I would argue that this has nothing to do with age verification, but everything to do with getting identifiable data on all of us.
The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
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Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#132Most of this debate makes more sense if the actual goal is liability reduction, not child safety. If it were genuinely about protecting kids, you'd regulate infinite scroll and algorithmic engagement optimization, not who can log in.
I think it's because there's always a group of nosy busybodies finger-wagging about protecting the children and we have to do decorative theatrics to satiate whatever narratives they've convinced themselves of
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#133It's kind of weird to me how every article on this topic here has people rushing to comment within a couple minutes with some generic "yes I too support ID checks for internet use!". Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?
I think it's quite embarrassing that the WWW exists since more than 3 decades and still there's no mechanism for privacy friendly approval for adults apart from sending over the whole ID. Of course this is a huge failure of governments but probably also of W3C which rather suggests the 100,000th JavaScript API. Especially in times of ubiquitous SSO, passkeys etc. The even bigger problem is that the average person needs accounts at dozens if not hundreds of services for "normal" Internet usage.
That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in current legislation yes/no.
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#134Why is no one talking about using zero knowledge proofs for solving this? Instead of every platform verifying all its users itself (and storing PII on its own servers), a small number of providers could expose an API which provides proof of verification. I'm not sure if some kind of machine vision algorithm could be used in combination with zero-knowledge technology to prevent even that party from storing original do…
People are talking about it, at least here anyway.
The reason you don’t see it in policy discussion from the officials pushing these laws is because removal of anonymity is the point. It’s nit about protecting kids, it never was. It’s about surveillance and a chilling effect on speech.
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#135It's kind of weird to me how every article on this topic here has people rushing to comment within a couple minutes with some generic "yes I too support ID checks for internet use!". Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?
It’s bots pushing another false narrative. You’ll notice this in anything around politics or intelligence the past 10+ years, with big booms around 2016 and 2024 “for some reason”
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Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although there is some organic support, there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. Governments (and a few companies) really want this.
> Governments (and a few companies) really want this. The cynic in me fears they don't want a privacy-preserving solution, which blinds them to 'who'. Because that would satisfy parents worried about their kids and many privacy conscious folks. Rather, they want a blank check to blackmail or imprison only their opponents.
That’s not cynicism, it’s reality.
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#137parents: won't somebody else put some rules and safeguards in place to protect my children?
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#138We are missing accessible cryptographic infrastructure for human identity verification. For age verification specifically, the only information that services need proof of is that the users age is above a certain threshold. i.e. that the user is 14 years or older. But in order to make this determination, we see services asking for government ID (which many 14-year-olds do not have), or for invasive face scans. These…
https://xkcd.com/538/
Your crypto nerd dream is vulnerable to the fact that someone under 18 can just ask someone over 18 to make an account for them. All age verification is broken in this way.
There is a similar problem for people using apps like Ubereats to work illegally by buying an account from someone else. However much verification you put in, you don't know who is pressing the buttons on the screen unless you make the process very invasive.
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't support ID for internet use, only for adult content specifically. There's things on Discord that would shock you to your core if you saw some of it, I don't think children should be blindly exposed to any of it. Specifically porn. Tumblr almost got kicked out of the app store over porn, they went the route of banning it and killing what to me felt like a dying social media platform as things stood. Do you thi…
The difference is that at the strip club, you show your ID to the bouncer, who makes sure its valid and that the photo matches your face, and then forgets all about it. Online, that data is stored forever. The principle of online ID checks is completely sound; the implementation is not.
The implementation is sound. Instead of getting an ID, the bouncer gets a serial number from you, he calls his government contact who tells him you are of age. The serial number is meaningless to him.
This would be impractical in meatspace, but works perfectly fine on the internet.
Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% correct. At this point the harms to children from social media use are very well documented. Like everything else in society, there are tradeoffs here, I'm much more concerned with the damage done to children's developing brains than I am to violations of data privacy, so I'm okay with age verification, however draconian it may be.
> At this point the harms to children from social media use are very well documented Our middle child (aged 12) has an Android phone, but it has Family Link on it. Nominally he gets 60 mins of phone time per day, but he rarely even comes close to that, according to Family Link he used it for a total of 17 minutes yesterday. One comes to the conclusion that with no social media apps, the phone just isn't that attracti…
I commend this but I always try to think about the arguments for something like cigarettes. People didn’t buy the argument that parents need to be preventing their kids from smoking