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.
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.
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.
The tokens could be tied to the device and Apple account by a provider like Apple, in fact you don’t need to issue tokens, only provide a web api that Apple and other browser providers support, which attests age.
This is certainly something that can be solved technically if we want.
It sounds like your scheme would only allow browsing the "adult web" on locked-down, unmodified devices running government-approved software. Frankly, that's worse than even requiring ID.
Not if you use a challenge-response protocol where the client returns a zero-knowledge proof of age, where the proof incorporates a random string sent by the website.
The traceable stuff is private information that the website never sees. If a minor is caught with it, then law enforcement has local access to the minor's hardware and can probably view the private data.
At that point, the private key can be put on a public revocation list. The zero-knowledge proof can include a proof that you're not on the revocation list. Once you've been revoked, you have to go through the hassle of setting this all up again, which might be enough incentive to keep it reasonably secure.
This doesn’t stop the scheme the parent proposes, where adults install some proxy on their device and challenges are responded to on the parent device. Then the private key never leaves the parent device and all the child device has is the proxy software, which could be set up to not log any identifier of the key that it used
I agree, but this is also clearly a increased barrier. Going back to OPs comment that perfection is impossible, the goal is to raise the bar, I would say that this is more than good enough.
Presumably, if you have a trusted application on a trusted device, the identifier was installed in a trusted way, the device is in trusted possession and the device won't be given to anyone else, trusted computing may be able, in certain cases, to make it more difficult for a remote minor to use the identifier.
We are talking about porn here.
And the internet will be always full of it - and that can only be prevented by controlling all of it, or have each state have a golden firewall.
All of these solutions seem very complicated, for little benefit. So a anonymous age verification scheme, fine with me. But making it more complicatdd, because dark entities could capture and resell tokens .. seems a step in the direction of madness.
I thought a solution to this would be to use a physical smartcard to store the certificate(perhaps on your government ID).
if the protocol is a challenge/response and the private key never leaves the card it would make proxying without the physical card more difficult.
A certificate could be anonymous and the website would only need to verify it against the born_before_2008_root_cert in 2026. You could issue has many certs as you want and all would have a validity of 1 year so that websites only have to install at the maximum 2 root certs.
If the smart cards required some human input to perform a signature maybe this could work. Otherwise there is nothing stopping someone from selling use of their card via some proxy software
the article also mentions; <But the government puts much of the onus on social media platforms to ensure users understand the verification process and on users to read up to make sure they aren’t being scammed.>
Unfortunately, the said-government doesn't seem to worry about the fact that their own systems have been breached over the years
> 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.
They don't work even then.
Suppose you completely eliminate privacy on the internet and require every domestic site to collect the name and social security number of everyone who visits. Then a child uses an adult's ID, regardless of whether it's with or without their knowledge. Is the child going to inform on themselves? No. Is the adult, when they don't even know about it? No. Is the adult, when they provided it on purpose? No.
That constitutes the entire set of people who would typically know that the person using the device isn't the person on the ID.
On top of that, we can punch an even bigger hole in it. Search engines, among other things, index other sites. Google is obviously the biggest but there are many others -- Bing, Marginalia, Brave, Swisscows, Yandex, Perplexity, Baidu, etc. They're run by adults and most of their users are adults, who reasonably expect to be able to turn off "safe search" if they want to. So some adult at each search engine would have to provide their ID to the crawler so it can index things inappropriate for children and show them to adult users. It would therefore be a fairly unremarkable and recurring thing to see the same ID make a zillion gigatons of requests.
But then you can't use "why is this person downloading 100 things from 100 computers at once" as an indication of anything nefarious happening, and anyone can still set up a service hosted on a foreign server that will serve adult content to anyone without an ID by serving it out of a cache. (And in the case where you're invading everyone's privacy, that service would also be very popular with adults.)
> 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.
Buying alcohol for a minor implies knowledge and intent.
Getting the tokens out of a phone doesn't require the user to do any of that, the user just has to be frugal and keep the phone longer than it's supported by the manufacturer, until some local exploit is found again, and that token will be extracted and available online for everyone to use.
Parents buy those phones, phones could easily have a "user is a minor" setting (and a flag sent to all the sites that want one) with a password for parents to unlock stuff if needed. This would be set during the phones first set up, and it's done. But nope, the plan is for everyone to install a form if a digital ID on their phones, and once it's there, requiring full-name identification when registering is just one step away.
Why can’t you just sell single use codes at gas stations/liquor stores/etc and they just check your ID before sale? Of course shady places can still sell them without ID check, but we have this problem already for liquor and tobacco.
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.
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.
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.
> But governments enjoy on a pretty broad support for this
No they do not. They do an enormous amount of PR trying to convince people that they have it, though.
In the real world when there is a ton of support behind a position, you see representatives of it all over the place and they are pushing the agenda and the coverage. In the world of online age verification, you just see a bunch of lame duck politicians using procedure to sneak policy changes in and keep objections from being heard, and a few government contractor-surrogates writing op-eds (that they haven't read.)
When puritans go on the march, they're actually pretty loud. Most of the anti-social media people are hippy-dippy upper-middle class liberals who curse "screens," completely believed Cambridge Analytica's PR and think that Trump rules through mind control - who will be bothered by the end of anonymity; and the remainder are angry online right-wingers who think that they were censored by and as a result of social media. They're not marching together, they're not marching to have people identified when they're using the internet, neither of them are even prioritizing social media right now and they aren't putting pressure on anyone.
The fact that it's so unpopular is why there are lame ducks doing it. They're just assuring their fortunes on the way out, and the person on the way in will pretend like they had nothing to do with it even though it will be will be passed and implemented on their watch.
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).
Of course it's accurate to say a lot of people aren't smart.
A lot of people also may or may not be smart but have limited knowledge of this area and limited time/effort to expend thinking about it.
I don't think you should rail against those things because they will always be true for every topic.
Instead, people who have understood the deeper implications of this, for instance the typical HN reader, need to connect with the average person, engage with rather than dismiss their child protection fears, while explaining the downsides.
Taking a high handed dismissive attitude will not help to shift public opinion.
But I'm expressing my opinion on HN, not for the general public?
I thought that stating this, I believe, fact as a contributing factor in the creeping authoritarian climate would be understood without having to attach a handful of caveats and papers?
Naah, "nice lady from the breakfast TV" is mostly[1] an allegory of the traditional media narrative, but you can't seriously deny the impact and importance of it?
If you deny for example Murdoch-owned media impact on the society, or the extent of the damage for example BBC did in the UK to the human rights or the discourse, I'd suggest reading more :)
[1] one TV programme I remember (I don't watch it): "Good Morning Britain is the UK's most talked about breakfast television show with a weekly audience reach of 4 million people." that's 10% of the age group 16-64 here, not too shabby-- and that's ONE tv.
Yeah. Didn't you find your dad's dirty VHS tapes when you were young? I'm sure most of us did. And we turned out fine.
And no, porn isn't more extreme these days either. I remember seeing bukkake, golden showers etc on borrowed tapes and hacked pay TV. BDSM existed back then too. And I had some pics of a girls face surrounded by male members and their output. Never once did I think this would be a normal thing to do with my girlfriend once I got one.
And these things are still gonna happen. Teens are going to go through their dad's phone when he's sleeping, find his stack of Blu-ray's or vids on this computer. Even with all this age verification stuff. I don't understand why we suddenly think that's the end of civilization.
There is a bootlegger and baptist thing going on here. One understandable point of view is that of parents that control their kids' phones, but other parents in the community do not. Then their kids are the only ones in the class without tiktok or Instagram or something.
For those parents life is easier if nobody is allowed on these things.
Have decent defaults. “Is this phone for a child” and “scan this wr from parents phone”. 90% of problems solved.
That said while Apple does a good job at parental controls, Microsoft is altered. Trying to have controls on Minecraft across a windows laptop and a switch involved a multi hour odyssey, creating tons of accounts for parent and child.
You've got to be really on the margin of society to not be able to set it up when every grandma and her dog use smartphones. There're about 1000 different ways to improve the lives of such people without making everyone use their government ID when scrolling Instagram.
I was thinking that some kind of permanent physical attachment with passive electronics could be given to children, like an ankle bracelet used for home curfew, monkey's headband, a dogs shock collar, or just a nice bracelet, call it MoB, which couldn't be removed until they are of age. Devices they are given could be associated with those devices and not usable without them, if they disappear from passive scanning then they have been tin-foiled, etc etc. I've not seen any discussion of this type of approach which gives children something to aim for - freedom, and tallies with human historical culture as well.
I don't understand why the act of buying internet access isn't considered a parental control. I doubt very many kids are doing it or can.
Ok, but parents buy internet access and then let their kids use it, because the kids need it for school. So? The parents job is to keep their kids out of trouble. Learning how to keep track of what their kids access shouldn't be difficult, and maybe should be part of the obligation parents have, kind of like their obligated to teach their kids to drive before giving them the keys to a car. Its analogious to saying "kids shouldn't walk home from school or be let out of the house at all because they might wander into a nude beach or join a drug smuggling satanic cult". Most of us don't hold that view because we trust that kids can be taught to be vaguely responsible.
What's more: tools to shield the kids have been around for longer than most of the parents have been alive at this point. The problem is pretty much solved in multiple ways, and wouldn't even be a problem if parents only followed their basic responsiblities. Also it isn't a problem in the first place, I haven't seen any clear, undisputed evidence that shows that kids are degenerating into fiends because of looking at adult stuff on the internet.
> The parents job is to keep their kids out of trouble. Learning how to keep track of what their kids access shouldn't be difficult
Unfortunately it is, but we could fix that with only minimally invasive legislation. Right now you either whitelist which breaks half the internet on a recurring basis (things are constantly changing) or you blacklist which is swiss cheese. Either way you're relying on third parties.
I think it would be much better to legally mandate a certain minimum level of self classification for website operators along with a simple and extensible scheme for communicating such. It might also be useful to mandate that devices ship from the OEM with parental control software supporting that standard but honestly I doubt that's necessary - if their were a standardized and above all reliable signal available I think browsers and operating systems would rapidly adopt support for it.
Exactly! We already have content tags on TV/Movies, just extend it to the web and make mandatory.
I imagine it could be not trivial to enforce (esp. for offshore web) - but definitely easier than enforcing the same sites to implement much more complicated identity verification (while preferably also not leaking this data).
But that might not even be necessary. A small on-device AI can probably do a decent job classifying pretty much everything we don't want children to see - with and option for parents to override it when needed.
> I imagine it could be not trivial to enforce (esp. for offshore web)
It's quite trivial, actually - the parental control software is designed so that if there are no content tags, then the site does not display. The mandate for websites to tag their content would only need to apply to websites over a certain size, to bootstrap the network effects.
The other option is for the major browsers to refuse to load pages that don't include the tag. I don't think it's a good thing that they can unilaterally dictate web standards but that's the reality so might as well take advantage of it for the better I guess.
The problem with this idea is that it assumes responsible parents, which are not a given. I agree with you completely - I don't want any kind of controls on the Internet - but we live in a world where we cannot actually rely on parents to fulfill what you would consider to be basic and reasonable expectations of parental duties.
They certainly have other problems however the internet is unique in that it drops the entire world directly in your living room. Even with irresponsible parents zoning laws keep most children away from things like casinos and strip clubs (at least until they can drive) and everyone benefits from community efforts to keep the neighborhood safe.
Children can buy their own devices. School issued devices are not under parent control. Parental controls and school controls are laughable. There is no incentive for OS vendors/retailers to provide robust solutions to this problem. PII industry is essentially pushing regulatory capture.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> Where does this 3rd party identity token provider come from?
Some oracle whose job it is to print tokens and hand out rolls to the stores (and to the websystems). They would know which store got which roll, and which website authenticated it, but not who each ticket from that roll went to.
With a big enough roll, this is essentially anonymous.
Yes, lotteries know which store got the winning ticket, but they have no idea which of the patrons in the store got it. Not unless they ask Eve to get her telescopic lens and notepad out.
> It's anonymous. The clerk or his POS system knows your name and age, but doesn't know your number.
What prevents a commercial "AI" security camera analysis firm from doing a decent job of linking footage of a store's customers to a likely subset of tokens, based on the knowledge of which tokens are sent to which store and how many tokens have been pulled off of the roll so far? Remember that you can design the token roll packaging so the easiest thing for a clerk to do is to pull off the rolls in the order in which they were shipped. Or -hell- you can design the token dispenser so that it phones home to the oracle that sent the roll to the store with the range of tokens in the roll when the roll is loaded into the dispenser (for "security purposes").
> 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.
I've seen many people buy lotto tickets. I've never seen anyone asked for ID. Perhaps the merchant is supposed to check for ID, but they don't. Relatedly:
> The clerk pulls a scratch-off ticket from the front of a ticket tape. The ticket contains a token identifier.
What prevents rolls of those tickets from falling off of a truck and either being handed out for free or at a substantial markup, no questions asked? [0]
In the real world, the system you propose absolutely will not function to the standards required by the people agitating for these systems. You can't "protect the children" if "children" can easily get their hands on anonymous access-granting tokens.
[0] The fact that this doesn't happen with lotto tickets often enough to be newsworthy is not a compelling counterexample. Stores make a decent amount of money selling those, and wouldn't want to get cut off from that revenue source by regularly "losing" shipments of tickets. What you propose doesn't make stores any money, so either you have to spend a bunch of money to induce them to carry the tokens [1], or you have to have harsh penalties for "losing" shipments of tokens. If you risk harsh penalties for choosing to sell the tokens, why even bother? Stores put up with the risk of selling booze because it's quite profitable... selling 5c or 0c tokens absolutely is not.
[1] Where does that money come from? From you and me, of course!
I’ve worked in the industry, so just adding some extra info, as I agree with you that the ticket system is not really less tracked than other systems, just differently tracked:
Lottery tickets don’t “fall off of trucks” or get “lost in the mail” because they aren’t valid for redemption until they’re activated at the POS terminal of a licensed store, and the lottery company knows which store receives each ticket roll, because they are shipped to known locations with tracking numbers and delivery verification and/or delivered in person by lottery employees. Even the rolls of blank lottery ticket receipt paper have different serial numbers every few inches, and it’s forbidden by policy to swap receipt paper between stores. All of these things are audited both regularly and randomly by state lottery officials.
> Lottery tickets don’t “fall off of trucks” or get “lost in the mail” because...
Oh yeah, true. A few minutes after I posted the comment, it occurred to me that lotto tickets always get scanned at the register, which is the obvious way to track their distribution and make it annoying to use a whole bunch of winning ones that fell off of a truck. Thanks for the first-hand industry info.
If it's effective, all that tracking and auditing can't be cheap. The lotto gets to pay for it with ticket sales... I don't expect folks would tolerate paying for that [0] for this "I'm an adult" token-distribution system.
[0] ...whether that payment is paid by the token purchaser or by the taxpayers, generally...
The scan at the time of purchase is just for tracking what the store owes to the state for the lottery system. The last ticket in each roll of tickets is scanned by the dedicated lottery terminal prior to being placed for sale in an admin mode activation function. The terminals themselves I am familiar with are Linux-based and seem to be thin clients which do everything remotely in real-time, because nothing works if the terminal is offline, from activation to redemption of tickets to win/loss checking. The terminal has its own dedicated wired Ethernet connection to a stand-alone Cradlepoint or other competitor brand cellular modem/router, which along with the terminal is all outsourced to a third party management company. (SGI is the only one I’m familiar with; there are likely others.) All of this is public info which could be gleaned from observing the terminals and their installation/operation, but I probably can’t say much more about them, but they are pretty neat and seem to work fairly reliably.
Now that you mention the auditing etc, a lottery system would probably be an easy way to get people to literally buy into an online ID scheme, not because it would necessarily be privacy-preserving, which would depend on implementation details, but because a not insignificant number of folks seem to like the chance to win money. Considering many states already have lottery systems, the ID code tickets could probably be provided alongside lottery tickets for free or nearly free, and employees already have the training to check/scan IDs. If there was an incentive such as the possibility to get discounts, win prizes, or tie-in purchases of some kind, I think it could work.
Many stores that sell lottery tickets also sell gift cards, so that technology could also be used instead or in addition to ID tokens at the point of sale. There are a lot of sponsorship opportunities available for cross-promotion.
“Please drink a verification can” was probably more prescient than was at first apparent. Mike Judge saw this whole thing coming from a mile away.
You can also just follow people around and look in their windows. Nothing prevents that other than laws and rules and social norms.
> In the real world, the system you propose absolutely will not function to the standards required by the people agitating for these systems. You can't "protect the children" if "children" can easily get their hands on anonymous access-granting tokens.
What stops children from paying someone to buy beer and cigs for them? What's the difference between age-controlled liquor and an age-controlled token falling off the back of a truck?
