12 ms·

Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

• watersb 3mo ago
  We need "How to talk to your legislators about zero-knowledge proofs".
  • dboreham 3mo ago
    Not really any point since US legislators aren't motivated by the interests of regular people.
    • consumer451 3mo ago
      Yes, they are not. > Today, we open sourced our Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries, fulfilling a promise and building on our partnership with Sparkasse to support EU age assurance.
  • protocolture 3mo ago
    "Dont do age assurance, ever" Done.
    • Avicebron 3mo ago
      Ok, they have ignored that. I did my part and sent an email. Now what?
      • protocolture 3mo ago
        Violent revolution I guess. Genuinely what are the other options? I made a formal submission to the Australian Government in the very small consulting window they held for the Access and Assistance bill. Pleading with them to consider simply not introducing the law, as there was no justification for it at all. Google also made a submission against the bill, as did many large local and overseas corporations. The government went ahead anyway. What are the chances of me swinging any government when Google et al are on the other side, determined to provide privacy and anonymity destroying products to bolster their bottom line? Probably worth mentioning that the Access and Assistance bill permits the Australian government to secretly (even just verbally) compel anyone building age assurance technology to secretly backdoor it to collect metadata, or any other information they choose. There's no level of safety from the government one can achieve with any app. If they resist they go straight to the Australian version of a secret national security court. The bill doesn't even make it clear whether briefing their solicitor about the request is legal. It doesn't matter how good the crypto is if the app is recording details outside of that. Its all just theatre at this point. There's no safe app, so we should completely resist all attempts to do things the government could restrict, leak or misuse. I dont see how this is even slightly contentious in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty six, after decades of leaks affirming governments do this stuff, decades of governments and corporations dangerously failing their citizens privacy, when a particular government is hell bent on using all the personal data it can hoover up to persecute migrants and refugees. How are people blindly monofocusing on the crypto while trusting everything else?
        • Gigachad 3mo ago
          The vast majority of the population supports banning social media for kids so revolution isn't happening. Of course the social media companies object to their product being banned. It's like cigarette companies objecting to plain packaging.
          • protocolture 3mo ago
            >The vast majority of the population supports banning social media for kids so revolution isn't happening Age assurance is being used in more than a single scope. I dont disagree that the revolution isnt happening, but theres no need to be so reductive. >Of course the social media companies object to their product being banned. It's like cigarette companies objecting to plain packaging. They aren't objecting to age assurance tools. They are objecting to the current ham fisted model, but when they can organise something less nebulous than the current regime they will be fighting to implement it first.
            • Gigachad 3mo ago
              Sure, the implementation details are blunt. But Facebook, Google, and Reddit have had decades to sort this out on their own and yet they have only poured fuel on the problem and watched the ad dollars rain in. So I have little sympathy that the resulting laws are not optimal for them.
              • protocolture 3mo ago
                >But Facebook, Google, and Reddit have had decades to sort this out on their own It was solved. Dont collect information. The problem is making shitty psychotic apps, not determining who can use them. I would much rather they cut meta into pieces and sold them off as scraps, than just scarfing up the PID of the users to make arbitrary determinations about who can have what brainrot.
                • intended 3mo ago
                  It was solved for you. There are more people than just you (and other tech literate folk) online. I would also rather meta be cut an sold of as scraps. This is sadly not the question being framed. I’ve dedicated a portion of my life volunteering to moderate content in communities. It is an unmitigated shit show. The status quo is great for firms and corrosive for society. If theres a takeaway from this sub thread, is why “meta being broken up and sold for scraps” not being raised as a question in the first place. Is it another case of too big to fail?
    • matheusmoreira 3mo ago
      "Do the opposite of what Meta is lobbying for" Done.
    • miki123211 3mo ago
      It's much easier to convince somebody to achieve their goals your way than to not achieve their goals at all. Politicians don't want to be seen as going soft on child predators and harms to children. That is a career-ending move. Whether the bills they introduce even protect children at all has no bearing on it. PR is PR. If you're essentially telling somebody that children don't need to be protected, you might feel smug and superior, but you're achieving nothing. You'll be ignored as a conspiracy-theory-loving nutjob. If, on the other hand, you tell politicians that there are multiple approaches to protecting children, all as effective, with one of them having fewer side-effects to the rest of society, now that's a much easier sell. You sound like somebody who knows their stuff and has a nuanced take.
