Comment by sciencejerk
5 days ago
It is suspicious to me that "age assurance" is trending EXACTLY as AI agents become capable of autonomously operating a personal computer in the same way a human office worker would.
I'm afraid "age assurance" has nothing to do with "the children".
>It is suspicious to me that "age assurance" is trending EXACTLY as AI agents become capable of autonomously operating
It is not, because your premise is false. This whole thing has been going on for as long as kids have been online. The early 2000s tried (and obviously failed) by using credit cards. The UK tried and failed last decade to ban porn for minors this way. AI tools are probably not even on the radar for the kind of politicians that keep pushing this.
> AI tools are probably not even on the radar for the kind of politicians that keep pushing this.
Forget about the politicians for a bit. There still are many regions on the globe where no age verification is mandatory, yet websites chose to implement it anyway. Why, if not for tracking and bots?
Well, because of things like COPPA I imagine most companies wouldn't want to risk anything here. So unless you have a website that is somehow guaranteed 100% blocking all traffic from the US or American citizens, you may as well implement it. But very few (if any) public websites will fall into that category.
> I'm afraid "age assurance" has nothing to do with "the children".
and you should be afraid, very afraid. Because none of these (and other measures to invade privacy) has ever had anything to do with children.
The point of ZKP in EU wallet is that it separates checking age and privacy.
You can both give a proof your age and not lose privacy.
Except that ZKP for sensitive data is far from being a thing, and also, I don't want the fucking government to have anything to do with what sites I access. Period.
Why the hell do I need to login to my digital wallet to access a fucking website???
What do you mean? Proving things about sensitive data without revealing it is what ZKPs are for. If you mean that the tech isn't mature enough to be trusted yet, I think there's some truth to that, but it depends on what software we're talking about specifically. Zcash has been in production for almost 10 years now.
The web is not a magical place detached from reality. Wanting absolutely zero goverment involvement (which does not mean spying btw) with it is frankly absurd.
6 replies →
A significant risk with ZKPs is that they can make a lot of explicit control rules palatable by making the side effects much less extreme.
If a company can come up with a reasonable reason to check something, then a ZKP enables that check without wider harm to privacy. But it still gives the narrow harm to privacy that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
Put differently, privacy concerns have shielded us not just from surveillance, but also from powerful control. Control in the form of “you are only allowed X if you meet criteria Y”. With ZKPs, that shield of “why would I tell you enough information to determine Y” stops working. But those conditions on X are harmful more broadly.
Take the US border checks of Social Media. Are those more OK if all of a sudden there’s a ZKP you have to give of never having called Trump a cunt in any private message?