Comment by j2kun
21 hours ago
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.
> 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.
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But could you not set up a system where you need to go get (for free) a limited use token at a physical location, or have them mailed to your home, and they have a rough geographical lock? If a bunch of those tokens start appearing in random locations, it is a good indication that someone is reselling them to minors? I'm not saying this is idiot proof, but what could go wrong?
There is a way to prevent this (or at least slow it down), but that way requires device integrity protection.
With integrity protection, tokens can only be minted with a government app, driven by both biometrics and physical human hands touching the physical screen. There's no way to do it in the background. Without it, you can indeed have a single activist mint 10 billion tokens and give them out for free, defeating the entire scheme.
There's a CAP-style triangle here. You can have age assurance and anonymity but lose the ability to run your own software, have age assurance and device control but lose anonymity (via traditional ID checks, which don't require IP in theory), or have anonymity and device control but lose age assurance.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Trusted computing solves this problem handily.
Kids shred these schemes. The designers of them seem to forget that the social dynamics of the adult world are completely different - just one kid needs to figure out how to bypass the system, and the knowledge spreads like wildfire.
Example: schools banned phones, so kids switched to talking over Google docs:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hotte...
If we give parents better tools to limit and monitor internet access, kids will just buy a used phone which is unregulated. If their parents even bother to use the tools in the first place (it is my impression most parents do not). There is also a lot of loopholes parents do not even think of (like a web browser on a game console).
having kids fiddle around with alternative means and schemes of communication might well turn out to be an intellectual and academic net positive.
> 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.)
> Is the child going to inform on themselves? No. Is the adult, when they don't even know about it?
In the context of social media, if they want to actively participate they have to given that it's the entire point. It's true that even with a government ID scheme people could borrow someone's ID to get passive access with their consent. But a kid couldn't share an account with a parent without that parent knowing because you see their activity, and they also couldn't post.
This is where social media and other sites' endless datamining and profiling will come back to bite them. These sites already know the age range of users to a very high degree of certainty, and can continue to obtain such in an ongoing fashion. If an underage person is using these sites, it's likely going to be because the store clerk just nodded and winked, instead of because they were genuinely fooled by a borrowed or fraudulent ID. And in that case, the clerk is the one facing the penalties.
Put the burden of responsibility on the sites themselves and the number of people that will be able to successfully bypass such restrictions is going to be negligible and largely depend upon ongoing inorganic behavior or being an outlier in terms of behavior/interests.
Even more significant than the means are the ends. Why does my government get to decide what is appropriate for children?
This sounds a lot like what governance is supposed to be, but there is a critical difference. It's one thing for our society to agree generally on categories that are inappropriate for children, to encode those into law, and to enforce those laws. The difference is, enforce to whom?
Children are victims, not perpetrators. Age verification restates a child's role as perpetrator. This is the premise that I find unacceptable.
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
> The entire point of age verification systems is to prevent minors from accessing certain resources.
Then why are they forbidding VPNs?
This is clearly NOT a use case that is solely referring to minors.
The whole cake is a lie and so is your assumption that age sniffing is "to protect children".
> Keep dreaming of a technological solution
We don't "dream" - we know what is possible and what is not.
Mass surveillance of everyone is simply not an option.
> Let individual parents decide on the level of harm that they are willing to accep
Nobody has an issue IF it were about individual parents, but it clearly is not. Governments try to criminalize and restrict everyone - and that is the true agenda.
> 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 problem is, this is wrong. What these governments want to do is get a grip on online behavior, through actions against individuals, who can't/won't defend themselves, rather than through actions against gigantic corporations that may choose litigation and take years to change their behavior, if they do at all.
Governments want to declare something illegal, say downloading a movie, putting racist comments online, ... then catch everyone who engages in that behavior online through mandatory identification, and actually have an effect.