      • protocolture 3mo ago
        Nuance is the problem, we have been experiencing death by small degrees thanks to giving lots of small wins to politicians. Government is these days largely solved, and for politicians that's a horrendous untenable situation, so they have to keep inventing problems to solve. All they do is stack law on law on law for no discernible public good, with only negative outcomes. The problem is the framing of the problem. Its not "How to protect kids online". The problem is "how to protect everyones freedoms online". And the only way to do that is to say absolutely not, every single time this shit comes up. And its disingenuous to say the least, to assume that these tools are only coming for kids on social media. These tools are coming everywhere, to everyone. You just let them in because they played the old "wont someone please think about the children" song and dance. This exact nonsense was how we got the eSafety commissioner, who was brought in with a mandate to scrub the video footage of the christchurch massacre off of the internet. Of course, now they spend a large amount of time and money trying to get all sorts of posts scrubbed off the internet, often in jurisdictions that have free speech mandates.
• rho138 3mo ago
  [2025]
  • consumer451 3mo ago
    Yes, but it's never been more important than now. Also, I did not have enough chars for an HN title.
    • stephen_g 3mo ago
      Funny though how whenever these laws are pushed though, the legislators are more interested in strongly identifying people to gate services despite the fact that they should have plenty of advice that things like zero-knowledge proofs exist. I hate to be cynical but I worry that this isn't going to matter, because it really seems that a lot of the pressure behind age verification isn't actually very interested in the age verification part...
      • consumer451 3mo ago
        Agreed. Now is our chance to very publicly inform our legislators. Not all is lost, yet.
      • semi-extrinsic 3mo ago
        It seems to me that the technical people who get invited to public debates are simply not competent or knowledgable enough. We definitely need to step up! But a part of me wonders if this may be by design from the debate moderators - if a technical expert opens up by saying "we have a cryptographically secured solution that is backed by experts and privacy advocates alike", what's the next 45 minutes of the TV show going to be about?
        • bigfishrunning 3mo ago
          The same thing every 45 minutes of every TV show is about -- selling cars and mattresses.
      • 3mo ago
• emsign 3mo ago
  What's the point of giving a single point of information about yourself to a single website, when all the websites you visit use the same trackers (from Google for example) only to merge these data points together and sell them as a package.
  • TalkingCodeMonk 3mo ago
    Because of the principle of least privilege: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege All current age verification measures open up a torrent of attack vectors on user PII and privacy. Limiting the number of entities that are able to access data is one of the best ways to prevent it's leak or abuse. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good. But therein lies the fundamental problem with surveillance capitalism. Until the sale of personal data/metadata is outlawed, the practice of targeting content based on an individuals personal data/metadata is outlawed, there is a highly punitive cost for violations and leaks that make storage outside core business functionality a major criminal and financial risk, and the compilation of this data by "intelligence" agencies it treated as a critical attack vector to national security – the attack on each citizens civil rights that it truly is – most privacy laws and regulations are just virtue signals designed specifically avoid the root causes, and further entrench the power of monopolies and incumbents. FYI I don't believe Google sells user data. They sell products which leverage user data to give them a critical advantage over every competitor who does not have trackers in everyones pockets/computers, does not store their entire web search/browsing history, etc. It's in the interest of big tech to protect their market advantage (like ZKP, which would prevent competitors from having a new gov-mandated vector to compile user data).
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    • sroussey 3mo ago
      Google never sold user data until the DoubleClick acquisition, from what I understand
• dadoum 3mo ago
  Still, I don't want to gate people based on age. Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.
  • doginasuit 3mo ago
    As a millennial-aged person I saw a fair amount of content I would not want the young people in my life to see, but it's probably not nearly as harmful as the non-age gated content that they will still have access to. There is a lot creepy youtube and tiktok content that isn't off limits but still unhealthy and my younger relatives are fascinated by it.
    • kentm 3mo ago
      Not that I want my kids looking at porn or violent content, but I’m far more concerned about man-o-sphere influencers than that other stuff.
      • pphysch 3mo ago
        Manosphere content is toxic and harmful but the hyperviolence and desensitisation of the former should not be downplayed. That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.
        • nearlyepic 3mo ago
          > That's where the mass shooters evidently come from. I mean, quite a few have come from proto-manosphere circles, too. Elliot Rodger comes to mind.
