For the record, I'm not actually against age verification for certain content. But it would have to be:
1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access) and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated requests or is the same user on other services).
2) widely available and extremely easy to register and integrate.
The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or cheap to integrate. And the measures they say they will accept are trivially easy to bypass - so what's the point?
I worked in a startup that satisfied point 1 back in 2015. The widely available bit didn't come off though when we ran out of runway.
Age verification should be done at the point of buying a laptop or a SIM card, the same way as when you buy alcohol. And there would be no need to send your ID to a company so that it ends up on the black market eventually.
Add to that
3) Verifiable to a lay person that the system truly has those properties, with no possibility of suddenly being altered to no longer have those properties without it exceedingly obvious.
This whole concept runs into similar issues as digital voting systems. You don't need to just be anonymous, but it must be verifiably and obviously so — even to a lay person (read your grandma with dementia who has never touched a computer in her life). It must be impossible to make changes to the system that remove these properties without users immediately notice.
The only reason why paper identification has close to anonymous properties is the fallibility of human memory. You won't make a computer with those properties.
It's easy to demonstrate (3) for an age verification system - practical experience will amply demonstrate it to everyone.
Voting is very different - you do need to be able to demonstrate the fairness of the process verifiably to everyone - not just crypto nerds. Age verification - well, some people might get around it, but if it generally seems to work that is good enough.
there's some irony that the EU is set to have a fairly anonymous solution like next year. they could have waited or tried to use similar tech for this, in theory
Important to note: Their anonymous solution is reported to be temporary until their digital ID system is released[1], which does not offer that same anonymity, but rather functions as a server-side OpenID-based authentication system.[2] While you can share only your age with an online service, it still creates an authorization token, which appears to remain persistent until manually removed by the user in the eID app. This would give the host of that authentication system (EU and/or governments) the ability to see which services you have shared data with, as well as a token linked to your account/session at that service. There is also no guarantee that removing an authorization will actually delete all that data in a non-recoverable way from the authentication system's servers.
China is doing great. Not saying the UK will do well, just that authoritarian regimes can be successful as states although not great for the commoners.
China only started doing great when they relaxed their ultra-centralized economic rules a little bit in the 1990s.
Read business books and news from the 80's - 90's, and they almost never mention China - it's all Germany, UK, Japan, USA. The stats tell the same story - China spent half a century going nowhere fast.
After liberalizing their economy, China spent the 90's quietly growing, and only started making real waves in the news around 2000.
All this to say that economic authoritarianism has never worked and there's no reason to suppose that the social kind is going to fare any better for anyone either.
Economic liberalism isn't really relevant to the question of social authoritarianism. While an enterprising individual in guangzhou can sell whatever he wants to the world without much state involvement, he can't really go around discussing Tibetan sovereignty for example.
You mean have companies and organization comply with regulations and having their complaints ignored? I think that's what's happening right now.
For the record, I'm not actually against age verification for certain content. But it would have to be:
1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access) and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated requests or is the same user on other services).
2) widely available and extremely easy to register and integrate.
The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or cheap to integrate. And the measures they say they will accept are trivially easy to bypass - so what's the point?
I worked in a startup that satisfied point 1 back in 2015. The widely available bit didn't come off though when we ran out of runway.
Age verification should be done at the point of buying a laptop or a SIM card, the same way as when you buy alcohol. And there would be no need to send your ID to a company so that it ends up on the black market eventually.
Add to that 3) Verifiable to a lay person that the system truly has those properties, with no possibility of suddenly being altered to no longer have those properties without it exceedingly obvious.
This whole concept runs into similar issues as digital voting systems. You don't need to just be anonymous, but it must be verifiably and obviously so — even to a lay person (read your grandma with dementia who has never touched a computer in her life). It must be impossible to make changes to the system that remove these properties without users immediately notice.
The only reason why paper identification has close to anonymous properties is the fallibility of human memory. You won't make a computer with those properties.
It's easy to demonstrate (3) for an age verification system - practical experience will amply demonstrate it to everyone.
Voting is very different - you do need to be able to demonstrate the fairness of the process verifiably to everyone - not just crypto nerds. Age verification - well, some people might get around it, but if it generally seems to work that is good enough.
1 reply →
there's some irony that the EU is set to have a fairly anonymous solution like next year. they could have waited or tried to use similar tech for this, in theory
Important to note: Their anonymous solution is reported to be temporary until their digital ID system is released[1], which does not offer that same anonymity, but rather functions as a server-side OpenID-based authentication system.[2] While you can share only your age with an online service, it still creates an authorization token, which appears to remain persistent until manually removed by the user in the eID app. This would give the host of that authentication system (EU and/or governments) the ability to see which services you have shared data with, as well as a token linked to your account/session at that service. There is also no guarantee that removing an authorization will actually delete all that data in a non-recoverable way from the authentication system's servers.
[1] https://itdaily.com/news/security/eu-temporary-app-age-verif...
[2] https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-presentations-1...
1 reply →
This is about the Category 1 duties arriving by 2027, not this year's tranche of rules (such as age gating).
Interesting - do you have a link to it?
2 replies →
China is doing great. Not saying the UK will do well, just that authoritarian regimes can be successful as states although not great for the commoners.
China only started doing great when they relaxed their ultra-centralized economic rules a little bit in the 1990s.
Read business books and news from the 80's - 90's, and they almost never mention China - it's all Germany, UK, Japan, USA. The stats tell the same story - China spent half a century going nowhere fast.
After liberalizing their economy, China spent the 90's quietly growing, and only started making real waves in the news around 2000.
All this to say that economic authoritarianism has never worked and there's no reason to suppose that the social kind is going to fare any better for anyone either.
Economic liberalism isn't really relevant to the question of social authoritarianism. While an enterprising individual in guangzhou can sell whatever he wants to the world without much state involvement, he can't really go around discussing Tibetan sovereignty for example.
1 reply →
Success of authoritarian regimes depends on the competence (and alignment) of the leadership. Not something we have much of here.