You can introduce as many soft-verification systems as you want to tweak this. The roll of numbers doesn't become active unless installed in a dispenser that phones home when it is installed, for example. The empty bobbins containing the roll have to be returned to the oracle, and need to register installation in a dispenser. The dispenser can even count each dispensed ticket. The only requirement is that the sale and the process of paying for the sale isn't linked to the ticket. If you maintain that, the system is anonymous. If you break it, it's not.
> What stops children from paying someone to buy beer and cigs for them?
I preempted this line of questioning. I'll quote the section for you:
What you propose doesn't make stores any money, so either you have to spend a bunch of money to induce them to carry the tokens [1], or you have to have harsh penalties for "losing" shipments of tokens. If you risk harsh penalties for choosing to sell the tokens, why even bother? Stores put up with the risk of selling booze because it's *quite* profitable... selling 5c or 0c tokens absolutely is not.
[1] Where does that money come from? From you and me, of course!
No business is going to risk any part of their business by selling seriously-age-restricted goods that they get essentially no profit from. In order to get a business to deal in them, either they will give zero shits about who gets the tokens (because there's no penalty for not caring), or they will get paid a lot of taxpayer money in order to make up for the state-imposed loss when they inevitably give some to under-eighteens. [0]
> The only requirement is that the sale and the process of paying for the sale isn't linked to the ticket.
Unless you make it turbo-illegal to link those pieces of information (even weakly), then those two pieces of information will be linked lickety-split. As aspenmaver mentions, lotto tickets are activated at time of sale by phoning home to -I assume- the issuer of the ticket, providing a ready-made mechanism to correlate which tickets are sold to which person. When the people who are crying to protect the under-eighteen from the "evils" of computing notice that under-eighteens are -shock! outrage!- still exposed to that "evil" despite this token-distribution scheme, they will demand any such laws be weakened or eliminated.
[0] ...or fail to strictly follow all of the regs when giving one to a "Token Commission" officer doing an undercover buy, as absolutely happens with alcohol sales...
You go to the store. You give the clerk many quarters, and get the maximum number of tickets. You go online and sell the lot, perhaps for $20. Since the system preserves privacy, doing this carries no risk for you.
Eventually this becomes common knowledge and "something must be done". Facebook (the corpo sponsoring these age verification laws to absolve their own liability) and their ilk decide that the token system no longer meaningfully proves age. They switch to demanding full government ID in cleartext, as there is still no comprehensive privacy law that would prevent such a thing.
Every single approach that puts the onus on the company to verify age falls apart this way, possibly including a de facto mandate for remote attestation (ie say good bye to libre operating systems and browsers that aren't MSIE, Safari, or Chrome). The only workable systems are ones in which the onus remains on parents giving their kids networked computing devices to enable parental controls and/or otherwise monitor their kids' usage, with those parental controls based on information flowing strictly from the website to the user agent (eg a content tag that asserts "this page is suitable for kids").
(and I say this as a parent who is staring down having to deal with this problem in a short year or two)
> 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.
I’ve sold lottery tickets, and you have to be legal age to both buy and redeem them, so I’m not sure that this analogy or hypothetical solution is comparable to lottery tickets, nor is it likely to be the panacea you think it is.
I don’t think that the nascent online age verification schemes are good for society in general, either, but that’s not really the point you were making in your comment, so I don’t assume that you believe they’re good or bad, but simply advocating for a more privacy-preserving implementation. Which is kind of the whole point of the argument against bad implementations, but those who mandate and implement the systems likely view uniquely identifying people as a boon, whereas you and I probably don’t, which is why I am not hopeful that your ticket system will be used, because it will be higher friction for more people than uploading scans of their IDs and/or their face.
The ticket system, if implemented, would be used by so few people that the folks who do could likely be re-identified by Bluetooth tracking beacons and facial recognition in the same stores which they bought the ID tickets you suggest, and so I think the number of people who would escape tracking by any such means to be so few as to be a rounding error.
Those folks who do pursue this privacy hobby/fetish are statistically likely to ultimately mess up on their opsec eventually on a long enough timeline, so it’s hard to even imagine a scenario in which it matters either way what individual privacy activists do or don’t do from the point of view of the panopticon designers or implementers. Those not identified to a desired confidence interval by the mass surveillance system will just be retargeted for more sophisticated surveillance measures.
Despite how we rage, we’re still just rats in a cage.
More and more, the privacy debate feels like a quixotic struggle against giants, when everyone already knows that those giants are actually windmills; the majority of society now lives on reclaimed lands which rely on those windmills’ continued existence, and so no one cares about privacy in the way that you or I might care, because they are incapable of perceiving windmills as giants, nor do they have the intellectual or philosophical or political beliefs which would allow them to even entertain such perceptions even for the purposes of discussion. The privacy debate is beyond their ken.
>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?
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.
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.
> 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.)
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
By some stroke of luck, the NZ government recently put into place a robust privacy-preserving framework for digital identity [1].
They just launched the GOVT.NZ [2] app, and it contains a wallet that can store digital credentials. It's built by a local company called MATTR [3], who specialise in trust technology and exotic cryptography like zero-knowledge proofs. The first credential available this year will be a mobile drivers license, and we'll then be able to prove things about ourselves like whether or not we're over 18 (according to an accredited institution), completely privately over the internet and without sharing any other information.
I'm cautiously optimistic about the direction our digital ecosystem is heading in NZ :')
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.
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.
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.
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.
So....what exactly would platform detection mechanisms be basing their decisions off of that wouldn't defeat the entire privacy-preserving premise of ZKP?
Wait - so you're advocating for use of a persistent identifier tied to a person? How is that any different than what advertising networks do right now beyond giving them additional guaranteed information of your age bracket?
To clarify - it's not cryptographically necessary to present the same token for each and every transaction and serves to categorically defeat the entire privacy guarantee of ZKP.
It also makes it trivial to associate your ZKP token with your real identity.
at the terminus, yes. there is no other way to avoid the homeless problem you listed. by terminus I am referring to where a central authority vouches for unforgability. this does not mean advertisers will have a token they can use (see remote attestation infrastructure).
> tied to a person
whether or not the terminus can tie a token to a real world identity will depend on how careless the user was and how much collusion there is between the terminus and the services. at the very least it will impose an investigation cost.
contrast this with the situation as it currently is (under ideal assumptions) where a central authority verifies your real identity and issues temporary rate limited tokens which are then saved by each service and can at any time be linked to you whenever the central authority can get the service to disclose the database entry. the nullifier will force the central authority to do an investigation about who the nullifier actually belongs to which may actually fail.
realistically I expect VPNs and Tor to just become more popular in response to such nonsense. I wouldn't be using government issued tokens for anything that isn't trivial to tie to your identity already: such as a personal bank access.
> at the terminus, yes. there is no other way to avoid the homeless problem you listed. by terminus I am referring to where a central authority vouches for unforgability. this does not mean advertisers will have a token they can use (see remote attestation infrastructure).
Where to even begin here....
To generate the token, it needs to be based on specific data. How do you prevent people from generating tokens based on fake data and submitting that to the "terminus" that you mention? We already have cases of people bypassing facial scan liveliness checks for banks using AI-generated footage.
What about validating tokens during the token enrollment process based on your government ID? Though that makes sure that poor or undereducated people who don't have such an ID are locked out of large swaths of Internet services.
Though there's also the matter of it being trivial to generate fake IDs using AI.
If you have no gatekeeping for the token enrollment process, anyone can submit an arbitrary number of new tokens.
And if you do have gatekeeping, you're right back to square one of needing to validate against more than just your age.
After all - the cryptography algorithms will be publicly known. If the only thing ZKP is validating against is age, it won't take long to figure out how to generate identifiers based on fabricated information.
> whether or not the terminus can tie a token to a real world identity will depend on how careless the user was and how much collusion there is between the terminus and the services. at the very least it will impose an investigation cost.
No it won't. A user submits a token to a server. The user also logs in with their e-mail address or phone number. Their email and/or phone number is hashed and it, along with the ZKP token and any additional information the website has on you, will be sent to data brokers.
This is the same as any other bit of information out there that data brokers collect on the internet. They just associate your new info with other info you are required to provide in order to use various services.
This will be automated and will cost next to nothing for data brokers to take advantage of.
> contrast this with the situation as it currently is (under ideal assumptions) where a central authority verifies your real identity and issues temporary rate limited tokens which are then saved by each service and can at any time be linked to you whenever the central authority can get the service to disclose the database entry. the nullifier will force the central authority to do an investigation about who the nullifier actually belongs to which may actually fail.
....what? What investigation by central authorities? You are talking of a system that would constantly mediate permissions for billions upon billions upon billions of devices across dozens of services and accounts per device.
You couldn't hire an army of people large enough to handle this and AI is infamously awful at detecting when a given image has been generated with AI.
> realistically I expect VPNs and Tor to just become more popular in response to such nonsense. I wouldn't be using government issued tokens for anything that isn't trivial to tie to your identity already: such as a personal bank access.
Their popularity would only rise in order to VPN into jurisdictions that don't enforce this. Assuming major websites don't just mandate age/identity verification for all new users regardless of jurisdiction just because it's easier and cheaper to apply one system to everyone.
Look - I know you mean well, but it is clear from this discussion you aren't familiar with cryptography, system security guarantees, Internet infrastructure scaling, or what would be needed to introduce new descriptive information about a person on the Internet and not have it become a new privacy risk.
This is an issue that has no tech-only solution. The specifics aren't just something to just figure out at a later date - the specifics are everything. And it's something that is enormously difficult to get right and extremely easy to get very, very wrong.
> Look - I know you mean well, but it is clear from this discussion you aren't familiar with cryptography, system security guarantees, Internet infrastructure scaling, or what would be needed to introduce new descriptive information about a person on the Internet and not have it become a new privacy risk.
it's actually clear that you are the one who isn't familiar with this, I referenced remote attestation which you appear to know little about as it addresses the problem of identifying information (the service has no way to link tokens across without help from the CA).
you also don't appear to know what a nullifier is, in a ZKP system you submit identifying information and a hash of a secret string. the CA adds the hash to a public database and in the future you prove you one of the members of the database with a nullifier - the anonymity-set is everyone in the database who entered it prior to your submission. this can also be done with a blind signature to the same effect.
> it's actually clear that you are the one who isn't familiar with this, I referenced remote attestation which you appear to know little about as it addresses the problem of identifying information (the service has no way to link tokens across without help from the CA).
You've promoted mutually exclusive concepts with regards to cryptography which is why I said you don't seem to understand it. And again - and again and again and again and again and again - what is the additional information you are authenticating based off of beyond age? Remote attestation provides absolutely zero privacy utility here whatsoever on its own! So you've remotely attested this ZKP key represents a person who is an adult. Creating another key based on that information alone is trivial to spoof - for it not to be trivial, it would require validating additional information!
What is your root of trust? What is the basis by which age is verified in a way that can't readily be spoofed?
> you also don't appear to know what a nullifier is, in a ZKP system you submit identifying information and a hash of a secret string. the CA adds the hash to a public database and in the future you prove you one of the members of the database with a nullifier - the anonymity-set is everyone in the database who entered it prior to your submission. this can also be done with a blind signature to the same effect.
That's nice and all for trivia on ZKP but how does that touch upon the problem being discussed?
The mechanics of ZKP are not relevant to the problem of ZKP being categorically worthless for the problem at hand. I don't say ZKP is worthless out of ignorance - more discussions about it won't change that.
The specifics of ZKP do not change the fact that you are validating either too little information to be useful for preventing fraud or too much to have privacy-preserving value.
> there is no further point to this discussion.
Evidently not.
We can't solve private age verification with blockchain tech. I'm happy you're so passionate about it, but it isn't a silver bullet.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
> You’re not happy about it, but you hand over a photo of your passport and hope it doesn’t come back to haunt you.
I think for this argument to carry weight with voters, privacy advocates need to be much more specific about what "coming back to haunt you" looks like. They do a little bit of it later on[1], but I think most people do a rough cost benefit in their head and decide that the small benefit outweighs the small risk (to them).
[1] "And that creates a lot of risks for data breaches, overly broad data collection and retention, censorial legal demands for collected data, corporate and governmental malfeasance, pressure to self-censor, and perhaps blatant First Amendment violations. Every new layer and every new mandate brings more potential for risk. As we’ve unfortunately seen many times over the years, people including high-level government officials will maliciously seek to root out the identities of their critics, so the more layers of anonymity we can preserve in online speech, the better."
I'm starting to think we need to lean on conspiracy theories in order to get broader population on train with this - and I'm saying this in utmost regret. That's a borrowing game from a right wing/extremist playbook.
Start with this: requiring IDs online is a first step in micro-chipping the population.
...or how about this: marxists/atifa/nazis/zionists/islamist/whoever-group-people-think-is-in-power want to erode your privacy online so it can be used against you. Some nefarious group what to know your every move!
...or how about this: remember Epstein files!? Well the pedos now want to id your children online!
I simply saying truth/evidence/rational based approach to this will not get people attention. People just don't care.
Just say that the government will control every single device that's controlled to the Internet and they can add government viruses that you can't remove and they can remotely control all of your devices and brick them if you try to send anything that the government doesn't like.
That's not even an exaggeration, once they enforce OS-level age verification via remote attestation they don't even have to pass a law to do this, they can send a secret order to Big Tech to do this.
I think both political extremes have their own angles: liberals might be concerned that conservative censors will censor kids from learning about LGBT people and minorities, conservatives will be concerned that liberals will force too much LGBT and minority content onto kids. Or whatever issue, they want to control what your kids read!
This will almost certainly be used to censor adults too, the only reason we aren’t doing that is because it hasn’t been possible to consistently identify people before. Considering who is pushing for this, they’re absolutely going to tie this into advertising, and if they know who you are so do all of the spooky upper echelons who could implement a true censorship regime.
“The only way they can do this is by controlling what you read, shouldn’t that be the parent’s choice?”
It's been decades since the very phrase "conspiracy theory" was introduced as a means to convert looking closer into something cringe. The normie position on most things is to accept something as no problem unless the mainstream designates it as such aliens), or it blows up enough that even unmotivated normies can't help but take notice (rich new york caribbean islanders). Privacy got close to that with Snowden, but it fizzled into apathy for most because imo there was no clear harm to present, it was perceived as abstract.
To me the connotation is that it's always an unreasonable theory, such as one that requires thousands of people to maintain nearly perfect secrecy for an indefinite period, with no mistakes and dedication even when they'd benefit from blabbing.
In contrast, imagine a 2-person conspiracy where both have lifelong reasons to keep it secret. Yeah, I could have a theory about that conspiracy existing, but it wouldn't be, y'know, a conspiracy theory in the usual sense.
> I'm starting to think we need to lean on conspiracy theories in order to get broader population on train with this - and I'm saying this in utmost regret. That's a borrowing game from a right wing/extremist playbook.
How about "if you want to buy a dildo on aliexpress, you have to do a full scan of your face and send it to israelis"?
I mean.. au10tix does age verification for aliexpress, it is an israeli firm, and you can't even buy a scalpel (the DIY crafts one) without having to scan your face there due to EU regulation.
Assuming no revolutionary changes are coming to the USA, I am planning to opt out of the digital world when I retire. Physical media only. No subscriptions. Spend lots of time in the library. Find like-minded people and meet in person. Will only keep the bare minimum for survival, like banking.
You don't need to make libraries illegal to get rid of them, you just need to undermine their value and they'll be defunded and disappear. No passing laws necessary, just pubic ambivalence.
I have been slowly moving towards that for a decade or two now. I still do some internet stuff (mostly here) but it is greatly diminished. The rest is just at work.
I appreciate the wealth of technical solutions that don't violate privacy, but isn't this overlooking an important point: that children don't need to be connected to the Internet at all times from such an early age? Many internet and cell phone providers seem to take it for granted that children must be online, which is already a net loss for their privacy as they mature.
I agree, I think kids should have limited access to the internet. I pretty much did and it worked out for me but I have seen so many reports about it causing harm in schools and personal life. (Specifically I think LLMs should not be used in education also, but different point) However, I think the main problem people have with this "think of the children" narrative is that it will force EVERYONE to give up their credentials to access the internet, not just kids. And the general consensus is that we as adults do not want to and should not have to prove our identity to access the internet.
I am wholeheartedly against identity verification, especially when it comes to giving up privacy. And I hope these "think of the children" arguments can be pushed back at from multiple angles. If the danger is real, then by the time a child is online, 4 out of 5 in them in Australia can apparently access social media anyway. So even if everyone's privacy was somehow an acceptable price to pay, these requirements do nothing.
Lol yeah exactly, if kids want to go on social media they will 100% find a way around it.... putting in these identity requirements will literally do nothing except require us as adults to give over more information. I'm sure everything will pass through congress fine though because "someone think of the children!!!!".
Should it also be their decision that they can gamble? Smoke cigarettes? Get a job? Have sex?
We draw the line somewhere because these things that "are the parents' decision" have consequences on broader society. They have consequences that impact you and me. And we also have a say.
You can make the argument that it's just the parents' decision. But you have to say why.
> Should it also be their decision that they can gamble? Smoke cigarettes? Get a job? Have sex?