          • scotty79 3mo ago
            Given how large it is, I don't think it's a high stat. Especially compared with other subcultures. And we don't blame feminism for every instance where a man is killed by a man hating woman.
• Groxx 3mo ago
  I've been trying to figure out how zero-knowledge stuff would work in practice for age verification, where "when issued" (or extremely coarse, like what year), "to whom", and "where it's used" are hidden from everyone except the individual holding the proof (since that's the gold standard, and the only one worth accepting). I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful. But if they reveal nothing, isn't it wide open for abuse? Couldn't one over-18-person's proof become everyone's proof, because they can't tell it's the same proof, and the issuer can't tell where or how often the proof is being used? Or are there ways to construct data leaks that are not user-identifying but are abuse-identifying (and what would that even mean)?
  • doginasuit 3mo ago
    My understanding as someone who is just learning about the tech is that zero-knowledge isn't a great description of what is happening. The issuer (some party with the proof, like the government) shares the knowledge and that is only valid for a single verifier. So knowledge is held and is shared, just the minimum amount possible to be credible.
  • Aurornis 3mo ago
    > But if they reveal nothing, isn't it wide open for abuse? Couldn't one over-18-person's proof become everyone's proof, because they can't tell it's the same proof, and the issuer can't tell where or how often the proof is being used? Yep! This is why the concept of zero knowledge age gating is such a trap for technically minded people. They imagine receiving a private cryptographic object that can be used to anonymously confirm that the government says it was issued to someone over 18. That’s completely useless because a single leaked token could be used forever, so nobody actually considers this. All of the real proposals have various compromises baked in. Some people want to require device attestation, so you could only do this handshake from a government approved device running a government approved operating system. Forget using Linux or maybe even a general purpose computer at all. Other proposals involve online government handshakes in various ways, with a pinky promise that the government won’t keep logs or tap it for national security purposes. So we get back to anonymous by trust only.
• doginasuit 3mo ago
  Zero-knowledge seems to be a bit of an oversell here. It is more like you break the knowledge up and only share the relevant parts with each party. And the facilitator (Google) arguably has access to the most information out of any of the parties involved.
  • dgrin91 3mo ago
    There are true ZKP setups where no one learns anything but the absolute minimum (e.g. is this person over 16, not what is their dob). This is hard to prove though and I don't know if I trust Google to do it
  • slwvx 3mo ago
    zero-knowledge proofs are a well-known tool in cryptography [1]. All Google is sharing is the library to implement it. Google would not have access to the information any more than they have access to the bank info of people who use Android or Gmail. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
    • doginasuit 3mo ago
      It's my understanding that they are sharing the library but they will also be involved as a facilitator, at least to the extent that people use their identity wallet service. It also seems like they will have access to who you are sharing information with, which seems like the most valuable information for a company in their position, with nothing but a pinky promise that it will not be tracked. Let me know if any of that is inaccurate.
      • _alternator_ 3mo ago
        I don't know the technical details of this ZKP library, but there is no technical reason that I'm aware of that the ID provider would need to know who you are sharing with. Not to say Google didn't build it this way for business reasons.
      • beepbooptheory 3mo ago
• coppsilgold 3mo ago
  Unfortunately ZKP's aren't magic. When not doing privacy oriented cryptocurrency (cough money laundering cough) with ZKP's, if you really want private verification you are in a position where a single actor can authenticate the entire world and no one will know it happened. And to prevent it you assemble the pieces necessary to deanonymize anyone. Make no mistake. ZKP age verification, as proposed, will just require multiple parties to collude to figure out your identity. They can't even implement ZKP for remote attestation due to the auth-the-world problem.
  • consumer451 3mo ago
    Assuming that perfect is the enemy of good, this is still better than all the proposed alternatives, isn't it?
    • coppsilgold 3mo ago
      With ZKP age verification, services will not be able to track you without help from the CA. The CA will not be able to track you without help from the services. Both will contain the necessary information in their databases that when combined deanonymize you. The CA is the central authority/certificate authority. So you should assume the government can track you, because you should assume both will be streaming those identifiers to it.
      • consumer451 3mo ago
        Yes, there is one party that can track you, which in some countries is still slightly trusted. Ideally, no age verification would be required or proposed. However, if it is, this implementation should be the base minimum, should it not? This is a gazillion percent better than a foreign corporation being in charge, isn't it?
        • consumer451 3mo ago
          I am a moron for writing this, ZKP is like magic like this. That is the entire point, and why I posted this.