To do this, breaking privacy is, of course, a core requirement. This can be introduced into these systems afterwards ("judge X wants to know who authenticated with token <token>, please provide the information"). Without this, government rules will remain totally ineffective online like they have been in the last 40 years.
I personally much prefer government rules remaining totally ineffective online.
> What these governments want to do
I feel strongly that this conspiratorial mind-reading approach to this sort of issue is just counterproductive.
What all the governments (and non-governments, frankly, there are many supporters of these things) are asking for is excluding minors from certain websites and services.
The problem is that this translates to age verification, which translates to identify verification, which incidentally gives states and other actors a variety of other tools they can use for anti-civil-liberties purposes.
In the end their motives are just irrelevant unless there is a clear way to exclude minors from certain services without going down the chain towards identity verification. Such a way does not exist, so we have to fight it here, at the point where the basic ask emerges.
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.
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> 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.
>charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor
In most countries it's perfectly legal to provide alcohol to your kids.
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.
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> 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'm really sorry, but that's giving politicians far to much credit for being able to plan ahead.
Look at both the UK and the USA. The UK's just yeeted its PM because he had the personality of a block of cheese. The USA is currently inches away from shooting people if they mention the word green and water in DC. None of that screams "I am a master at planning ahead and manipulating public opinion in to doing x"
The politicians have no idea about how this all works, they see that "social media" is causing harm (its not the only source, we might get to that) The public, especially in the UK really do not like americanised media being forced in their faces and want "something to be done"
Again for the UK specifically the OSA specifically didn't layout a government mechanism for age verification. they left it to the end company to avoid the suggestion of tracking. Despite it being ripe for uberfraud and blackmail.
it would be much more private if ofcom had published an opensource gateway to anonymously authenticate against. (assuming the thing was built properly and verified)
But to the point you are hinting at
Google, meta, apple and $OS makers already track you. This is not an issue of privacy persay, its about who can track you and why. I'd much rather a list of times I access a site that required age verification being stored by the government, than every single fucking page I looked at tracked by google/meta.
The latter is already here.
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That's why they are still appealing to sentiment rather than established research (which actively refutes the arguments they are making).
which begs the question, In preparation for what?
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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.
> I don't understand why we suddenly think that's the end of civilization.
Because they've been told to think it by the combined forces of Meta and the Heritage Project. They spelled it all out in Project 2025, a check list which has been followed nearly to the letter. They're also rampaging through libraries and trying to keep books of the shelves.
Conservatives don't like porn, because controlling sexuality is part of the cult playbook to control people. (Addendum: they don't like other people having it. They're hypocrites, of course.) They also want to, while instituting a backdoor ban on porn, define everything else they don't like as pornography. Project 2025 repeatedly uses the term "pornographic" as a synonym for for LGBT issues and other things.
The goal, after de-anonymizing the Internet, is specifically to control access to information and entrench their fascist Overton window shift.
They're really sore that many Millennials and Gen Z had the internet as an escape hatch from local, abusive churchy bubbles and want that locked down going forward.
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> 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.
Were they delivered to you in truckload volumes every day, including tapes recording executions, child molestation, foreign political propaganda, domestic political propaganda and misleading advertisements?
Every day, any day, unlimited quantities? Including giving your phone number to any strangers anywhere in the world so they can talk to you without limits, supervision or even parental knowledge?
No?
Then let's perhaps stop pretending that millenial internet free childhood is a thing that exists and let's talk about actual modern issues.
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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
They very much aren't good enough yet. I'm a highly technical user and have had to move to using MDM tools to actually have something that works reliably.
Why would you want to lock condoms?
Have you missed the recent moral panic about the declining birth rates of white children? Brought to you by the same people who hate pronouns [0], trans people, and/or covid vaccines. In such a world, condoms will be required for non-whites (or race mixing relationships) and forbidden to aryan/white couples.
Notes:
0 - For an example of using 2 pronouns in one sentence: "I am he".