Not on the first 2 because they're illegal for minors. Yes on the last 2. A parent can e.g. forbid their minor from being employed if it's hindering their studies. They also have a say on their romantic partner and how they interact. If rules are not followed, they can e.g. be grounded.
This isn’t about children, mate. It’s about controlling the population’s access to content.
The children are fine. Many countries no longer allow smartphones at school, which lowers the peer-pressure factor to be online.
Parents are doing their best to steer kids. But these pesky adults, goshdarnit, they access whatever content they want without approval from The State, potentially reading dissident materials, borrowing 1984 from libraries… politicians don’t like that.
Renting and work already require ID in the UK. Every landlord and employer is supposed to take a copy of original documents proving the right to rent/work in the UK. Technically you can do that without handing the docs to the government, but there's less potential liability to do so via the Home Office website.
You miss the point - they are stitching it all together in a way that deanonymize you to your ISP under the guise of save the kids and then convenience
I’m glad this is finally becoming the cause célèbre du jour. This feels like THE FIGHT or at least one of the TOP 3 THE FIGHTS and it hasn’t had even a fraction of the public’s attention until now.
>I’m glad this is finally becoming the cause célèbre du jour.
It really isn't, though. Don't mistake the internet for reality. The majority of people in the US and Europe support laws like these, and most of the rest don't care.
Even on Hacker News the consensus is mostly in favor of anything from age restriction to making all social media illegal.
The main issue is that they are very careful not to frame it like that. In broader contexts, it's always framed as something like "do you favor limiting children's access to social media" without a word on what it would cost to actually institute such a ban.
You can end all wars and eliminate hunger if you point the Death Star at us and kill all life on earth. If someone objects to the collateral damage, remind him that when you said "world peace and no hunger at all costs," you meant all costs.
> if anything we are seeing what a good idea taking kids off social media is and how crazy we allowed this to all happen for so long
We're not seeing anything of the sort, and couldn't possibly for some time yet.
What we are seeing, as evinced by the article, is how ineffective these laws are at actually keeping kids off social media, and how effective the mass collection of identity data is at creating an environment for scammers, hackers, data brokers and the means for widespread political oppression.
You don't necessarily have to be in favor of any measures which reduce adult privacy to be in favor of that. Logically speaking, the liability for minors accessing age-gated products and services is the person who provides those products and services to the minor. In the case of the internet, that person is the parent, not the ISP or the website. It is the parent who contracts with the provider and then forwards the product to the unauthorized user, the child. A parent who purchases, say, access to porn and then provides that access to their child is no different than a parent who buys booze and provides access to it to their child.
Exactly. You frame these things in the general case and HN is against it because obviously it's evil.
You frame it as "we've come up with a composite score (social credit) that lets us more efficiently enforce [stuff HN likes but the population likes way less]" and it's mostly all cheering and the one guy with principals is downvoted and flagged.
Do you think that this will lead to a new version of a alternative "internet" where people try to avoid the government control? And is that even possible? Or will we all just comply?
only for a short while longer. US, EU, China, and Russia are all on the same page about you-vill-ovn-nothing-und-you-vill-be-happy kind of future, and they will bully the rest of the world into compliance.
Only if it can be turned into gray market business: additional layers of proxies and VPNs, and whatever new is invented.
As simple "I care about privacy" need is not a reason to bother with setup for a regular person. So it could work only if it's as easy, as current internet. And for profit businesses provide it.
As for another protocol all together: there are some experiments already, but again, why use those?
This could be good to make the lack of privacy online more explicit to users, and actually cause people to be more cautious online, which all the snowden revelations failed to do. If we start using the internet the same way we use government websites, log in, do the thing, log out.
I feel we are still living in this bubble that treats the internet as some sort of utopian democratic institution. For certain people with strong mental gating it can be the case. But I'd say it's a massive projection from intelligent technologists on the rest of humanity. Most people really need some guardrails to avoid becoming hopelessly addicted to the worst material.
I hope this creates pressure for new technologies and media that answer some of the problems of communication which the internet couldn't. I guess people will find new bubbles of anonymity like Signal/Whatsapp groups to get information and discuss. Hopefully which reward some degree of contribution and proper thinking. Revive the genuine social sphere rather than tuning into the corporate filtered simulacrum of a town square. The truth I've seen is that the current internet is pure poison to most minds, and anonymity is just one less bit of friction to mindlessness.
No, it won’t. The internet is just getting smaller from my perspective because there’s no way I’m handing over my identification and allowing every connection made to a server to be tracked back to me.
It’s simply not on the cards, and I live a frugal enough life in a high paying industry that I can retire in a few years. If I was willing to bank on inheritance then I could retire now.
I feel for the people that are forced to engage though. But too many of them simply don’t care about privacy, which is why we’re here.
> you’re criticizing a powerful politician, or talking about your experiences with abuse or addiction, or discussing embarrassing medical issues you’re facing
This is not the problem. Even if, like millions, you are not talking about these things online, these systems still place you in danger. Even if you are a perfect, clean, compliant citizen these privacy-destroying systems place you in danger.
Fundamentally these systems expose you to coercion, extortion, blackmail, ID theft, etc. by criminals and immoral people who want money or power over you. There are countless examples of bad actors inside and outside these systems obtaining access to innocent people's private data and misusing it to their detriment.
This is the strongest argument against these bad ideas. Arguments that paint innocent, privacy-seeking people as suspicious or immoral in any way, should not be used.
It is rational and moral to seek privacy for your own safety and the safety of those you care for. Don't let them argue otherwise.
Sadly your take doesn’t matter since the other voting bloc is parents and people concerned about their kids.
I wish this resulted in techies spending more time to look at the substance of the harms playing out, however I see denial of the situation altogether more than anything else.
This seems more like a technical problem that we could actually solve well if we wanted to and had competent people advising the governments. You go to DMV and they generate a keypair and an entry in a DB. App looks up your age with your public key + signed private key authorization from you. Apps can ask for specific checks like is_over_21, is_citizen or whatever without any more data. Something like that, details are probably off ;) The whole infrastructure could be open source. Age verification doesn't need to equal identity verification by a 3rd party company that will leak your IDs.
None of this is necessary. First, the only devices that actually need to be gated are cell phones.
The user agent should simply send the user’s age of the parental lock is set up and the websites required to respect this.
Parental controls and the OS should be robust enough to not let kids bypass it (e.g.: by installing a browser that skips the header, or blocking proxy websites)
Done.
Cellphones only because those are the devices kids can have on them all the time and can easily use in private unsupervised.
They want it to equal identity verification! When virtually every top tech executive who wants a favor is at the inauguration and you have companies doing 180 degrees on support for something they previously furiously opposed, someone is getting something they wanted. It seems naive to think otherwise. Furthermore, the current administration in the U.S. fired or ignored the competent people to which you’re referring, and those people oppose a centralized repository of various metadata because it creates a central point of failure, otherwise known as a target, that is generally a bad idea for both our nation and our citizens. Of course there are agencies in the federal government that possess this information already, but they possess it for their purposes only. This is good because it means that it’s both more difficult to abuse internally in addition to being more cumbersome to collect externally.
There's still a whole DB matching IDs to keys waiting to be leaked. The US government can't even keep it's own personnel records safe and you think this won't get stolen and used to target people?
This still criminalizes sharing "adult" information with people who are not on the government's approved list (the things states do to crush dissent are not safe for children.)
why would any site on the internet need to give a damn about is_citizen? That's just gross to me at the mere suggestion. If it's a government service site, then they already know that information. If you're trying to use something like social media, then it couldn't possibly matter less.
There will be your internet-connected computer which will be assumed to be compromised, & which little, if anything of use will be kept on, & then there will be the airgapped system you do work on, which will probably be the last trusted version of a Linux distro you have multiple copies stashed away of. It will be a very old-fashioned experience, & moving/sharing data will become a dicey business.
How is hitting the library an act of rebellious defiance? Getting a library card requires an ID and proof of address. The library then tracks which books you've signed out. Unless you're reading the books inside the library without signing them out.
My library, at least, is fanatical about their patron's privacy.
I don't know what their retention time is on circulation records, but beyond aggregate statistics for culling materials that aren't circulating I bet it isn't too long. Now I want to go check.
My library also only keeps 24 hours of video surveillance because they didn't want to be able to fulfill requests from the cops for footage of patrons. I really liked that.
Edit: In the patron portal it permits me to disable "borrowing history" and says it permanently deletes my records. I do contract IT work for them so next time I'm engaged I'll ask about the details. They're moving to Koha later this year (free / open-source ILS) so I could go look at the code to see what it does (which is nice).
On the theme of their privacy fanaticism:
Over a decade ago the library got a grant to do outdoor public WiFi in the park behind their building. As part of that grant they needed to report the number of distinct users using the WiFi each day. Their UniFi controller tracks MAC addresses of associated stations. I used a query against the underlying MongoDB to get the usage reports to satisfy the grant.
To minimize the potential of tracking individual users the library director had me write a script to grovel thru MongoDB, do a SHA-1 hash of each public MAC address tracked concatenated with a randomly-generated salt for that day, then write back the first 48 bits of the hash over the original MAC. The library gets their daily statistics and long-term traffic trend data, they don't double-count associations for the same device in the same day, but they can't track individual people over a span of multiple days.
Now that devices randomly-generating MACs are mainstream it's much less necessary. I thought it was really cool she thought this. (The whole salting/hashing bit was my idea. She just wanted to be able to fulfill the grant reporting requirements amd be unable to track people.)
A library is supported by local property taxes, so requiring proof of residence serves a practical purpose. Of course they are going to track loaned books too. This is not the same thing, by any stretch. If they are somehow making that information available beyond the scope of the library system it is a breach of trust.
Certainly, but I think you need to have a library card to use the computers.
I do see folks who look homeless using the computers, so I assume there must be a special accommodation for them.
But, if you’re just a regular middle class joe looking for anonymity on the internet, I don’t think the library is the place for you—it’s tied to your library card which knows your address, and anyway what would you want to be private that you would be ok to broadcast in an open library setting? Nobody watching corn or browsing whatever successor to Silk Road.
Usually the login screen says something about fairly restrictive terms of use, even for the WiFi on a personal device, and I don’t know if you can install software on the library computers.
When I look around at library patrons using the computers, it’s usually lower income folks applying to jobs or similar, and people playing chess.
You can. You just have to ignore all the privileged people being annoyed that they have to see you. They love posting on Nextdoor about how much they hate homeless people.
The anti-authoritarian, anti-government, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist music genre punk rock? Always right wing?
I mean, Nazis have always been attracted to punk because they like the loud noise but are too stupid to understand lyrics, but they tend to get their shit kicked in by punks more often than not. I don't think that's the same thing.
The internet is not free. We've been running out of IP addresses for ages and most people don't have direct internet access these days so are completely dependent on man-in-the-middle servers. All it would take is a broad ban on VPN and end-to-end encryption. Governments have been wanting to ban strong encryption ever since the public got access to it in the 90s (see PGP/Zimmermann).
Privacy or accountability, pick one. Everyone holds your identity or pointers to it. They - pinky promise - won’t weaponize it until it becomes advantageous or ordered by the government.
In the end someone has to be held accountable. Society does not work without accountability and never has. We were living in temporary illusory world made by nerds. Now the rest joins in.
I think it was Ethan Zuckerman who once said that Congress is ill-equipped and incompetent to solve this kind of problem and that we need to design systems that guarantee outcomes and cites Signal as an example. We need to have that mindset now: a clarion call to software engineers.
I can’t think of a better solution to the issue of children being so aggressively harmed by the internet. That doesn’t remove any of the problems associated with this.
It’s not just kids. Adults are having their brains fried on AI generated political videos online right now. The state of the internet is an absolute disaster.
The thing is, those dealers can end up in jail for selling drugs.
More to the point, if a kid walked into a convenience store and the clerk sold them a pack of cigarettes, the clerk wouldn't get off the hook by claiming, "well, the parents are responsible for their kids." I'm also not sure how one would justify holding parents legally liable for crimes they played no role in committing.
I'm not saying that I agree with these laws. They appear to be taking things too far. But that has more to do with there being no clear way to define sites that are only of interest to adults (no gatekeeping needed) and sites that should be restricted to adults.
Once upon a time they idea that Americans would surrender all of their God Given rights for an illusion of security was considered absurd, but that's where we're at.
I'm glad computers came in and saved you from your otherwise-inevitable life of cartel involvement, but I don't see what this has to do with the en-masse mental poisoning of children? I'm not even talking about politics yet. Cyber-bullying is insane.
Either way, I genuinely don't believe "let's just hope parents... start doing better?" is a solution.
>What happens when parents don’t lock the liquor cabinet? When they smoke in front of their kids? When they leave porn laying on the table?
The state can't control those things, it can control putting an age restriction on certain websites. Unless you are advocating for the complete abolition of all age restrictions throughout society.
My parents always kept a few bottles of wine in a cabinet in the living room. If 8 year old me wanted wine, I could have drunk a whole bottle while they were away and there was no way they could have stopped me. Yet I didn't drink my parents' wine, nor did I grow up alcoholic.
Kudos for resisting alcohol as an eight year old. How does that apply to all the kiddos whose lives are impacted by social media? Kind of a "them problem"?
How is it more like leaving a liquor cabinet open than not buckling them up with seatbelts?
I'm glad we're discussing parental liability. It seems no one else is advocating for "social media access is criminal neglect," so I appreciate the novelty.
I would love to have this be the argument. Parents would typically agree that giving your kids heroin, for instance, should result in prison time. Yet I doubt they would argue the same for social media! Perhaps there should be discussions about what neglect looks like with regards to internet access and whether or not we need societal boundaries around this, enforced via punishing parents, rather than punishing everyone.
Giving children access to social media should have the same parental neglect charges as giving them heroin.
The current strategy of yelling "parent's should parent" does nothing to influence any sort of result. It's simply ineffective and makes people who say it look like slogan slingers rather than cooperating in any meaningful change.
I'm pretty sure this is a "pick your poison" problem. We as a society are damned no matter what we do or do not do. For my part, we need to do something, because things are not fine the way they are, including the half ass Australian solution. We can't keep putting the onus on private enterprise to address social issues.
I may sound crazy for saying so, but I think the answer is more government run infrastructure for enabling identity-based operations, like payments and authentication, with rules about standards, open source, contractor selection, and audit that make operation transparent. It can work if technical operations are legislated instead of "left for the engineers to figure out." Then at least the evolution of systems can become real political issues that map to election cycles.
My stance is probably a polarizing one, but this is precisely why we need to be able to debate the minutae of these systems through our political discourse instead of just "will we; won't we" legislation. This should be debated in democratic process.
We could try investing in positive infrastructure that improves peoples life's in stead of creating the panopticon torment nexus. Things like third spaces where people can spend time is save spaces where they form communities and public transit so that people can get to those places. Incentivize positive behaviors instead of closing off public spaces and pricing more and more people out of being able to do anything with the minuscule amount of free time they have besides going on the internet.
I think the lie is to look at the problems we have that the internet has enabled and say "things are ok as they are don't try to do anything to solve it."
If the problem is "social media bad for kids" then any parent that allows their children to access social media is as guilty of abuse or neglect as a parent that lets them play in traffic. Throw the parents in prison and put the kids in foster care. Problem solved.
That is a bold statement to make, and I wonder how many more people would be willing to make the same statement whenever these conversations come up on HN.
How is it any different from being required to identify yourself to get a phone or electricity account? Identifying yourself on the internet is long overdue.
You need to identify yourself to the phone and electricity utilities so they know where to send your monthly bill. My ISP knows my name because I pay them for connectivity. I am okay with this.
If I misbehave here, dang can just ban me. There's no reason HN needs to know my real name. The only reason to mandate blanket age and identity verification is to control online speech.
You aren't required to identify yourself to get a phone. You can get a prepaid phone with no ID.
You are required to identify yourself for an electricity account because it is essentially extending you credit. You use the electricity first, and then they bill you for it later. They also only identify the person who is receiving the bill. You could have a house with a dozen people in it but the electric company only knows the name of the person responsible for the bill.
You are free to identify yourself on the internet right now. People who are intelligent and/or believe in freedom and free speech are opposed to this authoritarian power grab.
> You aren't required to identify yourself to get a phone. You can get a prepaid phone with no ID.
Requiring ID to buy a prepaid SIM card has become the norm across the developed world. There are still a few holdout countries, but they won’t hold out for long.
I hold an unpopular opinion here, but well regulated digital IDs might not be a benefit to us all.
Almost all big tech giants are frankly paper tigers (can I survive without facebook, sure, without next day delivery, harder, without banking or secure ways to talk to my utility providers, waaay harder.
Having a way to get rid of bots that sour our
Online discussions, lovely. To reduce billion in bank fraud, sounds great.
I feel as privacy advocates we need to be clear on the difference between secrecy (that’s gone unless you stay offline.) and privacy (your neighbour knows you are having sex in the afternoons but does not say anything.