• quietthrow 3mo ago
  This seems great - one question (ideally for Alan stapleberg) why is this not available for everyone? Seems like this is only applicable to the EU? Genuine question - Why would other governments not want this for their people ? I am sure there is a flip side that EU thinks is not worth more than thier people getting this kind of privacy. But what’s has to be true for some govts to think that the flip side is more beneficial than the privacy aspect. Appreciate if someone can break down how incentive structures are different and hence the resultant choices/positions
• anon-3988 3mo ago
  Age is just one metric. I don't want zero proof tech about information X. I don't want to have an identity. Full stop.
  • ambicapter 3mo ago
    This can be used to have zero-proof knowledge of "over 18" or "not over 18". So they don't really get your age, except that you are in two broad ranges.
    • wmf 3mo ago
      I think anon's point is that it could be used for other attributes in the future, like your nationality or... your social credit score (don't worry, it only proves that your score is over or under 500).
    • onion2k 3mo ago
      If you get enough signals like that you can often narrow down a very large cohort of people to an individual. First it's 'over 18?', then it's 'over 25?', and then 'biological sex?', 'employed?', 'enjoys posting on HN?', 'active in the early morning?' and after half a dozen questions, all with binary answers that are safe individually, you can zero in on a 23 year old woman who has a job and posts on HN in the morning. Ask a few dozen questions like that and you'd be able to sieve an individual from a group of millions, especially if they're unlucky enough not to be absolutely typical.
      • alexghr 3mo ago
        Proper ZK proofs don’t work that way. N different proofs will not be linked to each other unless the circuits are written to emit a stable identifier. Obviously if you see a bunch of proofs for known circuits coming from the same IP address then yeah, you can infer a bunch of info from that metadata.
        • za_creature 3mo ago
          > N different proofs will not be linked to each other Please sign up to continue
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• userbinator 3mo ago
  Another attempt at a technological solution to a sociopolitical problem. No thanks.
• spacington 3mo ago
  It's not zero proof It's moving the goal post from one entity to another. You can also fake it by letting someone else solve it for you.
  • salviati 3mo ago
    > You can also fake it by letting someone else solve it for you. Fair enough, that's true. But there is no solution that could ever prevent this, right?
    • spacington 3mo ago
      Yeah exactly. I find the naming and the way it gets sold wrong because of it.
• sciencejerk 3mo ago
  It is suspicious to me that "age assurance" is trending EXACTLY as AI agents become capable of autonomously operating a personal computer in the same way a human office worker would. I'm afraid "age assurance" has nothing to do with "the children".
  • chii 3mo ago
    > I'm afraid "age assurance" has nothing to do with "the children". and you should be afraid, very afraid. Because none of these (and other measures to invade privacy) has ever had anything to do with children.
  • sigmoid10 3mo ago
    >It is suspicious to me that "age assurance" is trending EXACTLY as AI agents become capable of autonomously operating It is not, because your premise is false. This whole thing has been going on for as long as kids have been online. The early 2000s tried (and obviously failed) by using credit cards. The UK tried and failed last decade to ban porn for minors this way. AI tools are probably not even on the radar for the kind of politicians that keep pushing this.
    • M95D 3mo ago
      > AI tools are probably not even on the radar for the kind of politicians that keep pushing this. Forget about the politicians for a bit. There still are many regions on the globe where no age verification is mandatory, yet websites chose to implement it anyway. Why, if not for tracking and bots?
      • sigmoid10 3mo ago
        Well, because of things like COPPA I imagine most companies wouldn't want to risk anything here. So unless you have a website that is somehow guaranteed 100% blocking all traffic from the US or American citizens, you may as well implement it. But very few (if any) public websites will fall into that category.
  • u1hcw9nx 3mo ago
• PeterStuer 3mo ago
  Will they not just argue that you could share the assertion, and hence we need a 'trusted' verfication point to establish it is actually you in posession of the zkp token, right now. So turn on that smartphone camera right now and obediently follow our biometric verfication instructions ...
  • sigbottle 3mo ago
    Or even simpler - they can just claim to implement it but still store your data just because. Doesn't seem like government is taking any steps here to try and regulate anything anymore. Possibly not ever again.
    • xinayder 3mo ago
      There is literally no way of us knowing if Google hasn't chosen to cheat during the ZKP protocol or not. Zero chance.
