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EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

juraj.bednar.io

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Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#111

Post by throwthrowuknow »

jeroenhd wrote: post #96
pzo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference you barely have to show you physical ID - mostly only when interacting with bank, signing document, government. I never got asked when buying alcohol and if asked at least I would only let to have a look instead of snapping a picture. Imagine if suddenly every grocery, pharmacy, petrol station, parking place, restaurant, bar etc. now would ask you for your ID AND would snap a picture and store in their…

Why would they? The only reasons to show ID I can think of is when watching porn or maybe when buying alcohol online, though I doubt stores will want to risk driving customers away with that.

Consider that stores create reward point systems specifically for the purpose of connecting a customer profile to purchases.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#112

Post by esperent »

green7ea wrote: post #56
esperent wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you referencing here?

Many of the proposed EU digital solutions require a Google or Apple verified phone. This makes escaping American companies difficult.

I don't think that's true, it seems to be just this specific German one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47644406

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#113

Post by rcbdev »

croes wrote: post #25
wolvoleo wrote: post #7

> In any case, it was always presented as a toolbox that countries should adapt into their apps – so judging the app by itself does not make much sense, it depends on how these techniques are implemented in each country’s verification app. There will be no single EU app, despite what the honchos of EU say. Even more reason to make the "demo" app do things correctly because it's very unlikely that all member states ac…

> A simple solution is just not providing your kids with a phone or computer. That’s not a solution. Nowadays many schools require access to a computer.

These schools, at least here where I am in Europe, have to provide their pupils with devices. How else would it be fair?

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#114

Post by rglullis »

ragall wrote: post #110
rglullis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about the reality of the US, but even if I was talking about Europe: how does the GDPR even enter this equation here? I was never asked for consent to have my face recorded when I get into a shop in Germany. Were you?

Security recordings fall into the category if legitimate need, and have to be deleted after a short while.

How is that enforced?

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#115

Post by bluebarbet »

silversmith wrote: post #108
jdrek1 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is what follows. They will make it mandatory to use the electronic ID to do anything, resulting in total surveillance. And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing.

In Latvia we've had digital id for close to 20 years. Banks mostly use their own auth, some rely on digital id. No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping. What we use it for is access to government resources, and signing digital documents. I trust this system WAY more than whatever some company comes up with.

This is an interesting and hopeful datapoint.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#116

Post by izacus »

shevy-java wrote: post #41
izacus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many EU countries already issue a chipcard IDs which can be used to auth for government services (via NFC or a dedicated reader). So yeah, I'd expect those to move to a phone as an alternative to the card

This is not the same. For instance, we can access the internet without needing that ID. But right now there are attempts to force a digital ID in order to access information on the www - this is the whole idea behind "age verification". The kids are just used as excuse here. It has never been about the kids.

I think you're jumping to conclusions that aren't supported by the digital ID proposal.

Even with that: There's plenty of services dangerous to kids that we gate behind an ID check and I don't particularly see why internet is special in any way.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#117

Post by TacticalCoder »

How's this going to work now that there are, arguably, already more AI agents online than humans? Or close to it. Most of the web if fake AI slop already. Many websites are more crawled by bots than by real people.

We'll need to apply for digital IDs for bots and AI agents?

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#118

Post by pveierland »

It's frustrating to see how shortsighted and tech-illiterate politicians are on these topics. This article from Norway today presents the attitude of the minister of digitization as simply "Social media companies are making billions and we expect them to adequately implement age verification systems with solutions that respect privacy and we will fine those who fail at doing this".

The fantastic irony is that in some weak attempt to protect against the "evil big tech companies" they directly facilitate increased mass surveillance and removal of individual rights, instead of choosing more scalable and robust answers such as funding and promoting the development of protocols and open standards that can be applied voluntarily and in a decentralized manner to help mitigate these problems.

I have computers side by side on my desktop running Linux, and it is amazing to me how I can call `wormhole send --message hello` and receive it on the machine next to me, knowing that only I can receive this message, without it running through an age approval mechanism, without it being client-side scanned, and without being logged in some government database.

This is the century of AI and robotics - technologies which can facilitate great concentration of power and wealth. Gradually introducing mechanisms that facilitate digital fascism seems like a really bad way to guard us against this.

https://www.nrk.no/norge/datatilsynet-bekymret-for-personver...

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#119

Post by sublimefire »

There are slight contradictions in this open list of complaints with a bit of guesstimates.

As mentioned digital ids are a thing and this is where everything is moving. The author mentions that it would be great to use it but does not believe it is possible and then says age checks will lead to it and it is bad. There are reasons why digital ids will be forced and one of the big ones is because bigtech companies do not want to invest into looking after the content, e.g. misinformation, bullying, etc. Not to mention the inability of companies to control the age of users, and everyone knows this is not in the interest of advertisers.

Criticism is good but it also has to offer some options. Saying everything is bad bad does not help. All in all I have kids and it is very difficult to filter all of their internet traffic and I am not your average parent. Kids are reading crap and get brainwashed everyday, and the idea that you should just let them is ridiculous. Cyber bullying is a thing and I wonder what would you do when your kids get to be on the receiving side.

IMO this is trying to blame politicians who represent their electorate who wants this without acknowledging that the issue is in huge ad funded companies whose interest is to gather all that private data without any supervision or filtering. BTW Data is constantly being leaked from large companies as well, not only gov entities.

In relation to guesstimates the author jumps to possible conclusions without sufficient proof.

What would the author suggest to fix the main issues though?

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#120

Post by fauigerzigerk »

bootsmann wrote: post #69

> Real cryptographic unlinkability schemes like BBS+ or CL signatures would produce uncorrelated proofs even on reuse. This is not that. This discussion was already led ad nauseam with the Swiss eID proposal (which is supposed to be EUID compatible) and the reason why the system relies on rotating signatures instead of ZKPs is that the cryptography hardware modules in most phones don't support algorithms such as BBS+…

Have you read the spec? I have, but I don't understand how the revocation flow is supposed to be safe against collusion between issuers/governments and site owners to reveal the identity of (age verified) users.
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