Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.google

171–180 of 302 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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???

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.

The web has not had age gating via large-scale government coercion since its inception. To claim that it's absurd to think we can do without it is to detach from that reality, and is itself absurd.

The irony.

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

#172
Someone else in the thread asked, as others have, but most pithily

> How about not needing to do age verification?

Which I agree with. However, I think that ship is sailing. Those who care about this had better find a provider that they trust and support providers they trust, because the perfect is the enemy of the good, and without the good there'll be no way to rollback to the perfect at all.

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

#173
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manosphere content is toxic and harmful but the hyperviolence and desensitisation of the former should not be downplayed. That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.

> That's where the mass shooters evidently come from. I mean, quite a few have come from proto-manosphere circles, too. Elliot Rodger comes to mind.

Given how large it is, I don't think it's a high stat. Especially compared with other subcultures. And we don't blame feminism for every instance where a man is killed by a man hating woman.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The web has not had age gating via large-scale government coercion since its inception. To claim that it's absurd to think we can do without it is to detach from that reality, and is itself absurd. The irony.

I am not making an argument based on tradition. I couldn't care less that the web has not been government-gated for the past X years, because through this logic you should adhere to any dumb tradition or custom humans have ever had. I am concerned with the present and the future of the web's impact on the world, which of course requires government intervention like any other big phenomenon or technology in the history of humanity.

Before snarkily calling "irony", at least understand the topic of discussion and make appropriate comparisons.

P.S.:

Not only is your assumption false, since in its first years the web was only accessible to academics so the gating was implicit, but the internet itself from its beginning to the present day requires heavy governmental intervention and international collaboration to make it work. Do you know what's behind the cables that carry your bytes? The ICANN? The IANA? I hope you never do, if you dislike government involvement this much

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

#175
post #10

Still, I don't want to gate people based on age. Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.

Websites should have an easy way to check whether the connecting device has a child lock turned on. We don’t need to identify the person using the device at all. It should be up to parents to make sure their kids use device that are locked.

Or even better, just let the website return a set of flags (like age_rating=18) in a header and let the user agent decide if it wants to show it, block it, ask for approval, ...

Then the policy lives on the user agent.

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

#176
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's definitely not just kids. Social media is a lot like meth, we should at a bare minimum stop giving it to kids as soon as possible. And then come to realise it's bad for everyone and should be wound back.

But then what's the point of forcing IDs on everyone instead of cutting to the chase?

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to Google "man-o-sphere". Is it particularly more dangerous or toxic than other identity-based activist communities? Genuinely curious to know

Maybe? "Identity-based activist communities" are incredibly toxic as a rule. Maybe there's lasting harm from engaging in them early. Or maybe it's better to get exposed to them early in your life, so that you have time to figure out why you don't want anything to do with them. Either way, it seems pretty clear that preventing children and teens from engaging them is a nonstarter. You can't get anywhere close to conse…

I think it is safe to rule out early engagement as a positive factor.

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

#178
post #68
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…

Briefly, your government issues you a digital signed copy of a document, such as a driver's license or passport, that gets bound to a hardware security element that you own. In current implementations these are the secure elements of smart phones, but there is no reason that standalone hardware security elements could not be supported. When you want to provide information from that document to a third party a protoco…

> Someone over 18 person could indeed decide to help others prove age, but they would either have to do it in person or be willing to loan their unlocked security element to those others.

You can still automate age-verification-as-a-service using a physical autoclicker on a smartphone with the camera oriented at a screen showing QR codes. I expect this to happen, and for that reason I also expect true anonymity to be something that will last a year or so until it will be politically decided to fix the issue using some central party that verifiers have to contact to impose rate limiting.

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

#179
post #10

Still, I don't want to gate people based on age. Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.

I do. I’m going to take a wild guess that you are an old head like me, male, and lived your youth in the wonderful internet free of commercialisation of human interaction, free to roam and find new cool things and people, a wonderful library of Alexandria to learn and spend time in. Discuss what the experience was/is to zoomers and younger, especially girls. Did you try to play a silly online game with your friends w…

A bit further up there's a really nice comment about how those studies are just garbage.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to Google "man-o-sphere". Is it particularly more dangerous or toxic than other identity-based activist communities? Genuinely curious to know

Yes, a lot of it involves denigrating women and an entitled and very rigid attitude towards the male place in society (alphas etc). This is incredibly toxic for young men growing up and the women they interact with. Some of the more prominent proponents are actual pimps (the Tate brothers).

How is that different than pervasive pornography though? Many young boys now think it’s normal to ask girls for sexual acts before having ever kissed a girl.
Post reply on HN