  • Seattle3503 3mo ago
    Maybe, but we should force them to make that argument after we demonstrate age verification doesn't require identifying ourselves to every website. It would reveal they aren't seeking pragmatic solutions.
• mahirsaid 3mo ago
  more like walled off garden where they only, have access to children and what they watch. so now they will feed them the junk and ads curated only for children so they can get them hooked on products early on. Way to go Google yo uhave succeeded in your goal.
• ggm 3mo ago
  CSIRO and the Australian privacy commissioner suggested this path to the Australian Government a few years ago. I'm not a fan of technology fixes for social problems but i do think this may be in the sweet spot. I see a lot of people here don't agree. I think they may not appreciate quite how concerned a lot of the community is about the effects of networked communication on minors. I'm not here to change people's minds, but this isn't a US problem it's a global one, and US constitutional rights views do not predominate worldwide. Google has more customers outside the US than inside, and has more business with entities subject to non US laws than solely US domiciled entities.
• Nevermark 3mo ago
  If you need personalized government attestation to visit a site, then the government has the ability to dynamically deny and rescind your individual access to any site that adopts age verification, at any time. Once adult sites adopt the system, it will creep over to any site wanting to limit their liability. Banks. Business services. Eventually almost everyone. Liability the government will dramatize and escalate. You won't see the government pass any laws to create age-liability safe harbors. Wikipedia is already being forced to fight to not implement age verification. Age verification managed by the government = No Wikipedia access without individually tracked, controlled and revokable government permission. [0] Seldom has a slippery slope been so slippery. The distance between government controlled per-citizen access to obviously adult sites, and government permissioned/controlled access to any site of substance, does not even involve a technical hurdle. It just becomes a site adoption curve. Every adoption increasing the scope of real-time government surveillance in our minute-to-minute lives, and its real-time at-will ability to deny access to whatever it chooses, whenever it chooses, and for whoever it chooses. In any combination. Dystopia is here. In my opinion, this is terrifying. We need: Third party attestation, providable by anyone/entity meeting basic openly-defined criteria, limited to age attestation only, implemented with Zero Knowledge Proofs, to create a safe anonymous (unsurveiled/no personalized denials) alternative, to take the wind out of the sails of this constant governmental power grab. If it isn't solved by security minded technologists and the marketplace, the freedom destroying version will prevail - and it won't be undone. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/we-support-wikimedia-foundations-challenge-uks-online-safety-act https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/we-support-wikimedia-f...
  • kelseyfrog 3mo ago
    If you're ok with slippery slopes, are you ok with ad hominems?
  • xinayder 3mo ago
    We don't need age attestation or any kind of identity attestation, period.
    • Nevermark 3mo ago
• RedComet 3mo ago
  It is painfully obvious that the "age assurance" push is to limit anti-zionist propaganda. I wonder who or what will abuse this infrustructure when they fail.
• rimworld 3mo ago
  how would you get everyone to accept a economy 2.0 pre-req technology?
• metalman 3mo ago
  lying bastards fuck off nobody will trust ANYTHING if this shit keeps going on
• mv_d5339e31 3mo ago
  [dead]
• trashb 3mo ago
  I'm not a fan of age checks. There is a reason Google is offering this (for free). As always with tracking, the value is in the metadata. The knowledge if you are or are not above a certain age is already privacy invasive but not that relevant for tracking or ads. But with ZKP at least you won't need to send your creditcard, copy of ID and address to the 3rd party to verify.
  • human305893 3mo ago
    They already know everything about you. They are already tracking you.
• brigandish 3mo ago
  Someone else in the thread asked, as others have, but most pithily > How about not needing to do age verification? Which I agree with. However, I think that ship is sailing. Those who care about this had better find a provider that they trust and support providers they trust, because the perfect is the enemy of the good, and without the good there'll be no way to rollback to the perfect at all.
  • jonathanstrange 3mo ago
    The people who are against this do not trust any of them for good reasons, so that ship has sailed long ago, too.
• ortichic 3mo ago
  Lots of bias in this thread. But maybe we can have a technical discussion? I'm not into this topic, so maybe someone else can answer this: How "zero-knowledge" is this actually? As far as I understand, there are three parties here: 1. Me, the user; 2. The site I want to access; 3. The attestor (google? my government?). What do they know about each other? Does the site know who I am? Does the site know who my attestor is (and therefore, for example, that it doesn't like Winnie-the-Poo memes)? Does the attestor know what site or kind of content I want to visit (and therefore e.g. if he agrees with it)? Does the attestor know who I am? Do I always know who the site and attestor are, and when this proof happens?
