Comment by lambdaone

I'm very much in favour of blocking children from social media - it's an absolutely vile cesspit of cognitive addiction, bullying and social (and potential sexual) abuse. But none of it requires a mass-surveillance network to be put in place.

Just for one example; it would be trivial for Apple and Google to put age estimation on my phone, verify it on opening the web browser and provide a zero-knowledge proof of age to websites in a way that does not reveal my identity. All the infrastructure is already there, and it's relatively trivial to turn it on. The downside is that this will only work for people who are older than about 25 because of the uncertainty of face-to-age recognition, but it would be a start.

Another way to do it is for my bank, who know my age already, providing a similar credential that I can feed into the zero-knowledge proof engine on the phone.

This was all done properly for the covid tracking apps, at a time when the phone providers actually wanted to do tracking with anonymity - this is a similar problem, and it's easily cracked by technical means.

And you don't even need zero knowledge proofs if you perform on-device content detection - turn it on for kids, keep it off for adults. Modern phones have more than enough TPU capacity to do this.

But none of the actual implementations I've seen are truly anonymizing, and they all rely on trusting some really dodgy companies with your identity and browsing habits. Yes, the more respectable ones have security and privacy policies that are audited, but will they always? The cynical answer is "no", because history shows that someone will always do something sooner or later if (a) it makes money, and (b) they can get away with it.

Everything I see suggests that the desire for mass surveillance is the driver, and the "protect the children" front on this is a strategem by the people who are really driving this from behind the curtain. There are huge amounts of money to be made by capturing verifiable, blackmailable, personal data, and this is a magic money fountain for those who will be able to mine it.