Comment by croes
11 hours ago
Luckily it’s already possible to verify your age without actually giving out any data like your birthdate
11 hours ago
Luckily it’s already possible to verify your age without actually giving out any data like your birthdate
And without having to trust that the government isn't keeping track of every request for age verification?
I'd be curious how that might work as I haven't yet seen a zero-trust age verification system.
The age verification proposal of the EU tries to do that, the government knows you used age verification (and I think the rough number of times you used it), but they don't know when or where you used it.
https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
I can't imagine countries with such strict speech laws, for example, would be willing to build a system that is technically incapable of linking the person visiting a sire and the site requesting verification.
This proposal may have been updated since I read it previously, so I could be wrong now, but it didn't read as a true zero-knowledge proof as key steps in the flow still required a level of trusting the government as the central authority to do the right thing and not track requests, both today and in the future.
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The EU passing a law about the internet? What could possibly go wrong?
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See eg. BBS+[1]. Proofs that preserve anonymity are generated locally and neither the verifier nor issuer can determine the user based on these (in scenarios of non PII signals like age thresholds), while still allowing the verifier to validate it's issuer approved.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231456
Not to a service that only accepts such data as proof.
Steam thinks I was born Jan 1, 1970. Not that I needed to lie when I did my age verification back 15 years ago, I just randomly scrolled the year down and selected one.
As the years have marched on, though, that "birthdate" becomes significantly closer to my real birthday.
Only when chatting in a large channel at work, did I realise nearly 1/3 of the people there also set theirs as 1/1/1970. Which I presume is the first date that phisers will try to enter to reset people's accounts.
I am fully aware that my standard fake birthday is now used by me in some many places, that I have started to have a fake fake birhday. I should really just randomise and store it in my password manager.
But obviously the context of this OP story ruins all that.
> As the years have marched on, though, that "birthdate" becomes significantly closer to my real birthday.
I understand there's a clever phrasing here but I didn't get it. English is only my second language.
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That doesn't make any sense, your fake age increases every year just like your real age.
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