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What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

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Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#91
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transparency doesn't matter without consequences. Many of the currently ruling governments have demonstrated that already.

You're wrong, it still matters. It's the first step, and it's an important step in maintaining fairness.

> it's an important step in maintaining fairness.

When there are no consequences, it by definition isn't.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#92
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> exempting themselves from monitoring Wasn’t that in the Chat Control proposal? i.e. politicians and other important individuals are exempt

Of course. The lobbyists don't want to be called bribed people, so they only want to monitor the peons. Slavery 2.0.

>Slavery 2.0.

Chat control is a lot of things, but Slavery 2.0 is not one of them. The hyperbole only hurts your position.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#93

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…

Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? I don't personally see a way to verify someone's age which doesn't involve either credit card verification, photo id verification, or some sort of facial recognition. If you know enough about someone to verify their age—even to a relatively low degree of accuracy—you probably know enough to pinpoint who they are in general. Heck—in most cases, we can't even tell…

The way identity wallets work:

The government issues an eID to your wallet. The ID is signed by the government and linked to the device to prevent transferring the credential. A public/private key-pair is generated by the secure enclave in your phone, the public key along with proof of possession of the private key is included in the request for the government eID. The government signs individual attributes combined with the public key with the government private key. The government certificate containing the public key is, well, public.

One of the attributes is ‘over_18’ (In the EU eID scheme countries can add other over_XX attributes if they want, but over_18 is mandatory).

When a website wants to requests attributes, in this case the over_18 attribute, they send a request to the user’s wallet app, including a challenge. The wallet sends back a package including the government-signed attribute, which contains the device public key and the over_18 attribute plus a response to the challenge (proving the credential didn’t get transferred).

The website only sees the ‘over_18’ attribute, which is backed by the government signature. They don’t see any other attributes (the wallet app shows in advance which attributes you are sharing). The government never sees which website wants to know if you’re 18+.

Of course this is all a bit simplified, check OIDC4VCI and OIDC4VP for details.

The only real issue is the wallet app and device binding. Because a compromised device could allow credentials to be transferred some form of attestation of device and wallet app is required. In practice this means no rooted/jailbroken phones.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#94
post #18

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…

I am convinced that no one will make any progress on this issue so long as they refuse to understand that their aren't a group of shadowy figures pushing for this but rather a sizeable chunk of the general population, buoyed on by various moral outrage interest groups including a great many HNers who have been happily stoking the narrative that social media is the cause of every negative statistical ill. Who wants th…

In fairness (i.e. looking at the data with an open mind), social media does seem to be the cause of (or at least strongly correlated with) a bunch of ills.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#95
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you tell what one is? Reddit in 2010? Facebook in 2005? IRC in 1999?

If the users chooses what they are shown and the order they are shown in, then it's fine. If the platform chooses, then it's not, because they will always choose what creates the most engagement.

So HN should be banned

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#96
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Hacker News wouldn't be allowed?

I think it should be, maybe I'm missing some aspect, I just cooked up a simple list of rules on the spot, sheesh :-D Edit: huh, I'm probably stupid, but can you explain more?

HN uses magical platform votes.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#97
post #29

> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are sev…

Where are these mythical sweet-spot solutions? Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset. Now that users have been conditioned to accept this, nobody seems very interested in figuring out how to collect less PII - only insulating themselves from liability by having the data processed by a third party.

> half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset.

what kind of websites are you visiting to get age checked on half of the sites you visit? i've only been asked to verify for dating apps and "sexy stuff". and i definitely don't spend 50% of my total browsing time on those sites.

maybe this says more about the kind of content/sites you're accessing if it is really as high as 50%? UK age verification mostly only applies to sites which might end up hosting the content quoted below.

> pornographic images, and content that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for eating disorders, self-harm, or suicide.

or you're just being hyperbolic? 79% of statistics are made up, after all.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#98
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to see one I consider reasonable.

if you think even the client-side "yes im 18" on OS setup proposals are unreasonable, i dont know what to say.

Privacy-wise I think they're completely acceptable, but in terms of circumvention I don't think the politicians will be satisfied. It's barely a step up from the "I'm over 18" buttons on websites.

Re: What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? sure, i'll put my favorite two. though you'll find much more detailed and thought-out versions of these (and others) in the dozens of other giant threads on the same topic. - buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time. most people are comfortable with flashing their ID at the clerk. the UUID card is no…

And honestly, all these should ultimately just be done client side in the browser. After the browser has verified "User is x or user is over 21" there's no reason to then send that information to the website. Let websites issue a "window.isUserOver(16)" call once and then move forward based on the response to that query.

This is how California is legislating it—requiring the OS to let an admin set the user's age, then let browsers and through them, websites, to query that setting.
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