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2018%3A6-8...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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>The parents job is to keep their kids out of trouble.
I challenge that anyone believes this, and for my evidence, I would submit all the age based laws that protect children regardless of what parents do.
We have already, long ago, decided that it is the government's job to protect children, at least in cases where parents fail to do an adequate job. That's why I don't see this ending any other way. The march to total domination by the side of the government might be slow, but they already won the war around a century ago (exact timeline for laws protecting children in place of parents is a very long topic and does differ country to country, I recall hearing some places still even let kids buy alcohol if they say it is for their parents to consume).
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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.
> For those parents life is easier if nobody is allowed on these things.
Get over it, and stop caring how other people parent their kids. Or, better yet, learn from them.
...parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns...
No they're not - all those things are illegal for children nearly everywhere.
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.
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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.
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> 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.
> 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!
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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)
>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.
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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.
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>In what direction
Checkpoint Charlie directly ahead, not that far down the road.
If you venture into No Man's Land you could be shot on sight.
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.
they want to isolate gay and trans children from other gay and trans people. don't you know, there's social contagion afoot, but if we protect y^Wour children from this inherently sexual (and thus adult) content, we can prevent it. this is enough to make me oppose age verification wholesale. I don't care if there's fancy ZKPs, it's still going to be used to isolate and harm hundreds of thousands of vulnerable trans kids, who are already experiencing astronomically elevated suicide rates over the past few years. they don't need more of this.
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.
I've noticed that tech people will respond to an encroachment on civil rights with a technological alternative. I think this is a mistake, because the excuse is presented in bad faith, and to present an alternative is to accept their framing. The correct response is something to the effect of "I know what you're trying to do, fuck off."
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.
EU is (trying at least) go in that direction with Zero Knowledge Proof:
https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/archit...
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.
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Governments are serious about knowing who’s doing what online, and all this age verification is just an excuse. It will also raise the barrier to entry for newcomers in the market, so it’s convenient for platform owners as well.
Let's remember that this will greatly help ad attribution as well, enriching the platform owners. This reveals that their incentives are aligned against privacy.
Both Governments and industry players are, in actuality, interested in and moving in this direction, for some use cases. ex https://docs.withpersona.com/relay
None of this is really about age verification, the goal is for it to be invasive so a real ID can be connected to every piece of speech online.
> 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?
> There are at least some technological solutions
I think the main takeaway is that the concept of such verifications is fundamentally incompatible with privacy. Today we have a simple "are you an adult" check but who is to say we wouldn't want further levels of segmentation (legal age to drive, age to allow health insurance etc)?
And this just one signal. Nobody likes the EU cookie/consent prompts but what they've shown us is that most websites are perfectly happy to fingerprint you the moment you step on their pages, and then share/broker your activity with hundreds and thousands of "legitimate interest" partners of theirs.
So the real-world equivalent of this situation is that you walk on the street and whenever you need to wait for a traffic light, board a bus or the tube, go into a shop, etc... you have a security person who needs to faceID(or fingerprint) you and make you wait until they find a match of your profile... and then they ask you to present your ID (which you have to carry at all times) but hey, it's private because you need to enter your PIN for them to read the chip.
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.
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.
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?
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> that it's basically just be another government issued "thing" that they have to know about and be able to produce when requested
During COVID, there were protests about "vaccine passports" and masks. My state legislature tried introducing bills that would outlaw such things. In 2024, in several states (including mine), legislators introduced bills that would outlaw mRNA (and every vaccine made from it) [0]. REAL ID took almost 2 decades to get every state to implement it until the feds threatened to close all (commercial) airports in states refusing to implement it.
Notes:
0 - every year one of my legislators introduces a bill to outlaw chemtrails. This year, he added the plot of Termination Shock to his bill.
Bill to make "pureblood" a thing:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250118232059/https://apps.legi...
Bill to outlaw chemtrails & Termination Shock:
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/hb60.html
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