This was in part caused by the general public’s comfort with federated identity for OAuth. If everyone already has one anyway (the thinking may go), why not mandate it?
The discussion is not about whether it's a good or bad idea, but whether we will yield the power to these people to ratchet in further oppressive laws onto formerly free countries.
Tech companies should ignore it and just publicly name whoever attempts to prosecute them and see how the population responds. I think people today are orders of magnitude more informed about their privacy and the consequences of digital ID laws. A few countries are on the edge of revolt at the moment anyway, and this would be a good way to get young people into the streets.
20 years ago, people would have had no defense against it or understanding of what was being imposed on them. Today, normal people use Signal and encrypted messengers, faraday bags, and leave their phones at home. Where we were nerdy security guys back then, non-technologist women and girls use spy tradecraft level electronic opsec for their own safety and security from middle school. People are much more sophisticated about their privacy now. They're ready to take this on.
The laws coming into force are on people who are not in favour of them, and I'm so optimistic that I will not interrupt the enemies of privacy and human dignity while they are making a mistake.
The internet is dieing just like mobile phones before that. Correction: mobiles were stillborn due to no open standards or O/S. Cant even buy a modern TV without privacy concerns -- lel.
So everyone is on the same page on this issue. The First Amendment is the right to anonymous free speech. I doubt they teach it in the govt schools but the Federalist papers, which argued for the US Constitution, was published anonymously.
I'm not sure "social media" is the best example. You've never had complete freedom of speech on there.
It's been true for decades in the USA that if they want to arrest you, they will. The age verification doesn't make this situation better, but at this point it's almost just a formality.
Freedom of speech is contextually misunderstood. It's about political speech and the commons. Social Media is overwhelmingly private space, subject to contract terms and conditions. It may be a de-facto commons to some people but I do not believe this axiomatically, or legally makes it so, for the purposes of law and constitution. Law and constitutional bounds on speech online hit the international nature of the media very quickly.
Extra-territorial issue are huge here. What is the limit of the boundary on a given nations constitution and law? How much does the economy of the user, the hosting company, the owning company, the receiving parties matter?
Social Media has advertising and publishers. It has people who can effect editorial control over what is seen and by who and to who it is "said" -And that imposes obligations on them, and on people lodging content. Differentially depending on their economy, the reach of law, registration of legally incorporated entities.
All of this is being implemented somewhat haphazardly internationally, enforced differently, subject to legal and financial and social pressures differently depending on the times and the context.
If you want to ask questions about America, about Americans, using American companies, speaking to Americans, believe me you don't neccessarily have a simpler task here. It may well be clearer to some of you, but to me, its just as fraught.
It's just not clear to me "free speech" is the bastion rule which applies here. The EFF may think so, I don't think they have actually demonstrated it all the way to the end.
All I can say is I will never vote for any politician who votes for any form of this. Even if the bill fails to pass, they will never, ever get my vote.
Singing: nobody wants this everybody hates you! Governments burning their capital hard to try to prove what tough guys they are against the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.
The internet will just stop being the "cool place". Young people will need to find some other avenue or medium to congregate away from their nannies' watchful eyes. That has been the one constant across the multiple technological revolutions we've had in the last few decades, younger generations looking for a place to call their own. Meta, etc. obviously know this, hence the "metaverse" and AI slop. But what they refuse to believe is that it can't be manufactured and forced top-down, it needs to be bottom-up.
My privacy is already decimated. For 2 decades we’ve already known about the NSA slurping up everything[1] on top of the Snowden leaks.
Then you have the mega corps like Facebook who can figure out every detail about you even from merely _not_ using their system because of the hole you leave in your social network that does use them.
The only privacy left is from anonymous troll farms claiming to be an American while talking about how the Texas oblast is valuable for its warm water ports.
I am fine for privacy on consumption of content, but you should be forced to identify yourself for posting so the common man at least has a chance to evaluate your statements instead of being misled, all while, as stated above, our governments and corporations don’t have that limitation.
> ...you should be forced to identify yourself for posting...
The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the right to anonymous speech is inherent in the first amendment [1] [2]. See also The Federalist Papers or Common Sense, without which the US might not exist at all.
That’s pre the ability for foreign actors to engage in our public square en masse. I think technology has changed the situation.
Free speech absolutism that ends up in creating an environment where real speech is drowned out by lies is not valuable to me. It’s like the paradox of tolerance.
The first amendment doesn't have a clause that exempts Americans from anonymous speech if it's possible a foreigner could inadvertently take advantage of the freedom too.
You may as well advocate for no one to be allowed to drive cars because of the possibility of someone getting into a car accident.
Or (in case you're a fan of the second amendment) - advocate for guns not being allowed to be sold to law-abiding citizens because of the possibility of the gun later working its way into the hands of someone who would use it for a mass shooting.
Freedoms exist with the understanding that both positive and negative consequences can result from them. The argument is that the good vastly out-weighs the bad and are worth preserving.
> The first amendment doesn't have a clause that exempts Americans from anonymous speech if it's possible a foreigner could inadvertently take advantage of the freedom too.
Cool, ignore my point about technology changing the situation. I assume you’ll ignore Jefferson talking about how the constitution should be changed every 19-20 years because the world changed.
> You may as well advocate for no one to be allowed to drive cars because of the possibility of someone getting into a car accident.
That’s the literal reality with mandated car insurance. If you don’t have car insurance you can be banned from driving. What was your point here?
> Or (in case you're a fan of the second amendment) - advocate for guns not being allowed to be sold to law-abiding citizens because of the possibility of the gun later working its way into the hands of someone who would use it for a mass shooting.
I’m not an advocate for the 2nd amendment since the majority of people I’ve met advocating for it as a defense against tyranny are full throated proponents for the tyrannical leaders because they don’t like the cultural norms of anyone outside their tribe. I can’t think of a single 2nd amendment advocate who is ready to stand up to the government against rights violations and would be happy to hear from you of an example.
> Freedoms exist with the understanding that both positive and negative consequences can result from them. The argument is that the good vastly out-weighs the bad and are worth preserving.
Yea, the freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. Freedom of speech to explicitly lie like Steve Bannon organized and many others using the “flood the zone” strategy seems to the be at the end of my nose. If you are actively lying to manipulate me or others knowledge of reality, that is not feee speech, that’s Machiavellian manipulation.
> Cool, ignore my point about technology changing the situation. I assume you’ll ignore Jefferson talking about how the constitution should be changed every 19-20 years because the world changed.
The Constitution doesn't have a "except when technology gets advanced enough" clause either. I checked.
You wanting the Constitution to change is something else entirely - and that's not what you're advocating for.
> That’s the literal reality with mandated car insurance. If you don’t have car insurance you can be banned from driving. What was your point here?
I fail to see what car insurance analogizes to here.
>Yea, the freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. Freedom of speech to explicitly lie like Steve Bannon organized and many others using the “flood the zone” strategy seems to the be at the end of my nose. If you are actively lying to manipulate me or others knowledge of reality, that is not feee speech, that’s Machiavellian manipulation.
Speech is not violence. Comparing it to violence diminishes the suffefing and harm faced by people who have been a victim of violence.
You have the freedom to pay attention to whatever you want to - as do media outlets and political consultants.
Why should the entire country suffer because the media frequented by political-news-saturated people is so easily disatractable? They have the option to just...not...cover irrelevant nonsense.
It's not the option they choose to take though. See: The reflecting pool news cycle.
And I _can_ climb to the top of Mount Everest theoretically but it’s highly unlikely given the real world constraints.
I’d prefer a pragmatic solution and there is no pragmatic solution that gives us privacy back given the government and megacorps ability to pierce the vast majority of forms of privacy. The only thing anonymous speech is getting us currently is being manipulated by bad actors who are lying about their position.
I fundamentally do not want a world where I get the bad ends of both sides of semi anonymous speech where the government and megacorps know everything about me, but I just have to trust the account I am speaking to isn’t a bot or a worker in some foreign psyop shop, or even domestic psyop shop, lying to me.
I do not value free speech if it functionally disabled via the amount of lies permeating it. Free speech is useless if it’s nothing but a sea of “flood the zone” lies with the intent to make the truth unknowable, like how Russia or actors like Steve Bannon have manipulated the public square to be.
So much bad speech / misinformation is not anonymous, look at the kind of stuff the US President, Admin, and Gov't are proud posting, or the left/right-wing influencers. Forcing "papers please" on everyone is not going to meaningfully change the situation (imo). It will give the autocrats an inch and then they will take more. Eventually they will be able to police online speech.
---
From: On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, Chapter 1 title & intro
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
I am not obeying in advance. My privacy was obliterated with the government before I could even vote, with the data science of mega corps, and with the double digit number of times companies leaked my data based on have I been pwned numbers.
I am not under the impression I have any sort of privacy on the internet anymore, other than from other regular civilians.
What I have to deal with is bots, foreign actors, and domestic actors all flooding the zone with lies that I cannot discern from the truth but that companies and the government can.
Making posting a non anonymous activity equalizes the playing field between me and governments/corporations.
If you are arguing that we should keep this thin skin of anonymity that doesn’t stop the bad actors, then I assume you just want them to keep power or that you don’t actually believe that they have managed to track our behavior.
Can you link said research? I have never seen anything but division pushed by anonymity.
Also again, the corporations and governments(for certain levels of government like the members of the Five Eyes) can pierce this veil of anonymity, the people who have a lot to lose already are risking it by speaking.
Edit: this also isn’t a newly diagnosed phenomena, I remember seeing this satirical description of the behavior as a kid back when Web 2.0 and social media was starting to change the internet[1]
> My privacy is already decimated. For 2 decades we’ve already known about the NSA slurping up everything[1] on top of the Snowden leaks.
If you were correct, there would be no need for them to push these new laws. The fact is, you will have less privacy after these identification requirements are fully enforced.
What scary me a lot, is the amount of people here or in real life that are not concerned about that, and that are like "it is to protect the children, so whatever it is, it worth it. And what else we can do?". And often it goes on with things like "anyway, social media are bad, they ruin people even adult, so good thing". Literally they all look like repeating a carefully crafted propaganda without that much more deep thinking.
Basically, to mean it is brain rot. The problem is that it might concern a big part of the population and that is why we have such laws.
To me, it is exactly what was described in G. Orwell "Animal farm" book. Pigs are now in control and big part of the crowd are "sheeps".
Afterward, we always have hard time to understand how people could have let Nazi, Stasi, or Stalin come in power and do such awful things. But it never came in one day, and with the "i don't care, they probably now better" attitude of the current western country populations, you understand easily how all of that could have happened in a first place.
In the recent, and most recent history, let's not forget what happened to Putin's Russia. Russia was opening and on a very good course for individual freedom and rights, then a ex-KGB officer took control of the power and little by little, year after year, suppressed freedom, privacy, and opposition to reach the point of today where the country is a total nightmare for human rights and liberty.
Mate, you have to revise your stance on Russia, more people are imprisoned annually in the UK for speaking than people in Russia in a decade. The UK banned RT while you can access any western propaganda outpost from within Russia.
You’re on Hacker News, this website is known for attracting open minded free thinkers that do not fall under the influence of government financed propaganda. Learn and reassess your thoughts.
Anything to close Pandora's box. "They" liked the eras they could control the communications, and therefore the narrative. Boomers on their last legs, question is, will the future undo the unjustness that was forced upon them? Restore the rungs of the ladders that were removed, so they could have a chance too? Or are they going to stay in the fear narrative, and make this tragedy worse?
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/anonymou...
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.
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.
The tokens could be tied to the device and Apple account by a provider like Apple, in fact you don’t need to issue tokens, only provide a web api that Apple and other browser providers support, which attests age.
This is certainly something that can be solved technically if we want.
It sounds like your scheme would only allow browsing the "adult web" on locked-down, unmodified devices running government-approved software. Frankly, that's worse than even requiring ID.
> They become a traceable identity token
Not if you use a challenge-response protocol where the client returns a zero-knowledge proof of age, where the proof incorporates a random string sent by the website.
The traceable stuff is private information that the website never sees. If a minor is caught with it, then law enforcement has local access to the minor's hardware and can probably view the private data.
At that point, the private key can be put on a public revocation list. The zero-knowledge proof can include a proof that you're not on the revocation list. Once you've been revoked, you have to go through the hassle of setting this all up again, which might be enough incentive to keep it reasonably secure.
This doesn’t stop the scheme the parent proposes, where adults install some proxy on their device and challenges are responded to on the parent device. Then the private key never leaves the parent device and all the child device has is the proxy software, which could be set up to not log any identifier of the key that it used
I agree, but this is also clearly a increased barrier. Going back to OPs comment that perfection is impossible, the goal is to raise the bar, I would say that this is more than good enough.
Trusted computing fixes this.
Trusted computing is the biggest threat to privacy and liberty of them all!
The same way a lobotomy fixes a headache.
How so?
Presumably, if you have a trusted application on a trusted device, the identifier was installed in a trusted way, the device is in trusted possession and the device won't be given to anyone else, trusted computing may be able, in certain cases, to make it more difficult for a remote minor to use the identifier.
Trusted computing fixes this up to the analog hole. Which is as much as you can expect.
We are talking about porn here. And the internet will be always full of it - and that can only be prevented by controlling all of it, or have each state have a golden firewall.
All of these solutions seem very complicated, for little benefit. So a anonymous age verification scheme, fine with me. But making it more complicatdd, because dark entities could capture and resell tokens .. seems a step in the direction of madness.
I thought a solution to this would be to use a physical smartcard to store the certificate(perhaps on your government ID). if the protocol is a challenge/response and the private key never leaves the card it would make proxying without the physical card more difficult.
Yeah great idea, having to get out your government ID every time you want to use a website.
A certificate could be anonymous and the website would only need to verify it against the born_before_2008_root_cert in 2026. You could issue has many certs as you want and all would have a validity of 1 year so that websites only have to install at the maximum 2 root certs.
The “2008” part hit me hard
If the smart cards required some human input to perform a signature maybe this could work. Otherwise there is nothing stopping someone from selling use of their card via some proxy software
Is this type of problem even solvable?
Trusted computing solves this problem handily.
the article also mentions; <But the government puts much of the onus on social media platforms to ensure users understand the verification process and on users to read up to make sure they aren’t being scammed.>
Unfortunately, the said-government doesn't seem to worry about the fact that their own systems have been breached over the years
> 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.
They don't work even then.
Suppose you completely eliminate privacy on the internet and require every domestic site to collect the name and social security number of everyone who visits. Then a child uses an adult's ID, regardless of whether it's with or without their knowledge. Is the child going to inform on themselves? No. Is the adult, when they don't even know about it? No. Is the adult, when they provided it on purpose? No.
That constitutes the entire set of people who would typically know that the person using the device isn't the person on the ID.
On top of that, we can punch an even bigger hole in it. Search engines, among other things, index other sites. Google is obviously the biggest but there are many others -- Bing, Marginalia, Brave, Swisscows, Yandex, Perplexity, Baidu, etc. They're run by adults and most of their users are adults, who reasonably expect to be able to turn off "safe search" if they want to. So some adult at each search engine would have to provide their ID to the crawler so it can index things inappropriate for children and show them to adult users. It would therefore be a fairly unremarkable and recurring thing to see the same ID make a zillion gigatons of requests.
But then you can't use "why is this person downloading 100 things from 100 computers at once" as an indication of anything nefarious happening, and anyone can still set up a service hosted on a foreign server that will serve adult content to anyone without an ID by serving it out of a cache. (And in the case where you're invading everyone's privacy, that service would also be very popular with adults.)
> 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.
Buying alcohol for a minor implies knowledge and intent.
Getting the tokens out of a phone doesn't require the user to do any of that, the user just has to be frugal and keep the phone longer than it's supported by the manufacturer, until some local exploit is found again, and that token will be extracted and available online for everyone to use.
Parents buy those phones, phones could easily have a "user is a minor" setting (and a flag sent to all the sites that want one) with a password for parents to unlock stuff if needed. This would be set during the phones first set up, and it's done. But nope, the plan is for everyone to install a form if a digital ID on their phones, and once it's there, requiring full-name identification when registering is just one step away.
Why can’t you just sell single use codes at gas stations/liquor stores/etc and they just check your ID before sale? Of course shady places can still sell them without ID check, but we have this problem already for liquor and tobacco.
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.
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.
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.
> But governments enjoy on a pretty broad support for this
No they do not. They do an enormous amount of PR trying to convince people that they have it, though.
In the real world when there is a ton of support behind a position, you see representatives of it all over the place and they are pushing the agenda and the coverage. In the world of online age verification, you just see a bunch of lame duck politicians using procedure to sneak policy changes in and keep objections from being heard, and a few government contractor-surrogates writing op-eds (that they haven't read.)
When puritans go on the march, they're actually pretty loud. Most of the anti-social media people are hippy-dippy upper-middle class liberals who curse "screens," completely believed Cambridge Analytica's PR and think that Trump rules through mind control - who will be bothered by the end of anonymity; and the remainder are angry online right-wingers who think that they were censored by and as a result of social media. They're not marching together, they're not marching to have people identified when they're using the internet, neither of them are even prioritizing social media right now and they aren't putting pressure on anyone.