  • hoppp 3mo ago
    Its not really possible to know. the system is valid zkp but any of the services in practice can still collect personally identifiable information from their users. There is also nothing stopping the attestor to collude with the site you want to access, to reveal information about you.
    • rcxdude 3mo ago
      If you are controlling the middle part of the zkp (or at least can validate it), then identification should not be possible through the zkp even if the attestor and and site collude with each other (they could maybe collude based on some other information, like IP address or browser fingerprinting, ofc).
      • hoppp 3mo ago
        I think if google provides the attestation and they also provide a client side dependency for the site, then they can collect all the data they want. Also, nothing stops a site from having a flow like: 1. Please enter your age 2. Verify that it's correct using a proof The zkp is valid as far as the tech is concerned but the sites can still do whatever they want.
        • rcxdude 3mo ago
• EGreg 3mo ago
  In this scenario, Google is still a trusted dealer. I just posted a general solution anyone can implement without needing Google as the trusted dealer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760492
• jrm4 3mo ago
  This is going to be a thing where the individual parties might get something like reliable anonymity, and Google will still be able to trace it, right?
• marginalia_nu 3mo ago
  ZKP for this purpose is a trojan horse for identity tracking and device attestation, as those are prerequisites for avoiding the scenario of someone printing attestations that everyone is of age in bulk and handing them out for free. It works for contract signing and payments, because there is a built in incentive there, but not for age attestation.
• krunck 3mo ago
  "ZKP makes it possible for people to prove that something about them is true without exchanging any other data. So, for example, a person visiting a website can verifiably prove he or she is over 18, without sharing anything else at all." But not "...without sharing anything else even when setting up your token." Can I prove that some cryptographic token A) doesn't contain any PII and B) that the token itself can't be used as an ID tied to my identity in a Google or government database? No and no. So, I do not support schemes like this.
  • geek_at 3mo ago
    Of course not? The idea would be a government (who already has your age data for example) will allow you to create a signed message and the platform you are verifying your age to doesn't know who you are, what age you are but that you are of age
    • rcxdude 3mo ago
      And also, crucially, that the government does not get to know what platforms you are visiting. (the process goes: you get a certificate for certain facts, then your 'ID wallet' generates a ZKP itself that can prove that you have a certificate of any subset of those facts, and neither the certificate issuer nor the receiver of that proof can link that to anything but those facts, even if they collude)
  • rcxdude 3mo ago
    As I understand it, ZKPs can prove both those properties. You can get a certificate from whoever is trusted to verify that you're over 18, and then you can use that to generate tokens that only encode the information 'X has verified that I am over 18' without either the original verifier or the entity you are providing it to being able to link that to the original certificate. See section 2 of this document: https://eudi.dev/2.4.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-proof/ https://eudi.dev/2.4.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr... . If there are any objections that this is not technically feasible to achieve in practice, I would like to know what they are. (Also, AFAIK, setting up such a thing would comply with any of the age-verification laws that are being proposed around the world. You could even set up this as two arms of the same company and be able to prove to your users that while you've seen all their IDs, you cannot link their usernames to their IDs. This still isn't the best because you're still handling their PII with associated risk of leaks but it's a lot better than anyone is doing ATM)
• myshapeprotocol 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• Nevermark 3mo ago
  A great number of people here are engaged in civilized debates about whether parenting needs age verification. That might seem to be the issue, but it is a red herring. Powerful people are ramming age verification through in a way that will surveil you and give government the ability to not just attest for your age, but surveil what sites you use, and revert their attestation, for anyone, on any site, for whatever reason. Not just porn sites but any site they convince to use their age verification scheme. Even Wikipedia is having to fight this with the help of the EFF to not force all its users to submit to this. Wake up. We all need to wake up. The purpose of an anonymizing open source alternative is to head off dystopia. Nuanced opinions about parenting are not a defense strategy. Not against a closed internet permissioning system run by governments. Implemented by people who are using parenting as a cover. Your parenting opinions won’t help you log onto increasing numbers of sites that block you without a government supplied key. Wake up. We must not let governments use this issue to lock down the internet. But that is now the default outcome. The problem is insidious.
• tomyow 3mo ago
  [flagged]