always truely private. I've also always been curious how a truely anonymous identity verification could possibly work. At best for age verification, I could be given some kind of token that would still have to verify my age and be verifiable with a central authority to ensure my token is valid. The central authority could always keeper records of my token, revoke it whenever they please, and every entity that can verify the age associated with, or embedded into, the token knows at least some of my PII.

vkou 3mo ago
> I've also always been curious how a truely anonymous identity verification could possibly work. You go to a store. You show the clerk your id and give him a quarter. The clerk pulls a scratch-off ticket from the front of a ticket tape. The ticket contains a token identifier. It's anonymous. The clerk or his POS system knows your name and age, but doesn't know your number. The vendor providing the tape doesn't know your number or your name. The system accepting the token knows your number, but doesn't know your name. The token is only valid for a day after use, so loss and transfer isn't much of an issue. It's the exact same process by which you buy lottery tickets in a world where they don't need to verify your identity when you redeem them. The lottery has no idea who bought a particular ticket, only that a ticket was bought. The clerk knows you bought a ticket, but doesn't know which ticket. Obviously, Eavesdropping Eve looking over your shoulder knows both your name and your ticket number, but that's not a practical attack.
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  > It's anonymous. The clerk or his POS system knows your name and age, but doesn't know your number. The vendor providing the tape doesn't know your number or your name. Where does this 3rd party identity token provider come from? For government-issued identity tokens, there are not separate parties. It's just the government, and they can choose to link whatever they want in their internal system if they decide it's in the interests of national security. You're also forgetting that lottery tickets are tracked. This is how they can announce which store sold the winning ticket before anyone steps forward with it. It would be trivial to match a buyer to the ticket if they wanted to inspect the records. In the case of a government identity token service, there isn't even a separation of parties providing the records. They do it all and can have all the data.

andrewla 3mo ago

The article talks about the possibilities of malicious cloning of these tokens by third parties, but fails to identify the much more common use case, and one that makes this scheme useless for age verification. It's one thing to be concerned about someone stealing my credential, but another to prevent the transfer of these credentials, especially if they are limited use credentials. The entire point of age verification systems is to prevent minors from accessing certain resources. I think we all know that this is basically impossible; but what these various governments and social media companies want to do is to make it high friction to do so. The highest friction version of this is that the credential ties to a real world identity somehow; maybe locked behind legal barriers, etc., but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor. Without the possibility of real world enforcement, none of these identity solutions can possibly work. Keep dreaming of a technological solution -- there is none that does not lead to the world that FIRE is warning about, except to accept that we can only make a solution "good enough" and leave it at that, without expanding into full on identity verification. The solution here is likely to just try to provide better abilities for parents to monitor and limit their children's use of the internet. Let individual parents decide on the level of harm that they are willing to accept, and accept that there will be ways to work around this even if parents are vigilant, but just try to reduce it on the margins.

Aurornis 3mo ago
Yes, this is the part of the issue that is so frequently ignored: Anonymous age verification schemes are easily defeated through proxying because there wouldn't be any consequences for selling your tokens. "Install this app on your phone and we'll pay you $1 per day" and it will mint your anonymous identity tokens and send them off to kids who want to buy them. If there's no way to track the tokens, there is no possibility of negative consequences. So the schemes always start introducing features to reduce the anonymity of the tokens or make them more trackable in some way: > The highest friction version of this is that the credential ties to a real world identity somehow; maybe locked behind legal barriers, etc., but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime Which requires that these identity tokens not be anonymous age-verification credentials. They become a traceable identity token tied to your government-issued ID.

johnc1 3mo ago

There is a much easier solution that already exists - parental controls on children's devices. I honestly don't understand why is it not solving the problem? Yes, parents are responsible to set this up. But parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns, condoms, etc., and many other things. Perhaps parental controls are not good enough? That's where the regulation could genuinely help - require child-certified devices to implement minimum set of parental controls, and make them easy to use.