The fact that it's so unpopular is why there are lame ducks doing it. They're just assuring their fortunes on the way out, and the person on the way in will pretend like they had nothing to do with it even though it will be will be passed and implemented on their watch.
The bills are being raised and passing in more countries than just America though.
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).
Of course it's accurate to say a lot of people aren't smart.
A lot of people also may or may not be smart but have limited knowledge of this area and limited time/effort to expend thinking about it.
I don't think you should rail against those things because they will always be true for every topic.
Instead, people who have understood the deeper implications of this, for instance the typical HN reader, need to connect with the average person, engage with rather than dismiss their child protection fears, while explaining the downsides.
Taking a high handed dismissive attitude will not help to shift public opinion.
But I'm expressing my opinion on HN, not for the general public?
I thought that stating this, I believe, fact as a contributing factor in the creeping authoritarian climate would be understood without having to attach a handful of caveats and papers?
(you're contradicting yourself)
Once again blaming the tv which barely anyone watches rather than the algorithmic feed in their pocket 24 hours a day.
It’s not 1980 any more.
Naah, "nice lady from the breakfast TV" is mostly[1] an allegory of the traditional media narrative, but you can't seriously deny the impact and importance of it?
If you deny for example Murdoch-owned media impact on the society, or the extent of the damage for example BBC did in the UK to the human rights or the discourse, I'd suggest reading more :)
[1] one TV programme I remember (I don't watch it): "Good Morning Britain is the UK's most talked about breakfast television show with a weekly audience reach of 4 million people." that's 10% of the age group 16-64 here, not too shabby-- and that's ONE tv.
That's why they are still appealing to sentiment rather than established research (which actively refutes the arguments they are making).
Precisely. The people in power would love nothing more than to stop “disinformation” (facts that cause social unrest).
Yeah. Didn't you find your dad's dirty VHS tapes when you were young? I'm sure most of us did. And we turned out fine.
And no, porn isn't more extreme these days either. I remember seeing bukkake, golden showers etc on borrowed tapes and hacked pay TV. BDSM existed back then too. And I had some pics of a girls face surrounded by male members and their output. Never once did I think this would be a normal thing to do with my girlfriend once I got one.
And these things are still gonna happen. Teens are going to go through their dad's phone when he's sleeping, find his stack of Blu-ray's or vids on this computer. Even with all this age verification stuff. I don't understand why we suddenly think that's the end of civilization.
There is a bootlegger and baptist thing going on here. One understandable point of view is that of parents that control their kids' phones, but other parents in the community do not. Then their kids are the only ones in the class without tiktok or Instagram or something.
For those parents life is easier if nobody is allowed on these things.
I think their point is to protect kids who have parents so tech illiterate they do not know how to manage parental controls.
Having seen some parents I kind of believe it but not to the point of wanting to implement ID tracking on everything.
Have decent defaults. “Is this phone for a child” and “scan this wr from parents phone”. 90% of problems solved.
That said while Apple does a good job at parental controls, Microsoft is altered. Trying to have controls on Minecraft across a windows laptop and a switch involved a multi hour odyssey, creating tons of accounts for parent and child.
You've got to be really on the margin of society to not be able to set it up when every grandma and her dog use smartphones. There're about 1000 different ways to improve the lives of such people without making everyone use their government ID when scrolling Instagram.
I was thinking that some kind of permanent physical attachment with passive electronics could be given to children, like an ankle bracelet used for home curfew, monkey's headband, a dogs shock collar, or just a nice bracelet, call it MoB, which couldn't be removed until they are of age. Devices they are given could be associated with those devices and not usable without them, if they disappear from passive scanning then they have been tin-foiled, etc etc. I've not seen any discussion of this type of approach which gives children something to aim for - freedom, and tallies with human historical culture as well.
My God, what a horrific and evil idea
I don't understand why the act of buying internet access isn't considered a parental control. I doubt very many kids are doing it or can.
Ok, but parents buy internet access and then let their kids use it, because the kids need it for school. So? The parents job is to keep their kids out of trouble. Learning how to keep track of what their kids access shouldn't be difficult, and maybe should be part of the obligation parents have, kind of like their obligated to teach their kids to drive before giving them the keys to a car. Its analogious to saying "kids shouldn't walk home from school or be let out of the house at all because they might wander into a nude beach or join a drug smuggling satanic cult". Most of us don't hold that view because we trust that kids can be taught to be vaguely responsible.
What's more: tools to shield the kids have been around for longer than most of the parents have been alive at this point. The problem is pretty much solved in multiple ways, and wouldn't even be a problem if parents only followed their basic responsiblities. Also it isn't a problem in the first place, I haven't seen any clear, undisputed evidence that shows that kids are degenerating into fiends because of looking at adult stuff on the internet.
> The parents job is to keep their kids out of trouble. Learning how to keep track of what their kids access shouldn't be difficult
Unfortunately it is, but we could fix that with only minimally invasive legislation. Right now you either whitelist which breaks half the internet on a recurring basis (things are constantly changing) or you blacklist which is swiss cheese. Either way you're relying on third parties.
I think it would be much better to legally mandate a certain minimum level of self classification for website operators along with a simple and extensible scheme for communicating such. It might also be useful to mandate that devices ship from the OEM with parental control software supporting that standard but honestly I doubt that's necessary - if their were a standardized and above all reliable signal available I think browsers and operating systems would rapidly adopt support for it.
Exactly! We already have content tags on TV/Movies, just extend it to the web and make mandatory.
I imagine it could be not trivial to enforce (esp. for offshore web) - but definitely easier than enforcing the same sites to implement much more complicated identity verification (while preferably also not leaking this data).
But that might not even be necessary. A small on-device AI can probably do a decent job classifying pretty much everything we don't want children to see - with and option for parents to override it when needed.
> I imagine it could be not trivial to enforce (esp. for offshore web)
It's quite trivial, actually - the parental control software is designed so that if there are no content tags, then the site does not display. The mandate for websites to tag their content would only need to apply to websites over a certain size, to bootstrap the network effects.
The other option is for the major browsers to refuse to load pages that don't include the tag. I don't think it's a good thing that they can unilaterally dictate web standards but that's the reality so might as well take advantage of it for the better I guess.
The problem with this idea is that it assumes responsible parents, which are not a given. I agree with you completely - I don't want any kind of controls on the Internet - but we live in a world where we cannot actually rely on parents to fulfill what you would consider to be basic and reasonable expectations of parental duties.
For kids with parents like that, the internet is probably the least of their problems.
Exactly. Might be the only place they have a semblance of home.
They certainly have other problems however the internet is unique in that it drops the entire world directly in your living room. Even with irresponsible parents zoning laws keep most children away from things like casinos and strip clubs (at least until they can drive) and everyone benefits from community efforts to keep the neighborhood safe.
...parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns...
No they're not - all those things are illegal for children nearly everywhere.
Why would you want to lock condoms?
Children can buy their own devices. School issued devices are not under parent control. Parental controls and school controls are laughable. There is no incentive for OS vendors/retailers to provide robust solutions to this problem. PII industry is essentially pushing regulatory capture.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> Where does this 3rd party identity token provider come from?
Some oracle whose job it is to print tokens and hand out rolls to the stores (and to the websystems). They would know which store got which roll, and which website authenticated it, but not who each ticket from that roll went to.
With a big enough roll, this is essentially anonymous.
Yes, lotteries know which store got the winning ticket, but they have no idea which of the patrons in the store got it. Not unless they ask Eve to get her telescopic lens and notepad out.
I'm talking about identity token services.
You're saying the real solution is that we bring in a private, 3rd-party company to start checking our IDs to access websites now?
It’s millions of third party companies checking ids. Anywhere that sells alcohol or tobacco could do it.
I was asked if this problem can be solved in an anonymous manner. I gave a solution that is pretty anonymous and fairly cheap.
I am not actually advocating for it. I'm just saying how it's possible to solve it given those constraints.
> It's anonymous. The clerk or his POS system knows your name and age, but doesn't know your number.
What prevents a commercial "AI" security camera analysis firm from doing a decent job of linking footage of a store's customers to a likely subset of tokens, based on the knowledge of which tokens are sent to which store and how many tokens have been pulled off of the roll so far? Remember that you can design the token roll packaging so the easiest thing for a clerk to do is to pull off the rolls in the order in which they were shipped. Or -hell- you can design the token dispenser so that it phones home to the oracle that sent the roll to the store with the range of tokens in the roll when the roll is loaded into the dispenser (for "security purposes").
> 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.
I've seen many people buy lotto tickets. I've never seen anyone asked for ID. Perhaps the merchant is supposed to check for ID, but they don't. Relatedly:
> The clerk pulls a scratch-off ticket from the front of a ticket tape. The ticket contains a token identifier.
What prevents rolls of those tickets from falling off of a truck and either being handed out for free or at a substantial markup, no questions asked? [0]
In the real world, the system you propose absolutely will not function to the standards required by the people agitating for these systems. You can't "protect the children" if "children" can easily get their hands on anonymous access-granting tokens.
[0] The fact that this doesn't happen with lotto tickets often enough to be newsworthy is not a compelling counterexample. Stores make a decent amount of money selling those, and wouldn't want to get cut off from that revenue source by regularly "losing" shipments of tickets. What you propose doesn't make stores any money, so either you have to spend a bunch of money to induce them to carry the tokens [1], or you have to have harsh penalties for "losing" shipments of tokens. If you risk harsh penalties for choosing to sell the tokens, why even bother? Stores put up with the risk of selling booze because it's quite profitable... selling 5c or 0c tokens absolutely is not.
[1] Where does that money come from? From you and me, of course!
I’ve worked in the industry, so just adding some extra info, as I agree with you that the ticket system is not really less tracked than other systems, just differently tracked:
Lottery tickets don’t “fall off of trucks” or get “lost in the mail” because they aren’t valid for redemption until they’re activated at the POS terminal of a licensed store, and the lottery company knows which store receives each ticket roll, because they are shipped to known locations with tracking numbers and delivery verification and/or delivered in person by lottery employees. Even the rolls of blank lottery ticket receipt paper have different serial numbers every few inches, and it’s forbidden by policy to swap receipt paper between stores. All of these things are audited both regularly and randomly by state lottery officials.
> Lottery tickets don’t “fall off of trucks” or get “lost in the mail” because...
Oh yeah, true. A few minutes after I posted the comment, it occurred to me that lotto tickets always get scanned at the register, which is the obvious way to track their distribution and make it annoying to use a whole bunch of winning ones that fell off of a truck. Thanks for the first-hand industry info.
If it's effective, all that tracking and auditing can't be cheap. The lotto gets to pay for it with ticket sales... I don't expect folks would tolerate paying for that [0] for this "I'm an adult" token-distribution system.
[0] ...whether that payment is paid by the token purchaser or by the taxpayers, generally...
The scan at the time of purchase is just for tracking what the store owes to the state for the lottery system. The last ticket in each roll of tickets is scanned by the dedicated lottery terminal prior to being placed for sale in an admin mode activation function. The terminals themselves I am familiar with are Linux-based and seem to be thin clients which do everything remotely in real-time, because nothing works if the terminal is offline, from activation to redemption of tickets to win/loss checking. The terminal has its own dedicated wired Ethernet connection to a stand-alone Cradlepoint or other competitor brand cellular modem/router, which along with the terminal is all outsourced to a third party management company. (SGI is the only one I’m familiar with; there are likely others.) All of this is public info which could be gleaned from observing the terminals and their installation/operation, but I probably can’t say much more about them, but they are pretty neat and seem to work fairly reliably.
Now that you mention the auditing etc, a lottery system would probably be an easy way to get people to literally buy into an online ID scheme, not because it would necessarily be privacy-preserving, which would depend on implementation details, but because a not insignificant number of folks seem to like the chance to win money. Considering many states already have lottery systems, the ID code tickets could probably be provided alongside lottery tickets for free or nearly free, and employees already have the training to check/scan IDs. If there was an incentive such as the possibility to get discounts, win prizes, or tie-in purchases of some kind, I think it could work.
Many stores that sell lottery tickets also sell gift cards, so that technology could also be used instead or in addition to ID tokens at the point of sale. There are a lot of sponsorship opportunities available for cross-promotion.
“Please drink a verification can” was probably more prescient than was at first apparent. Mike Judge saw this whole thing coming from a mile away.
You can also just follow people around and look in their windows. Nothing prevents that other than laws and rules and social norms.
> In the real world, the system you propose absolutely will not function to the standards required by the people agitating for these systems. You can't "protect the children" if "children" can easily get their hands on anonymous access-granting tokens.
What stops children from paying someone to buy beer and cigs for them? What's the difference between age-controlled liquor and an age-controlled token falling off the back of a truck?
You can introduce as many soft-verification systems as you want to tweak this. The roll of numbers doesn't become active unless installed in a dispenser that phones home when it is installed, for example. The empty bobbins containing the roll have to be returned to the oracle, and need to register installation in a dispenser. The dispenser can even count each dispensed ticket. The only requirement is that the sale and the process of paying for the sale isn't linked to the ticket. If you maintain that, the system is anonymous. If you break it, it's not.
> What stops children from paying someone to buy beer and cigs for them?
I preempted this line of questioning. I'll quote the section for you:
No business is going to risk any part of their business by selling seriously-age-restricted goods that they get essentially no profit from. In order to get a business to deal in them, either they will give zero shits about who gets the tokens (because there's no penalty for not caring), or they will get paid a lot of taxpayer money in order to make up for the state-imposed loss when they inevitably give some to under-eighteens. [0]> The only requirement is that the sale and the process of paying for the sale isn't linked to the ticket.
Unless you make it turbo-illegal to link those pieces of information (even weakly), then those two pieces of information will be linked lickety-split. As aspenmaver mentions, lotto tickets are activated at time of sale by phoning home to -I assume- the issuer of the ticket, providing a ready-made mechanism to correlate which tickets are sold to which person. When the people who are crying to protect the under-eighteen from the "evils" of computing notice that under-eighteens are -shock! outrage!- still exposed to that "evil" despite this token-distribution scheme, they will demand any such laws be weakened or eliminated.
[0] ...or fail to strictly follow all of the regs when giving one to a "Token Commission" officer doing an undercover buy, as absolutely happens with alcohol sales...
You go to the store. You give the clerk many quarters, and get the maximum number of tickets. You go online and sell the lot, perhaps for $20. Since the system preserves privacy, doing this carries no risk for you.
Eventually this becomes common knowledge and "something must be done". Facebook (the corpo sponsoring these age verification laws to absolve their own liability) and their ilk decide that the token system no longer meaningfully proves age. They switch to demanding full government ID in cleartext, as there is still no comprehensive privacy law that would prevent such a thing.
Every single approach that puts the onus on the company to verify age falls apart this way, possibly including a de facto mandate for remote attestation (ie say good bye to libre operating systems and browsers that aren't MSIE, Safari, or Chrome). The only workable systems are ones in which the onus remains on parents giving their kids networked computing devices to enable parental controls and/or otherwise monitor their kids' usage, with those parental controls based on information flowing strictly from the website to the user agent (eg a content tag that asserts "this page is suitable for kids").
(and I say this as a parent who is staring down having to deal with this problem in a short year or two)
> 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.
I’ve sold lottery tickets, and you have to be legal age to both buy and redeem them, so I’m not sure that this analogy or hypothetical solution is comparable to lottery tickets, nor is it likely to be the panacea you think it is.
I don’t think that the nascent online age verification schemes are good for society in general, either, but that’s not really the point you were making in your comment, so I don’t assume that you believe they’re good or bad, but simply advocating for a more privacy-preserving implementation. Which is kind of the whole point of the argument against bad implementations, but those who mandate and implement the systems likely view uniquely identifying people as a boon, whereas you and I probably don’t, which is why I am not hopeful that your ticket system will be used, because it will be higher friction for more people than uploading scans of their IDs and/or their face.
The ticket system, if implemented, would be used by so few people that the folks who do could likely be re-identified by Bluetooth tracking beacons and facial recognition in the same stores which they bought the ID tickets you suggest, and so I think the number of people who would escape tracking by any such means to be so few as to be a rounding error.
Those folks who do pursue this privacy hobby/fetish are statistically likely to ultimately mess up on their opsec eventually on a long enough timeline, so it’s hard to even imagine a scenario in which it matters either way what individual privacy activists do or don’t do from the point of view of the panopticon designers or implementers. Those not identified to a desired confidence interval by the mass surveillance system will just be retargeted for more sophisticated surveillance measures.
Despite how we rage, we’re still just rats in a cage.
More and more, the privacy debate feels like a quixotic struggle against giants, when everyone already knows that those giants are actually windmills; the majority of society now lives on reclaimed lands which rely on those windmills’ continued existence, and so no one cares about privacy in the way that you or I might care, because they are incapable of perceiving windmills as giants, nor do they have the intellectual or philosophical or political beliefs which would allow them to even entertain such perceptions even for the purposes of discussion. The privacy debate is beyond their ken.
