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Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

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Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#71

Post by vlian2088 »

Gigachad wrote: post #50
protocolture wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violent revolution I guess. Genuinely what are the other options? I made a formal submission to the Australian Government in the very small consulting window they held for the Access and Assistance bill. Pleading with them to consider simply not introducing the law, as there was no justification for it at all. Google also made a submission against the bill, as did many large local and overseas corporations. The gover…

The vast majority of the population supports banning social media for kids so revolution isn't happening. Of course the social media companies object to their product being banned. It's like cigarette companies objecting to plain packaging.

>The vast majority of the population supports banning social media for kids so revolution isn't happening.

reddit isn't the vast majority of the population, fren. it's 1% of 4%.

unless you've got polls you could show to back up your claim? polls, not opinion pieces. polls asking unambiguous questions like "are you in favor of banning social media?" or "are you in favor of age verification laws?", not vague ones like "are you concerned about the content your kids might see on the internet?". got any of those?

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#72

Post by fwipsy »

echelon wrote: post #55
denkmoon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shock sites are materially different to the harm kids do to one another on social media.

> Shock sites are materially different to the harm kids do to one another This would be the "fixed" version of your comment. The social media bit is irrelevant. Kids have always been assholes to other kids. I took the school bus a few times, and the older neighborhood kids tried to chase me down, beat me, and piss on me. That was before the internet. You can't make up for other parents' bad parenting by trying to inv…

Just because you survived it doesn't mean that it's "not real harm." I am sympathetic to privacy concerns, but the downsides also need to be taken seriously and mitigated where it's possible to do so without critically compromising privacy.

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#73

Post by Gigachad »

vlian2088 wrote: post #71
Gigachad wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of the population supports banning social media for kids so revolution isn't happening. Of course the social media companies object to their product being banned. It's like cigarette companies objecting to plain packaging.

>The vast majority of the population supports banning social media for kids so revolution isn't happening. reddit isn't the vast majority of the population, fren. it's 1% of 4%. unless you've got polls you could show to back up your claim? polls, not opinion pieces. polls asking unambiguous questions like "are you in favor of banning social media?" or "are you in favor of age verification laws?", not vague ones like…

77% of the Australian population were in support of "Proposed ban on social media for children under 16"

https://yougov.com/articles/51000-support-for-under-16-socia...

This was in 2024, since then the attitude is still very much that kids should be taken off social media, but that the current restrictions aren't yet working as the face scanning verification is easily bypassed.

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#74

Post by semi-extrinsic »

Aurornis wrote: post #23
Groxx wrote: post #13

I've been trying to figure out how zero-knowledge stuff would work in practice for age verification, where "when issued" (or extremely coarse, like what year), "to whom", and "where it's used" are hidden from everyone except the individual holding the proof (since that's the gold standard, and the only one worth accepting). I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful. But if they reveal nothing…

> But if they reveal nothing, isn't it wide open for abuse? Couldn't one over-18-person's proof become everyone's proof, because they can't tell it's the same proof, and the issuer can't tell where or how often the proof is being used? Yep! This is why the concept of zero knowledge age gating is such a trap for technically minded people. They imagine receiving a private cryptographic object that can be used to anonym…

> Some people want to require device attestation, so you could only do this handshake from a government approved device running a government approved operating system. Forget using Linux or maybe even a general purpose computer at all.

The reason this is a non-problem for the purpose being discussed (age verification on social media) is that you can simply allow anyone with a de-Googled phone or using Linux on a laptop (or even Mac or Windows) to bypass the age check. You don't need a 100.0% accuracy solution, anything above 90% is fine.

Essentially all teenagers are using social media on Android or iOS with apps from the official app store. If you make social media unavailable only on those devices, they are not going to be switching en masse to SailfishOS or start to carry around backpacks with laptops.

Maybe a few will. But then they're going to be very lonely on their social media and subsequently stop caring.

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#75

Post by adrianN »

ambicapter wrote: post #58
anon-3988 wrote: post #51

Age is just one metric. I don't want zero proof tech about information X. I don't want to have an identity. Full stop.

This can be used to have zero-proof knowledge of "over 18" or "not over 18". So they don't really get your age, except that you are in two broad ranges.

You only need about 33 bits of information to uniquely identify every human.

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#76

Post by bloqs »

echelon wrote: post #59
Gigachad wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The harms of smartphones and social media are about as far from imaginary as it could get. The data is screaming at us. We will look back at handing kids phones with instagram like giving kids cigarettes and think wtf were we doing.

Are you sure it's just kids? In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like. Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way. Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 198…

I'm not sure I get your arguement here

Are you saying that we should let children smoke and just tax it because its better for their liberty and freedoms?

Or are you saying we should just tax social media for adults but banning it for kids is ok

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#77

Post by Nursie »

Aurornis wrote: post #23
Groxx wrote: post #13

I've been trying to figure out how zero-knowledge stuff would work in practice for age verification, where "when issued" (or extremely coarse, like what year), "to whom", and "where it's used" are hidden from everyone except the individual holding the proof (since that's the gold standard, and the only one worth accepting). I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful. But if they reveal nothing…

> But if they reveal nothing, isn't it wide open for abuse? Couldn't one over-18-person's proof become everyone's proof, because they can't tell it's the same proof, and the issuer can't tell where or how often the proof is being used? Yep! This is why the concept of zero knowledge age gating is such a trap for technically minded people. They imagine receiving a private cryptographic object that can be used to anonym…

There are a variety of schemes possible that do not have these flaws.

There's an interesting post here which goes into some of this - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...

So -

> Yep!

Actually nope.

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#78

Post by vatsachak »

Groxx wrote: post #13

I've been trying to figure out how zero-knowledge stuff would work in practice for age verification, where "when issued" (or extremely coarse, like what year), "to whom", and "where it's used" are hidden from everyone except the individual holding the proof (since that's the gold standard, and the only one worth accepting). I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful. But if they reveal nothing…

Even if you had to submit a picture of your driver's license, you can send someone else's

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#79

Post by EGreg »

doginasuit wrote: post #14

Zero-knowledge seems to be a bit of an oversell here. It is more like you break the knowledge up and only share the relevant parts with each party. And the facilitator (Google) arguably has access to the most information out of any of the parties involved.

Google has pioneered a few technologies where they are the trusted dealer. For example, Private State Tokens.

I have written a paper on how to do age verification in a completely privacy-preserving way, and it doesn’t even need zero-knowledge proofs:

https://magarshak.com/papers/Personal.pdf

Re: Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

#80

Post by Nursie »

coppsilgold wrote: post #28

Unfortunately ZKP's aren't magic. When not doing privacy oriented cryptocurrency ( cough money laundering cough ) with ZKP's, if you really want private verification you are in a position where a single actor can authenticate the entire world and no one will know it happened. And to prevent it you assemble the pieces necessary to deanonymize anyone. Make no mistake. ZKP age verification, as proposed, will just requir…

I don't really believe this is true, there are schemes which allow limited use tokens but which don't compromise the ZK nature of things - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
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