kaashif 3mo ago
That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.
- johnc1 3mo ago
  I know! What puzzles me is responses every such article gets even on HN - let's build some cool tech that 95% of the general population and 100% of politicians won't even understand not to mention agree to. Yes, government want to end anonymity and that's clear to some. But governments enjoy on a pretty broad support for this and many people supporting this believe it's a real problem. Suggesting to leave it unsolved or solve it in a way they can't trust or understand is only going to alienate them, making the government job easier. I think suggesting a simple, cheap and effective solution to this problem that has no impact on privacy is a way better way to counter that. I think local parental controls fits the bill.
  - subscribed 3mo ago
    People on average aren't very smart and will happily support programs objectively harmful to them and everyone else because the government and a nice lady from the breakfast TV says it's necessary to think of someone's else's children watching porn (this soundbite is gross. I don't understand how it's okay for the serious people to repeat it).
    - 3mo ago

onetimeusename 3mo ago

I don't think they are serious about privacy and even if they were I don't even want to distinguish between "children" and "adults" on the internet. Things seem to have worked fine up to this point, there doesn't appear to be a public demand for age verification, rather some murky corporations/NGOs/agencies pushing for this. I think it's pretty clear there is some other intention besides protecting children that is the goal here.

skybrian 3mo ago
We should only need to distinguish devices with parental controls turned on from other devices, and rely on parents to set up the devices accordingly.
citruscomputing 3mo ago
they want to isolate gay and trans children from other gay and trans people. don't you know, there's social contagion afoot, but if we protect y^Wour children from this inherently sexual (and thus adult) content, we can prevent it. this is enough to make me oppose age verification wholesale. I don't care if there's fancy ZKPs, it's still going to be used to isolate and harm hundreds of thousands of vulnerable trans kids, who are already experiencing astronomically elevated suicide rates over the past few years. they don't need more of this.

kaurimu 3mo ago

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coldtea 3mo ago

>There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. Technological solutions for what problem?

sneak 3mo ago

No. The point of these initiatives IS TO GET ID, not to protect children. Anonymous credentials don’t allow the state to retaliate in the dark of night against protected expression that they don’t like. Anonymous credentials do not allow for that, so they are irrelevant.

Nursie 3mo ago

Yep, there are a variety of ways this can work well, but the overwhelming 'vibe' here at HN is a) that the tech is too complex and b) that governments actually want to end privacy anyway for their own nefarious reasons. I find 'a' amusing as we'll often see in the same conversation that users appeal to parents to take responsibility and lock down their kids' access to things, as if that's trivial for non-tech folk and foolproof. It's also silly because the user interface to such a system doesn't need to show all that complexity. And 'b' is often supported by some out of context quote that at first glance looks incriminating but doesn't actually mean much. The saddest thing is that the article you link addresses most of the objections people have brought up in the thread, but few have read it.

CGMthrowaway 3mo ago

> There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. Identity verification is busy being rolled out across the entire developed world right now, and I have yet to see or hear about even one single mention of anonymous credentials in the discussion of any of the laws.

whywhywhywhy 3mo ago

None of this is really about age verification, the goal is for it to be invasive so a real ID can be connected to every piece of speech online.

isodev 3mo ago

> There are at least some technological solutions I think the main takeaway is that the concept of such verifications is fundamentally incompatible with privacy. Today we have a simple "are you an adult" check but who is to say we wouldn't want further levels of segmentation (legal age to drive, age to allow health insurance etc)? And this just one signal. Nobody likes the EU cookie/consent prompts but what they've shown us is that most websites are perfectly happy to fingerprint you the moment you step on their pages, and then share/broker your activity with hundreds and thousands of "legitimate interest" partners of theirs. So the real-world equivalent of this situation is that you walk on the street and whenever you need to wait for a traffic light, board a bus or the tube, go into a shop, etc... you have a security person who needs to faceID(or fingerprint) you and make you wait until they find a match of your profile... and then they ask you to present your ID (which you have to carry at all times) but hey, it's private because you need to enter your PIN for them to read the chip.

stingraycharles 3mo ago

Governments are serious about knowing who’s doing what online, and all this age verification is just an excuse. It will also raise the barrier to entry for newcomers in the market, so it’s convenient for platform owners as well.

groceries8192 3mo ago
Let's remember that this will greatly help ad attribution as well, enriching the platform owners. This reveals that their incentives are aligned against privacy.

cloverich 3mo ago

Both Governments and industry players are, in actuality, interested in and moving in this direction, for some use cases. ex https://docs.withpersona.com/relay https://docs.withpersona.com/relay

ktosobcy 3mo ago

EU is (trying at least) go in that direction with Zero Knowledge Proof: https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/architecture-and-technical-specifications/ https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/archit...

gaze 3mo ago

I've noticed that tech people will respond to an encroachment on civil rights with a technological alternative. I think this is a mistake, because the excuse is presented in bad faith, and to present an alternative is to accept their framing. The correct response is something to the effect of "I know what you're trying to do, fuck off."