>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?
Using cryptographic signatures from approved signers, like a government
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.
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.
> 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.)
> 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.
Exactly. And the funny thing is that the EU Age Verification App seems to be vulnerable to relay attacks anyway.
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
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
>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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In what direction do the incentives point?
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.
>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.
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.
God, that sentence didn’t pass the sniff test, so I checked:
https://pa.media/blogs/fact-check/fact-check-international-d...
Don’t think that the claim stands up to scrutiny, since its comparing unlike things.
Reading your link, "comparing unlike things" looks like spin to me. "It's different when we do it."
For who?
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.
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.
By some stroke of luck, the NZ government recently put into place a robust privacy-preserving framework for digital identity [1].
They just launched the GOVT.NZ [2] app, and it contains a wallet that can store digital credentials. It's built by a local company called MATTR [3], who specialise in trust technology and exotic cryptography like zero-knowledge proofs. The first credential available this year will be a mobile drivers license, and we'll then be able to prove things about ourselves like whether or not we're over 18 (according to an accredited institution), completely privately over the internet and without sharing any other information.
I'm cautiously optimistic about the direction our digital ecosystem is heading in NZ :')
[1] https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/about-the-commission/gover...
[2] https://www.digital.govt.nz/digital-government/key-areas-of-...
[3] https://mattr.global/
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.
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.
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.
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.
So....what exactly would platform detection mechanisms be basing their decisions off of that wouldn't defeat the entire privacy-preserving premise of ZKP?
multiple use of the same token on multiple accounts...?
tying multiple accounts and services together isn't ideal but its inarguably better than tying your real world identity to every single service.
Wait - so you're advocating for use of a persistent identifier tied to a person? How is that any different than what advertising networks do right now beyond giving them additional guaranteed information of your age bracket?
To clarify - it's not cryptographically necessary to present the same token for each and every transaction and serves to categorically defeat the entire privacy guarantee of ZKP.
It also makes it trivial to associate your ZKP token with your real identity.
contrast this with the situation as it currently is (under ideal assumptions) where a central authority verifies your real identity and issues temporary rate limited tokens which are then saved by each service and can at any time be linked to you whenever the central authority can get the service to disclose the database entry. the nullifier will force the central authority to do an investigation about who the nullifier actually belongs to which may actually fail.
realistically I expect VPNs and Tor to just become more popular in response to such nonsense. I wouldn't be using government issued tokens for anything that isn't trivial to tie to your identity already: such as a personal bank access.
> at the terminus, yes. there is no other way to avoid the homeless problem you listed. by terminus I am referring to where a central authority vouches for unforgability. this does not mean advertisers will have a token they can use (see remote attestation infrastructure).
Where to even begin here....
To generate the token, it needs to be based on specific data. How do you prevent people from generating tokens based on fake data and submitting that to the "terminus" that you mention? We already have cases of people bypassing facial scan liveliness checks for banks using AI-generated footage.
What about validating tokens during the token enrollment process based on your government ID? Though that makes sure that poor or undereducated people who don't have such an ID are locked out of large swaths of Internet services.
Though there's also the matter of it being trivial to generate fake IDs using AI.
If you have no gatekeeping for the token enrollment process, anyone can submit an arbitrary number of new tokens.
And if you do have gatekeeping, you're right back to square one of needing to validate against more than just your age.
After all - the cryptography algorithms will be publicly known. If the only thing ZKP is validating against is age, it won't take long to figure out how to generate identifiers based on fabricated information.
> whether or not the terminus can tie a token to a real world identity will depend on how careless the user was and how much collusion there is between the terminus and the services. at the very least it will impose an investigation cost.
No it won't. A user submits a token to a server. The user also logs in with their e-mail address or phone number. Their email and/or phone number is hashed and it, along with the ZKP token and any additional information the website has on you, will be sent to data brokers.
This is the same as any other bit of information out there that data brokers collect on the internet. They just associate your new info with other info you are required to provide in order to use various services.
This will be automated and will cost next to nothing for data brokers to take advantage of.
> contrast this with the situation as it currently is (under ideal assumptions) where a central authority verifies your real identity and issues temporary rate limited tokens which are then saved by each service and can at any time be linked to you whenever the central authority can get the service to disclose the database entry. the nullifier will force the central authority to do an investigation about who the nullifier actually belongs to which may actually fail.
....what? What investigation by central authorities? You are talking of a system that would constantly mediate permissions for billions upon billions upon billions of devices across dozens of services and accounts per device.
You couldn't hire an army of people large enough to handle this and AI is infamously awful at detecting when a given image has been generated with AI.
> realistically I expect VPNs and Tor to just become more popular in response to such nonsense. I wouldn't be using government issued tokens for anything that isn't trivial to tie to your identity already: such as a personal bank access.
Their popularity would only rise in order to VPN into jurisdictions that don't enforce this. Assuming major websites don't just mandate age/identity verification for all new users regardless of jurisdiction just because it's easier and cheaper to apply one system to everyone.
Look - I know you mean well, but it is clear from this discussion you aren't familiar with cryptography, system security guarantees, Internet infrastructure scaling, or what would be needed to introduce new descriptive information about a person on the Internet and not have it become a new privacy risk.
This is an issue that has no tech-only solution. The specifics aren't just something to just figure out at a later date - the specifics are everything. And it's something that is enormously difficult to get right and extremely easy to get very, very wrong.
you also don't appear to know what a nullifier is, in a ZKP system you submit identifying information and a hash of a secret string. the CA adds the hash to a public database and in the future you prove you one of the members of the database with a nullifier - the anonymity-set is everyone in the database who entered it prior to your submission. this can also be done with a blind signature to the same effect.
there is no further point to this discussion.
> it's actually clear that you are the one who isn't familiar with this, I referenced remote attestation which you appear to know little about as it addresses the problem of identifying information (the service has no way to link tokens across without help from the CA).
You've promoted mutually exclusive concepts with regards to cryptography which is why I said you don't seem to understand it. And again - and again and again and again and again and again - what is the additional information you are authenticating based off of beyond age? Remote attestation provides absolutely zero privacy utility here whatsoever on its own! So you've remotely attested this ZKP key represents a person who is an adult. Creating another key based on that information alone is trivial to spoof - for it not to be trivial, it would require validating additional information!
What is your root of trust? What is the basis by which age is verified in a way that can't readily be spoofed?
> you also don't appear to know what a nullifier is, in a ZKP system you submit identifying information and a hash of a secret string. the CA adds the hash to a public database and in the future you prove you one of the members of the database with a nullifier - the anonymity-set is everyone in the database who entered it prior to your submission. this can also be done with a blind signature to the same effect.
That's nice and all for trivia on ZKP but how does that touch upon the problem being discussed?
The mechanics of ZKP are not relevant to the problem of ZKP being categorically worthless for the problem at hand. I don't say ZKP is worthless out of ignorance - more discussions about it won't change that.
The specifics of ZKP do not change the fact that you are validating either too little information to be useful for preventing fraud or too much to have privacy-preserving value.
> there is no further point to this discussion.
Evidently not.
We can't solve private age verification with blockchain tech. I'm happy you're so passionate about it, but it isn't a silver bullet.
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.
> 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.
>There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials.
Technological solutions for what problem?
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
How is it possible to have something that both proves something about your identity but also does not allow ANYONE to deanonymize you?
> You’re not happy about it, but you hand over a photo of your passport and hope it doesn’t come back to haunt you.
I think for this argument to carry weight with voters, privacy advocates need to be much more specific about what "coming back to haunt you" looks like. They do a little bit of it later on[1], but I think most people do a rough cost benefit in their head and decide that the small benefit outweighs the small risk (to them).
[1] "And that creates a lot of risks for data breaches, overly broad data collection and retention, censorial legal demands for collected data, corporate and governmental malfeasance, pressure to self-censor, and perhaps blatant First Amendment violations. Every new layer and every new mandate brings more potential for risk. As we’ve unfortunately seen many times over the years, people including high-level government officials will maliciously seek to root out the identities of their critics, so the more layers of anonymity we can preserve in online speech, the better."
Most likely there's some huge breach where all the IDs are stolen and resold, which would maybe fix this problem while creating a bunch of others.
> privacy advocates need to be much more specific
I'm starting to think we need to lean on conspiracy theories in order to get broader population on train with this - and I'm saying this in utmost regret. That's a borrowing game from a right wing/extremist playbook.
Start with this: requiring IDs online is a first step in micro-chipping the population.
...or how about this: marxists/atifa/nazis/zionists/islamist/whoever-group-people-think-is-in-power want to erode your privacy online so it can be used against you. Some nefarious group what to know your every move!
...or how about this: remember Epstein files!? Well the pedos now want to id your children online!
I simply saying truth/evidence/rational based approach to this will not get people attention. People just don't care.
Just say that the government will control every single device that's controlled to the Internet and they can add government viruses that you can't remove and they can remotely control all of your devices and brick them if you try to send anything that the government doesn't like.
That's not even an exaggeration, once they enforce OS-level age verification via remote attestation they don't even have to pass a law to do this, they can send a secret order to Big Tech to do this.
Perhaps “censorship” & manufacturing consent?
I think both political extremes have their own angles: liberals might be concerned that conservative censors will censor kids from learning about LGBT people and minorities, conservatives will be concerned that liberals will force too much LGBT and minority content onto kids. Or whatever issue, they want to control what your kids read!
This will almost certainly be used to censor adults too, the only reason we aren’t doing that is because it hasn’t been possible to consistently identify people before. Considering who is pushing for this, they’re absolutely going to tie this into advertising, and if they know who you are so do all of the spooky upper echelons who could implement a true censorship regime.
“The only way they can do this is by controlling what you read, shouldn’t that be the parent’s choice?”
> Or whatever issue, they want to control what your kids read!
Considering demographic trends, soon such arguments will sound very hollow.
It's been decades since the very phrase "conspiracy theory" was introduced as a means to convert looking closer into something cringe. The normie position on most things is to accept something as no problem unless the mainstream designates it as such aliens), or it blows up enough that even unmotivated normies can't help but take notice (rich new york caribbean islanders). Privacy got close to that with Snowden, but it fizzled into apathy for most because imo there was no clear harm to present, it was perceived as abstract.
To me the connotation is that it's always an unreasonable theory, such as one that requires thousands of people to maintain nearly perfect secrecy for an indefinite period, with no mistakes and dedication even when they'd benefit from blabbing.
In contrast, imagine a 2-person conspiracy where both have lifelong reasons to keep it secret. Yeah, I could have a theory about that conspiracy existing, but it wouldn't be, y'know, a conspiracy theory in the usual sense.
> I'm starting to think we need to lean on conspiracy theories in order to get broader population on train with this - and I'm saying this in utmost regret. That's a borrowing game from a right wing/extremist playbook.
How about "if you want to buy a dildo on aliexpress, you have to do a full scan of your face and send it to israelis"?
I mean.. au10tix does age verification for aliexpress, it is an israeli firm, and you can't even buy a scalpel (the DIY crafts one) without having to scan your face there due to EU regulation.
It always gets back to the evil Jews with some people and ideologies. Sheesh.
Assuming no revolutionary changes are coming to the USA, I am planning to opt out of the digital world when I retire. Physical media only. No subscriptions. Spend lots of time in the library. Find like-minded people and meet in person. Will only keep the bare minimum for survival, like banking.
Which is precisely why powers will try to make all these illegal
I don't think they are going to make libraries illegal mate.
But what about entering one anonymously?
Libraries track what books you read (nowadays via some database and in the past via paper)
Unless you read it directly at the library (at least in my country), without borrowing it.
Ah, like how we don't have pay phones any more because they were made illegal.
I saw a working payphone at Pinecrest Lake a month ago. Presuming you didn’t literally mean illegal, what did you mean?
You don't need to make libraries illegal to get rid of them, you just need to undermine their value and they'll be defunded and disappear. No passing laws necessary, just pubic ambivalence.
I have been slowly moving towards that for a decade or two now. I still do some internet stuff (mostly here) but it is greatly diminished. The rest is just at work.
Got to the same conclusion. Guess I will go back to in-person only, and lots lots of time away from devices (which I already have).
I appreciate the wealth of technical solutions that don't violate privacy, but isn't this overlooking an important point: that children don't need to be connected to the Internet at all times from such an early age? Many internet and cell phone providers seem to take it for granted that children must be online, which is already a net loss for their privacy as they mature.
Its a tragedy of the commons situation. The benefits of being offline are dampened by the kid being out of the loop
I agree, I think kids should have limited access to the internet. I pretty much did and it worked out for me but I have seen so many reports about it causing harm in schools and personal life. (Specifically I think LLMs should not be used in education also, but different point) However, I think the main problem people have with this "think of the children" narrative is that it will force EVERYONE to give up their credentials to access the internet, not just kids. And the general consensus is that we as adults do not want to and should not have to prove our identity to access the internet.
I am wholeheartedly against identity verification, especially when it comes to giving up privacy. And I hope these "think of the children" arguments can be pushed back at from multiple angles. If the danger is real, then by the time a child is online, 4 out of 5 in them in Australia can apparently access social media anyway. So even if everyone's privacy was somehow an acceptable price to pay, these requirements do nothing.
Unfortunately, they are looking to expand the eCommmisioners powers to try and close that door a bit tighter now.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-25/australia-will-streng...
Lol yeah exactly, if kids want to go on social media they will 100% find a way around it.... putting in these identity requirements will literally do nothing except require us as adults to give over more information. I'm sure everything will pass through congress fine though because "someone think of the children!!!!".
That's their parents' decision to make, not yours.
Should it also be their decision that they can gamble? Smoke cigarettes? Get a job? Have sex?
We draw the line somewhere because these things that "are the parents' decision" have consequences on broader society. They have consequences that impact you and me. And we also have a say.
You can make the argument that it's just the parents' decision. But you have to say why.
> Should it also be their decision that they can gamble? Smoke cigarettes? Get a job? Have sex?
Not on the first 2 because they're illegal for minors. Yes on the last 2. A parent can e.g. forbid their minor from being employed if it's hindering their studies. They also have a say on their romantic partner and how they interact. If rules are not followed, they can e.g. be grounded.
...yes on the last? Might be in a minority on that one.
The idea that browsing the internet is remotely comparable to smoking is utterly retarded.
What is "parents' decision" is up to debate. This is how the society always worked.
I mean its only a hope and a skip away from having to validate ones age to turn on the router.
This isn’t about children, mate. It’s about controlling the population’s access to content.
The children are fine. Many countries no longer allow smartphones at school, which lowers the peer-pressure factor to be online.
Parents are doing their best to steer kids. But these pesky adults, goshdarnit, they access whatever content they want without approval from The State, potentially reading dissident materials, borrowing 1984 from libraries… politicians don’t like that.
The path ahead in the next few years (at least for the UK)
1. Age gating + VPN ban under the guise of protecting children from social media
2. Few years pass, Identity Passport gets ushered in under guise of convenience of not having to repeat those pesky age verification checks.
3. Utilities start to require ID Passport. Including signing up with an ISP.
4. Renting starts to require ID Passport.
5. Work requires ID Passport.
6. Well done, you built the torment nexus!
Renting and work already require ID in the UK. Every landlord and employer is supposed to take a copy of original documents proving the right to rent/work in the UK. Technically you can do that without handing the docs to the government, but there's less potential liability to do so via the Home Office website.
You miss the point - they are stitching it all together in a way that deanonymize you to your ISP under the guise of save the kids and then convenience
Here in Australia we already have the first part of 1 then most of 3,4,5. We are almost there. And you thought our wildlife was the torment nexus.
I’m glad this is finally becoming the cause célèbre du jour. This feels like THE FIGHT or at least one of the TOP 3 THE FIGHTS and it hasn’t had even a fraction of the public’s attention until now.
Unfortunately I don’t think it has the public’s attention, it’s still very niche. Nowhere near enough to change anything yet.
At least it's a start.
Most folks already know the internet is not a safe place to express political thought. The powerlessness the public feels is obvious.
>I’m glad this is finally becoming the cause célèbre du jour.
It really isn't, though. Don't mistake the internet for reality. The majority of people in the US and Europe support laws like these, and most of the rest don't care.
Even on Hacker News the consensus is mostly in favor of anything from age restriction to making all social media illegal.
> Even on Hacker News the consensus is mostly in favor of anything from age restriction to making all social media illegal.
That doesn't sound right. Put up a poll. I'd put money on 90%+ choosing some flavor privacy/anonymity on the internet.
The main issue is that they are very careful not to frame it like that. In broader contexts, it's always framed as something like "do you favor limiting children's access to social media" without a word on what it would cost to actually institute such a ban.
It's about as meaningful a framing as asking if you favor world peace and ending world hunger.
You can end all wars and eliminate hunger if you point the Death Star at us and kill all life on earth. If someone objects to the collateral damage, remind him that when you said "world peace and no hunger at all costs," you meant all costs.
Relevant British comedy clip (Yes, [Prime] Minister) on such polls:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks
Yeah, and we’re starting to inoculate people against that kind of rhetoric. It’s a process.
Not really, if anything we are seeing what a good idea taking kids off social media is and how crazy we allowed this to all happen for so long.
> if anything we are seeing what a good idea taking kids off social media is and how crazy we allowed this to all happen for so long
We're not seeing anything of the sort, and couldn't possibly for some time yet.
What we are seeing, as evinced by the article, is how ineffective these laws are at actually keeping kids off social media, and how effective the mass collection of identity data is at creating an environment for scammers, hackers, data brokers and the means for widespread political oppression.
You don't necessarily have to be in favor of any measures which reduce adult privacy to be in favor of that. Logically speaking, the liability for minors accessing age-gated products and services is the person who provides those products and services to the minor. In the case of the internet, that person is the parent, not the ISP or the website. It is the parent who contracts with the provider and then forwards the product to the unauthorized user, the child. A parent who purchases, say, access to porn and then provides that access to their child is no different than a parent who buys booze and provides access to it to their child.
Exactly. You frame these things in the general case and HN is against it because obviously it's evil.
You frame it as "we've come up with a composite score (social credit) that lets us more efficiently enforce [stuff HN likes but the population likes way less]" and it's mostly all cheering and the one guy with principals is downvoted and flagged.
> I'd put money on 90%+ choosing some flavor privacy/anonymity on the internet.
I can only say what I've observed from numerous threads - people's advocacy for privacy on the internet here does not extend so social media.
But OK this could be fun let's put my keyboard where my mouth is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48680434
Talk to people in person and you’ll get a different view (at least among those under 50), especially if you ask about the negatives.
Social media is full of astroturfing.
Don't mistake cynicism for knowledge.
Do you think that this will lead to a new version of a alternative "internet" where people try to avoid the government control? And is that even possible? Or will we all just comply?
only for a short while longer. US, EU, China, and Russia are all on the same page about you-vill-ovn-nothing-und-you-vill-be-happy kind of future, and they will bully the rest of the world into compliance.
Only if it can be turned into gray market business: additional layers of proxies and VPNs, and whatever new is invented.
As simple "I care about privacy" need is not a reason to bother with setup for a regular person. So it could work only if it's as easy, as current internet. And for profit businesses provide it.
As for another protocol all together: there are some experiments already, but again, why use those?
Yeah profits is a problem.
I consider mesh-nets for home use... We already use walkies in the house...
This could be good to make the lack of privacy online more explicit to users, and actually cause people to be more cautious online, which all the snowden revelations failed to do. If we start using the internet the same way we use government websites, log in, do the thing, log out.
I feel we are still living in this bubble that treats the internet as some sort of utopian democratic institution. For certain people with strong mental gating it can be the case. But I'd say it's a massive projection from intelligent technologists on the rest of humanity. Most people really need some guardrails to avoid becoming hopelessly addicted to the worst material.
I hope this creates pressure for new technologies and media that answer some of the problems of communication which the internet couldn't. I guess people will find new bubbles of anonymity like Signal/Whatsapp groups to get information and discuss. Hopefully which reward some degree of contribution and proper thinking. Revive the genuine social sphere rather than tuning into the corporate filtered simulacrum of a town square. The truth I've seen is that the current internet is pure poison to most minds, and anonymity is just one less bit of friction to mindlessness.
No, it won’t. The internet is just getting smaller from my perspective because there’s no way I’m handing over my identification and allowing every connection made to a server to be tracked back to me.
It’s simply not on the cards, and I live a frugal enough life in a high paying industry that I can retire in a few years. If I was willing to bank on inheritance then I could retire now.
I feel for the people that are forced to engage though. But too many of them simply don’t care about privacy, which is why we’re here.
Also a very good game, https://store.steampowered.com/app/239030/Papers_Please/
Better, official link https://papersplea.se/ since it has been released on multiple platforms
> you’re criticizing a powerful politician, or talking about your experiences with abuse or addiction, or discussing embarrassing medical issues you’re facing
This is not the problem. Even if, like millions, you are not talking about these things online, these systems still place you in danger. Even if you are a perfect, clean, compliant citizen these privacy-destroying systems place you in danger.
Fundamentally these systems expose you to coercion, extortion, blackmail, ID theft, etc. by criminals and immoral people who want money or power over you. There are countless examples of bad actors inside and outside these systems obtaining access to innocent people's private data and misusing it to their detriment.
This is the strongest argument against these bad ideas. Arguments that paint innocent, privacy-seeking people as suspicious or immoral in any way, should not be used.
It is rational and moral to seek privacy for your own safety and the safety of those you care for. Don't let them argue otherwise.
Sadly your take doesn’t matter since the other voting bloc is parents and people concerned about their kids.
I wish this resulted in techies spending more time to look at the substance of the harms playing out, however I see denial of the situation altogether more than anything else.
> these systems expose you to coercion, extortion, blackmail, ID theft, etc. by criminals and immoral people
I'd prefer to have safety from that regardless of privacy.
I think privacy is a stopgap semi-solution to those problems that might lessen the pressure to actually solve them in a reasonable manner.
What privacy? With the enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 it was game over. Were you not born then?
This seems more like a technical problem that we could actually solve well if we wanted to and had competent people advising the governments. You go to DMV and they generate a keypair and an entry in a DB. App looks up your age with your public key + signed private key authorization from you. Apps can ask for specific checks like is_over_21, is_citizen or whatever without any more data. Something like that, details are probably off ;) The whole infrastructure could be open source. Age verification doesn't need to equal identity verification by a 3rd party company that will leak your IDs.
None of this is necessary. First, the only devices that actually need to be gated are cell phones.
The user agent should simply send the user’s age of the parental lock is set up and the websites required to respect this.
Parental controls and the OS should be robust enough to not let kids bypass it (e.g.: by installing a browser that skips the header, or blocking proxy websites)
Done.
Cellphones only because those are the devices kids can have on them all the time and can easily use in private unsupervised.
Never underestimate the resolve of a teenager who is being kept from something they want. And once they solve it, they will spread the word for clout.
The system doesn't need to be impenetrable. There might even be legitimate reasons for kids to circumvent it.
They want it to equal identity verification! When virtually every top tech executive who wants a favor is at the inauguration and you have companies doing 180 degrees on support for something they previously furiously opposed, someone is getting something they wanted. It seems naive to think otherwise. Furthermore, the current administration in the U.S. fired or ignored the competent people to which you’re referring, and those people oppose a centralized repository of various metadata because it creates a central point of failure, otherwise known as a target, that is generally a bad idea for both our nation and our citizens. Of course there are agencies in the federal government that possess this information already, but they possess it for their purposes only. This is good because it means that it’s both more difficult to abuse internally in addition to being more cumbersome to collect externally.
It's a political problem, not a technical problem.
Yeah this is a basic problem that's been solved since the advent of PGP. As many other posters have said, this isn't about age verification.
There's still a whole DB matching IDs to keys waiting to be leaked. The US government can't even keep it's own personnel records safe and you think this won't get stolen and used to target people?
This still criminalizes sharing "adult" information with people who are not on the government's approved list (the things states do to crush dissent are not safe for children.)
why would any site on the internet need to give a damn about is_citizen? That's just gross to me at the mere suggestion. If it's a government service site, then they already know that information. If you're trying to use something like social media, then it couldn't possibly matter less.
To use frontier AI
There will be your internet-connected computer which will be assumed to be compromised, & which little, if anything of use will be kept on, & then there will be the airgapped system you do work on, which will probably be the last trusted version of a Linux distro you have multiple copies stashed away of. It will be a very old-fashioned experience, & moving/sharing data will become a dicey business.
Renaissance of LAN parties and SneakerNets?
Who'd have guessed hitting the library would become an act of rebellious defiance
How is hitting the library an act of rebellious defiance? Getting a library card requires an ID and proof of address. The library then tracks which books you've signed out. Unless you're reading the books inside the library without signing them out.
My library, at least, is fanatical about their patron's privacy.
I don't know what their retention time is on circulation records, but beyond aggregate statistics for culling materials that aren't circulating I bet it isn't too long. Now I want to go check.
My library also only keeps 24 hours of video surveillance because they didn't want to be able to fulfill requests from the cops for footage of patrons. I really liked that.
Edit: In the patron portal it permits me to disable "borrowing history" and says it permanently deletes my records. I do contract IT work for them so next time I'm engaged I'll ask about the details. They're moving to Koha later this year (free / open-source ILS) so I could go look at the code to see what it does (which is nice).
On the theme of their privacy fanaticism:
Over a decade ago the library got a grant to do outdoor public WiFi in the park behind their building. As part of that grant they needed to report the number of distinct users using the WiFi each day. Their UniFi controller tracks MAC addresses of associated stations. I used a query against the underlying MongoDB to get the usage reports to satisfy the grant.
To minimize the potential of tracking individual users the library director had me write a script to grovel thru MongoDB, do a SHA-1 hash of each public MAC address tracked concatenated with a randomly-generated salt for that day, then write back the first 48 bits of the hash over the original MAC. The library gets their daily statistics and long-term traffic trend data, they don't double-count associations for the same device in the same day, but they can't track individual people over a span of multiple days.
Now that devices randomly-generating MACs are mainstream it's much less necessary. I thought it was really cool she thought this. (The whole salting/hashing bit was my idea. She just wanted to be able to fulfill the grant reporting requirements amd be unable to track people.)
A library is supported by local property taxes, so requiring proof of residence serves a practical purpose. Of course they are going to track loaned books too. This is not the same thing, by any stretch. If they are somehow making that information available beyond the scope of the library system it is a breach of trust.
Start your own library.
Write your own books.
Make your own music.
My library card has no picture on it. Me and 100 of my closest friends could easily share the same card.
I'm pretty sure I didn't provide an address or an id when I got my library card.
In the US? I think you most likely need to provide proof of an address
I'm pretty sure I had to provide some proof of residency for a library card from my town or state in the US.
I think some will just limit the books you can take out at a time if you don't have proof.
What if you are homeless? Can you at least sit and read there?
Certainly, but I think you need to have a library card to use the computers.
I do see folks who look homeless using the computers, so I assume there must be a special accommodation for them.
But, if you’re just a regular middle class joe looking for anonymity on the internet, I don’t think the library is the place for you—it’s tied to your library card which knows your address, and anyway what would you want to be private that you would be ok to broadcast in an open library setting? Nobody watching corn or browsing whatever successor to Silk Road.
Usually the login screen says something about fairly restrictive terms of use, even for the WiFi on a personal device, and I don’t know if you can install software on the library computers.
When I look around at library patrons using the computers, it’s usually lower income folks applying to jobs or similar, and people playing chess.
You can. You just have to ignore all the privileged people being annoyed that they have to see you. They love posting on Nextdoor about how much they hate homeless people.
Do you know any librarians? Public libraries have always been a bit punk rock.
In your country maybe.. In mine it's super boring and intellectual
The punk rock is? I would be interested in checking that out! (/s)
Punk rock has always been right wing. Libraries are about as far from this as they can get.
>Punk rock has always been right wing.
What???
The anti-authoritarian, anti-government, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist music genre punk rock? Always right wing?
I mean, Nazis have always been attracted to punk because they like the loud noise but are too stupid to understand lyrics, but they tend to get their shit kicked in by punks more often than not. I don't think that's the same thing.
I've seen a lot of confidently incorrect takes on this site, but "punk rock is right wing" may be the worst.
It's just the web we're losing. The internet is still free. As for the web, good riddance, let's build something new.
The internet is not free. We've been running out of IP addresses for ages and most people don't have direct internet access these days so are completely dependent on man-in-the-middle servers. All it would take is a broad ban on VPN and end-to-end encryption. Governments have been wanting to ban strong encryption ever since the public got access to it in the 90s (see PGP/Zimmermann).
This just legitimises the existing practices. They already know who you are.
"just"?
Privacy or accountability, pick one. Everyone holds your identity or pointers to it. They - pinky promise - won’t weaponize it until it becomes advantageous or ordered by the government.
In the end someone has to be held accountable. Society does not work without accountability and never has. We were living in temporary illusory world made by nerds. Now the rest joins in.
I think it was Ethan Zuckerman who once said that Congress is ill-equipped and incompetent to solve this kind of problem and that we need to design systems that guarantee outcomes and cites Signal as an example. We need to have that mindset now: a clarion call to software engineers.
I can’t think of a better solution to the issue of children being so aggressively harmed by the internet. That doesn’t remove any of the problems associated with this.
It’s not just kids. Adults are having their brains fried on AI generated political videos online right now. The state of the internet is an absolute disaster.
An enormous portion of the world is effectively addicted to a drug.
Solution: Maximize the distance between yourself and the people
Rather than becoming a social outcast I’d rather support any proposed laws that take down the social media companies.
You can definitely drop social media and not become a social outcast. Group threads on Signal are great!
Parents taking responsibility for their kids.
I grew up in a neighborhood full of drug dealers. Street sellers, not the classy Walter White kind.
Ironically being on a computer all day kept me out of trouble.
But with these laws in place I guess you might as well start doing stupid ish in real life.
The thing is, those dealers can end up in jail for selling drugs.
More to the point, if a kid walked into a convenience store and the clerk sold them a pack of cigarettes, the clerk wouldn't get off the hook by claiming, "well, the parents are responsible for their kids." I'm also not sure how one would justify holding parents legally liable for crimes they played no role in committing.
I'm not saying that I agree with these laws. They appear to be taking things too far. But that has more to do with there being no clear way to define sites that are only of interest to adults (no gatekeeping needed) and sites that should be restricted to adults.
>I'm also not sure how one would justify holding parents legally liable for crimes they played no role in committing.
This is already a thing.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/charging-parents-for-childs...
Once upon a time they idea that Americans would surrender all of their God Given rights for an illusion of security was considered absurd, but that's where we're at.
I'm glad computers came in and saved you from your otherwise-inevitable life of cartel involvement, but I don't see what this has to do with the en-masse mental poisoning of children? I'm not even talking about politics yet. Cyber-bullying is insane.
Either way, I genuinely don't believe "let's just hope parents... start doing better?" is a solution.
Parents do need to do better.
Work on building self confidence.
My family relentlessly called me stupid and lazy to the point where a cyberbully would of been an upgrade.
You can always turn your phone off.
A lot of God awful parents treat their kids like trash and blame everyone else when Timmy doesn't get into Harvard.
Of all the people I've met with rough upbringings not a single one blamed anything outside of bad parenting.
Being a parent ( especially a step parent) is extremely hard.
100 years ago bad parents blamed dime novels.
50 years ago it was rock music.
So what happens when parents don't?
Too bad?
What happens when parents don’t lock the liquor cabinet? When they smoke in front of their kids? When they leave porn laying on the table?
Too bad!
>What happens when parents don’t lock the liquor cabinet? When they smoke in front of their kids? When they leave porn laying on the table?
The state can't control those things, it can control putting an age restriction on certain websites. Unless you are advocating for the complete abolition of all age restrictions throughout society.
You need an ID to access cigarettes and liquor and porn (from a physical store)...
My parents always kept a few bottles of wine in a cabinet in the living room. If 8 year old me wanted wine, I could have drunk a whole bottle while they were away and there was no way they could have stopped me. Yet I didn't drink my parents' wine, nor did I grow up alcoholic.
Kudos for resisting alcohol as an eight year old. How does that apply to all the kiddos whose lives are impacted by social media? Kind of a "them problem"?
How is it more like leaving a liquor cabinet open than not buckling them up with seatbelts?
I'm glad we're discussing parental liability. It seems no one else is advocating for "social media access is criminal neglect," so I appreciate the novelty.
I would love to have this be the argument. Parents would typically agree that giving your kids heroin, for instance, should result in prison time. Yet I doubt they would argue the same for social media! Perhaps there should be discussions about what neglect looks like with regards to internet access and whether or not we need societal boundaries around this, enforced via punishing parents, rather than punishing everyone.
Giving children access to social media should have the same parental neglect charges as giving them heroin.
The current strategy of yelling "parent's should parent" does nothing to influence any sort of result. It's simply ineffective and makes people who say it look like slogan slingers rather than cooperating in any meaningful change.
> Giving children access to social media should have the same parental neglect charges as giving them heroin.
This is probably the most interesting angle of discussion I’ve seen in the past few days on this topic.
Most people want to operate within the boundaries of their society.
A simple G/PG/PG-13/R header for websites would solve 97% of actual issues anyone could care to present. (violence, porn, etc)
Forcing people to identify themselves will not solve skinner boxes, gambling-for-children, focus-degrading slop, etc.
Bluey-themed slot machines are still harmful.
There is absolutely no privacy on the internet, Snowden told us 13 years ago but we all forgot.
The government already knows everything about us, and I mean everything. It is extremely naive to think they don't or that you are safe behind a VPN.
The government is largely incompetent about proactively sifting through vast amounts of information for relevant bits.
That’s minimal defense, but it’s worth remembering the difference between what it in theory knows and what its actually paying attention to.
There is a difference between the NSA knowing and being every petty burocrat being a trivial administrative subpoena away from everything.
Age verification is identity verification... except when it's in California or Illinois?
I'm pretty sure this is a "pick your poison" problem. We as a society are damned no matter what we do or do not do. For my part, we need to do something, because things are not fine the way they are, including the half ass Australian solution. We can't keep putting the onus on private enterprise to address social issues.
I may sound crazy for saying so, but I think the answer is more government run infrastructure for enabling identity-based operations, like payments and authentication, with rules about standards, open source, contractor selection, and audit that make operation transparent. It can work if technical operations are legislated instead of "left for the engineers to figure out." Then at least the evolution of systems can become real political issues that map to election cycles.
My stance is probably a polarizing one, but this is precisely why we need to be able to debate the minutae of these systems through our political discourse instead of just "will we; won't we" legislation. This should be debated in democratic process.
We could try investing in positive infrastructure that improves peoples life's in stead of creating the panopticon torment nexus. Things like third spaces where people can spend time is save spaces where they form communities and public transit so that people can get to those places. Incentivize positive behaviors instead of closing off public spaces and pricing more and more people out of being able to do anything with the minuscule amount of free time they have besides going on the internet.
That sounds like a great idea, but I think we should also try to solve human trafficking online.
Creating a surveillance state isn't going to solve human trafficing.
As the parent poster pointed out, doing nothing and pretending this doesn’t happen doesn’t fly anymore.
I guess, welcome to the middle age of tech? The part where you have to pick up the pieces and clean up the mess that you see around you.
And yet as the article mentioned, the "problem" is a lie... an excuse to justify the surveillance state.
I think the lie is to look at the problems we have that the internet has enabled and say "things are ok as they are don't try to do anything to solve it."
If the problem is "social media bad for kids" then any parent that allows their children to access social media is as guilty of abuse or neglect as a parent that lets them play in traffic. Throw the parents in prison and put the kids in foster care. Problem solved.
If you think any attempt at a solve goes immediately to 11, sure, but I hope you believe in nuance or else we’re all lost.
That is a bold statement to make, and I wonder how many more people would be willing to make the same statement whenever these conversations come up on HN.
How is it any different from being required to identify yourself to get a phone or electricity account? Identifying yourself on the internet is long overdue.
Thought experiment: How do you get a phone or electricity in the most impoverished, backwards parts of the USA?
You need to identify yourself to the phone and electricity utilities so they know where to send your monthly bill. My ISP knows my name because I pay them for connectivity. I am okay with this.
If I misbehave here, dang can just ban me. There's no reason HN needs to know my real name. The only reason to mandate blanket age and identity verification is to control online speech.
You aren't required to identify yourself to get a phone. You can get a prepaid phone with no ID.
You are required to identify yourself for an electricity account because it is essentially extending you credit. You use the electricity first, and then they bill you for it later. They also only identify the person who is receiving the bill. You could have a house with a dozen people in it but the electric company only knows the name of the person responsible for the bill.
You are free to identify yourself on the internet right now. People who are intelligent and/or believe in freedom and free speech are opposed to this authoritarian power grab.
> You aren't required to identify yourself to get a phone. You can get a prepaid phone with no ID.
Requiring ID to buy a prepaid SIM card has become the norm across the developed world. There are still a few holdout countries, but they won’t hold out for long.
> You aren't required to identify yourself to get a phone. You can get a prepaid phone with no ID.
Not in Australia
privacy online is already largely gone
I hold an unpopular opinion here, but well regulated digital IDs might not be a benefit to us all.
Almost all big tech giants are frankly paper tigers (can I survive without facebook, sure, without next day delivery, harder, without banking or secure ways to talk to my utility providers, waaay harder.
Having a way to get rid of bots that sour our Online discussions, lovely. To reduce billion in bank fraud, sounds great.
I feel as privacy advocates we need to be clear on the difference between secrecy (that’s gone unless you stay offline.) and privacy (your neighbour knows you are having sex in the afternoons but does not say anything.
This was in part caused by the general public’s comfort with federated identity for OAuth. If everyone already has one anyway (the thinking may go), why not mandate it?
it is the fight, but the game is already over.
what do people think the billions of billions of pattern matching used in ads will be used for?
people think 'anonymous' credentialing will work here?
they've captured scroll patterns, typing patterns, language patterns, all sorts of fingerprinting.
the game unfortunately is basically already over.
> * whether you’re protected from hackers or data breaches*
Not a matter of if, but when, a breach happens.
Is a 10% reduction that bad?
The discussion is not about whether it's a good or bad idea, but whether we will yield the power to these people to ratchet in further oppressive laws onto formerly free countries.
Tech companies should ignore it and just publicly name whoever attempts to prosecute them and see how the population responds. I think people today are orders of magnitude more informed about their privacy and the consequences of digital ID laws. A few countries are on the edge of revolt at the moment anyway, and this would be a good way to get young people into the streets.
20 years ago, people would have had no defense against it or understanding of what was being imposed on them. Today, normal people use Signal and encrypted messengers, faraday bags, and leave their phones at home. Where we were nerdy security guys back then, non-technologist women and girls use spy tradecraft level electronic opsec for their own safety and security from middle school. People are much more sophisticated about their privacy now. They're ready to take this on.
The laws coming into force are on people who are not in favour of them, and I'm so optimistic that I will not interrupt the enemies of privacy and human dignity while they are making a mistake.
>Tech companies should ignore it and just publicly name whoever attempts to prosecute them
The most powerful tech companies are in favor of this.
try out nostr instead of just complaining and whining
The internet is dieing just like mobile phones before that. Correction: mobiles were stillborn due to no open standards or O/S. Cant even buy a modern TV without privacy concerns -- lel.
So everyone is on the same page on this issue. The First Amendment is the right to anonymous free speech. I doubt they teach it in the govt schools but the Federalist papers, which argued for the US Constitution, was published anonymously.
my toaster is about to ask for my social security number
I'm not sure "social media" is the best example. You've never had complete freedom of speech on there.
It's been true for decades in the USA that if they want to arrest you, they will. The age verification doesn't make this situation better, but at this point it's almost just a formality.
Freedom of speech is contextually misunderstood. It's about political speech and the commons. Social Media is overwhelmingly private space, subject to contract terms and conditions. It may be a de-facto commons to some people but I do not believe this axiomatically, or legally makes it so, for the purposes of law and constitution. Law and constitutional bounds on speech online hit the international nature of the media very quickly.
Extra-territorial issue are huge here. What is the limit of the boundary on a given nations constitution and law? How much does the economy of the user, the hosting company, the owning company, the receiving parties matter?
Social Media has advertising and publishers. It has people who can effect editorial control over what is seen and by who and to who it is "said" -And that imposes obligations on them, and on people lodging content. Differentially depending on their economy, the reach of law, registration of legally incorporated entities.
All of this is being implemented somewhat haphazardly internationally, enforced differently, subject to legal and financial and social pressures differently depending on the times and the context.
If you want to ask questions about America, about Americans, using American companies, speaking to Americans, believe me you don't neccessarily have a simpler task here. It may well be clearer to some of you, but to me, its just as fraught.
It's just not clear to me "free speech" is the bastion rule which applies here. The EFF may think so, I don't think they have actually demonstrated it all the way to the end.
And we all know why lolberts are worried about kids and privacy online... Regret voting for Trump yet, chuds? You can't hide once we know who you are.
Have you ever heard the joke, how do you know if someone does CrossFit? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you
In my experience Trump supporters aren’t exactly quiet about it.
All I can say is I will never vote for any politician who votes for any form of this. Even if the bill fails to pass, they will never, ever get my vote.
My Google account is 21 years old already. Is that enough of a proof?
Interesting trivia: 90% of people don’t know the definition of decimate
This would never be used to do evil of course...
Singing: nobody wants this everybody hates you! Governments burning their capital hard to try to prove what tough guys they are against the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.
Wait till someone liberates all this poorly protected data
if i run a pain vanilla website with no need for user accounts, do i have to age verify? will icann also ask for id when i register a new domain?
The internet will just stop being the "cool place". Young people will need to find some other avenue or medium to congregate away from their nannies' watchful eyes. That has been the one constant across the multiple technological revolutions we've had in the last few decades, younger generations looking for a place to call their own. Meta, etc. obviously know this, hence the "metaverse" and AI slop. But what they refuse to believe is that it can't be manufactured and forced top-down, it needs to be bottom-up.
My privacy is already decimated. For 2 decades we’ve already known about the NSA slurping up everything[1] on top of the Snowden leaks.
Then you have the mega corps like Facebook who can figure out every detail about you even from merely _not_ using their system because of the hole you leave in your social network that does use them.
The only privacy left is from anonymous troll farms claiming to be an American while talking about how the Texas oblast is valuable for its warm water ports.
I am fine for privacy on consumption of content, but you should be forced to identify yourself for posting so the common man at least has a chance to evaluate your statements instead of being misled, all while, as stated above, our governments and corporations don’t have that limitation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
> ...you should be forced to identify yourself for posting...
The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the right to anonymous speech is inherent in the first amendment [1] [2]. See also The Federalist Papers or Common Sense, without which the US might not exist at all.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/362/60
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-986.ZO.html
That’s pre the ability for foreign actors to engage in our public square en masse. I think technology has changed the situation.
Free speech absolutism that ends up in creating an environment where real speech is drowned out by lies is not valuable to me. It’s like the paradox of tolerance.
The first amendment doesn't have a clause that exempts Americans from anonymous speech if it's possible a foreigner could inadvertently take advantage of the freedom too.
You may as well advocate for no one to be allowed to drive cars because of the possibility of someone getting into a car accident.
Or (in case you're a fan of the second amendment) - advocate for guns not being allowed to be sold to law-abiding citizens because of the possibility of the gun later working its way into the hands of someone who would use it for a mass shooting.
Freedoms exist with the understanding that both positive and negative consequences can result from them. The argument is that the good vastly out-weighs the bad and are worth preserving.
> The first amendment doesn't have a clause that exempts Americans from anonymous speech if it's possible a foreigner could inadvertently take advantage of the freedom too.
Cool, ignore my point about technology changing the situation. I assume you’ll ignore Jefferson talking about how the constitution should be changed every 19-20 years because the world changed.
> You may as well advocate for no one to be allowed to drive cars because of the possibility of someone getting into a car accident.
That’s the literal reality with mandated car insurance. If you don’t have car insurance you can be banned from driving. What was your point here?
> Or (in case you're a fan of the second amendment) - advocate for guns not being allowed to be sold to law-abiding citizens because of the possibility of the gun later working its way into the hands of someone who would use it for a mass shooting.
I’m not an advocate for the 2nd amendment since the majority of people I’ve met advocating for it as a defense against tyranny are full throated proponents for the tyrannical leaders because they don’t like the cultural norms of anyone outside their tribe. I can’t think of a single 2nd amendment advocate who is ready to stand up to the government against rights violations and would be happy to hear from you of an example.
> Freedoms exist with the understanding that both positive and negative consequences can result from them. The argument is that the good vastly out-weighs the bad and are worth preserving.
Yea, the freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. Freedom of speech to explicitly lie like Steve Bannon organized and many others using the “flood the zone” strategy seems to the be at the end of my nose. If you are actively lying to manipulate me or others knowledge of reality, that is not feee speech, that’s Machiavellian manipulation.
> Cool, ignore my point about technology changing the situation. I assume you’ll ignore Jefferson talking about how the constitution should be changed every 19-20 years because the world changed.
The Constitution doesn't have a "except when technology gets advanced enough" clause either. I checked.
You wanting the Constitution to change is something else entirely - and that's not what you're advocating for.
> That’s the literal reality with mandated car insurance. If you don’t have car insurance you can be banned from driving. What was your point here?
I fail to see what car insurance analogizes to here.
>Yea, the freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. Freedom of speech to explicitly lie like Steve Bannon organized and many others using the “flood the zone” strategy seems to the be at the end of my nose. If you are actively lying to manipulate me or others knowledge of reality, that is not feee speech, that’s Machiavellian manipulation.
Speech is not violence. Comparing it to violence diminishes the suffefing and harm faced by people who have been a victim of violence.
You have the freedom to pay attention to whatever you want to - as do media outlets and political consultants.
Why should the entire country suffer because the media frequented by political-news-saturated people is so easily disatractable? They have the option to just...not...cover irrelevant nonsense.
It's not the option they choose to take though. See: The reflecting pool news cycle.
we can design better online spaces, the incentives are not currently aligned
And I _can_ climb to the top of Mount Everest theoretically but it’s highly unlikely given the real world constraints.
I’d prefer a pragmatic solution and there is no pragmatic solution that gives us privacy back given the government and megacorps ability to pierce the vast majority of forms of privacy. The only thing anonymous speech is getting us currently is being manipulated by bad actors who are lying about their position.
I fundamentally do not want a world where I get the bad ends of both sides of semi anonymous speech where the government and megacorps know everything about me, but I just have to trust the account I am speaking to isn’t a bot or a worker in some foreign psyop shop, or even domestic psyop shop, lying to me.
I do not value free speech if it functionally disabled via the amount of lies permeating it. Free speech is useless if it’s nothing but a sea of “flood the zone” lies with the intent to make the truth unknowable, like how Russia or actors like Steve Bannon have manipulated the public square to be.
So much bad speech / misinformation is not anonymous, look at the kind of stuff the US President, Admin, and Gov't are proud posting, or the left/right-wing influencers. Forcing "papers please" on everyone is not going to meaningfully change the situation (imo). It will give the autocrats an inch and then they will take more. Eventually they will be able to police online speech.
---
From: On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, Chapter 1 title & intro
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
https://ia801505.us.archive.org/11/items/on-tyranny-twenty-l...
I am not obeying in advance. My privacy was obliterated with the government before I could even vote, with the data science of mega corps, and with the double digit number of times companies leaked my data based on have I been pwned numbers.
I am not under the impression I have any sort of privacy on the internet anymore, other than from other regular civilians.
What I have to deal with is bots, foreign actors, and domestic actors all flooding the zone with lies that I cannot discern from the truth but that companies and the government can.
Making posting a non anonymous activity equalizes the playing field between me and governments/corporations.
If you are arguing that we should keep this thin skin of anonymity that doesn’t stop the bad actors, then I assume you just want them to keep power or that you don’t actually believe that they have managed to track our behavior.
I disagree because the people who have the most important things to say have the most to lose by saying it.
Also anonymity can actually improve social media polarization (see Chris Bail’s research)
Can you link said research? I have never seen anything but division pushed by anonymity.
Also again, the corporations and governments(for certain levels of government like the members of the Five Eyes) can pierce this veil of anonymity, the people who have a lot to lose already are risking it by speaking.
Edit: this also isn’t a newly diagnosed phenomena, I remember seeing this satirical description of the behavior as a kid back when Web 2.0 and social media was starting to change the internet[1]
[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
> My privacy is already decimated. For 2 decades we’ve already known about the NSA slurping up everything[1] on top of the Snowden leaks.
If you were correct, there would be no need for them to push these new laws. The fact is, you will have less privacy after these identification requirements are fully enforced.
What scary me a lot, is the amount of people here or in real life that are not concerned about that, and that are like "it is to protect the children, so whatever it is, it worth it. And what else we can do?". And often it goes on with things like "anyway, social media are bad, they ruin people even adult, so good thing". Literally they all look like repeating a carefully crafted propaganda without that much more deep thinking.
Basically, to mean it is brain rot. The problem is that it might concern a big part of the population and that is why we have such laws.
To me, it is exactly what was described in G. Orwell "Animal farm" book. Pigs are now in control and big part of the crowd are "sheeps".
Afterward, we always have hard time to understand how people could have let Nazi, Stasi, or Stalin come in power and do such awful things. But it never came in one day, and with the "i don't care, they probably now better" attitude of the current western country populations, you understand easily how all of that could have happened in a first place.
In the recent, and most recent history, let's not forget what happened to Putin's Russia. Russia was opening and on a very good course for individual freedom and rights, then a ex-KGB officer took control of the power and little by little, year after year, suppressed freedom, privacy, and opposition to reach the point of today where the country is a total nightmare for human rights and liberty.
Mate, you have to revise your stance on Russia, more people are imprisoned annually in the UK for speaking than people in Russia in a decade. The UK banned RT while you can access any western propaganda outpost from within Russia.
You’re on Hacker News, this website is known for attracting open minded free thinkers that do not fall under the influence of government financed propaganda. Learn and reassess your thoughts.
Anything to close Pandora's box. "They" liked the eras they could control the communications, and therefore the narrative. Boomers on their last legs, question is, will the future undo the unjustness that was forced upon them? Restore the rungs of the ladders that were removed, so they could have a chance too? Or are they going to stay in the fear narrative, and make this tragedy worse?
Maybe it will kill social media? And maybe that's a good thing?