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EFF launches Age Verification Hub

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Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#171

Post by chriswarbo »

techdmn wrote: post #161
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am someone who is very privacy focused. I've literally never had a social media account on any platform and I'm 42. From day one of facebook, I never wanted my information online. Like many here, I'm deeply concerned about privacy and surveillance. In real life, we think age verification is a good thing. Kids shouldn't buy porn. Teenagers shouldn't get into bars. etc... There has to be room somewhere for reasonable…

Hate to break it to you, you're on social media right now.

If HN is social media, then so are PHPBB, NNTP, BBS, etc. and the term loses its semantic relevance.

My heuristic is that social media focuses on particular people, regardless of what they're talking about. In contrast, forums (like HN) focus on a particular topic, regardless of who's talking about it.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#172

Post by pembrook »

topkai22 wrote: post #153
pksebben wrote: post #88

This keeps coming up and we keep having the same debates about what Age Verification isn't. For the folks in the back row: Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance Without even reaching for my tinfoil hat, the strategy at work here is clear […

Age verification is absolutely about kids. It’s also being used (or hijacked into) a vehicle for people who want increased surveillance. There is a ton of evidence that there are harms to unrestricted online access for kids and teens (the book The Anxious Generation is cultural touchstone for this topic at this point). There is a real, well reasoned, and valid movement to do something about this problem. The solution…

Unfortunately The Anxious Generation is a very well-written house of cards built on questionable studies [1] and its success is simply a reflection of the fact it capitalizes on the trendiest moral panic of our times.

Social media is akin to violent video games in the 2000s, tv addiction in the 90s, santanic heavy metal in 80s, and even 'bicycle face' in the 1890s bicycle craze.

Jonathan Haidt seems extremely earnest and thoughtful, but unfortunately being lovingly catapulted to fame for being the guy who affirms everyones gut reaction to change (moral panic)...makes it extremely difficult financially, emotionally and socially for him to steelman the opposite side of that thing.

Even if he hadn't compiled a bunch of suspect research from pre-2010 to make his claims, the field of Psychology is at the center of the replication crisis and is objectively its worst offender. Pyschology studies published in prestigious academic journals have been found to replicate only 36% of the time. [2]

1. https://reason.com/video/2024/04/02/the-bad-science-behind-j...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#173

Post by zmmmmm »

stvltvs wrote: post #162
zmmmmm wrote: post #114

I feel like the EFF has stretched a bit far on this one. They need to be advocating for good solutions, not portraying age verification as fundamentally about surveillance and censorship. As many are pointing out zero knowledge proofs exist and resolve most of the issues they are referring to. And it doesn't have to be complex. A government (or bank, or anybody that has an actual reason to know your identity) provide…

What good solutions are there that prevent the age verification service and the website from comparing notes (because Big Brother told them to) and figuring out who you are and what you're doing?

If they voluntarily collude then yes, you can't avoid that. It's like third party cookies - once two parties collude it's game over. But that just outlines a situation where the user's chosen trusted service is hostile to their interests and they need to find one that isn't.

If Big Brother starts mandating the collusion - then yes, there's a hill to die on. But in some ways that's the point here. There are hills to die on - this just isn't it. And if you pick the wrong hill then you already died so you are losing the ones that really mattered. If the EFF pointed out to everyone that there is a privacy preserving answer to the core issue that is driving this, they could then mount a strong defense for the part that is truly problematic, since it isn't actually required to solve the problem.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#174

Post by orblivion »

pksebben wrote: post #127
phyzome wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of any age verification systems that do not have this property? (This includes being robust against law enforcement action, legal or otherwise.)

Like many mention in other comments on this post, it's possible to implement using ZKPs. There are likely other methods that would be effective without compromising privacy. None of them are part of the Age Verification discussion because kids are not the actual point of Age Verification. When I say "if we have to know you're not a kid, we have to know who you are" I'm not stating an actual truth , but the argument a…

Okay but then if a ZKP solution is presented, that's calling their bluff. They now have one less excuse for surveillance.

EDIT: Actually do one better - tell them that for 16+ websites, you're actually protecting teenagers by keeping them anonymous.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#175

Post by pksebben »

delusional wrote: post #156
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we make meaningless laws that inconsistently enforced? What do you think happens when little Johnny is caught with weed in his car in a 95% White high income school district vs little Jerome in a 95% Black school district? Also how much “shaping of society” do you expect to happen when you pass a law that no one respects? How many kids do you think a law is going to stop from going to the porn sites that completel…

> How many kids say “I really want to smoke weed but it’s illegally so I won’t do it”? I think it's generally accepted that marijuana use increases after legalization. So yes.

You would think so, but DARE increased adolescent usage of some drugs while having little to no effect on others.

Turns out being illegal isn't as much of a disincentive as being uncool. If your parents are smoking it...

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#176

Post by akersten »

zmmmmm wrote: post #114

I feel like the EFF has stretched a bit far on this one. They need to be advocating for good solutions, not portraying age verification as fundamentally about surveillance and censorship. As many are pointing out zero knowledge proofs exist and resolve most of the issues they are referring to. And it doesn't have to be complex. A government (or bank, or anybody that has an actual reason to know your identity) provide…

> They need to be advocating for good solutions, not

No, fighting back against horrible proposals does not require suggesting an alternative proposal to the alleged problem. That only serves to benefit the malicious actors proposing the bad thing in the first place, the hope that we'll settle on something Not As Bad.

Thank god for the EFF and their everlasting fight to stop these nonsense internet laws. I'm glad they don't waste their time on "well how about this" solutions. The middle ground will never be enough for the proponents of surveillance, and will always be an incremental loss for the victims.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#177

Post by Seattle3503 »

quitit wrote: post #144
zmmmmm wrote: post #114

I feel like the EFF has stretched a bit far on this one. They need to be advocating for good solutions, not portraying age verification as fundamentally about surveillance and censorship. As many are pointing out zero knowledge proofs exist and resolve most of the issues they are referring to. And it doesn't have to be complex. A government (or bank, or anybody that has an actual reason to know your identity) provide…

There are overwhelming dichotomous portrayals in this debate which gives me pause because there are entities who benefit from both sides of this debate, but neither would benefit with a sensible privacy-preserving solution. So instead of advocating for those sensible and workable solutions, the discussions are always centred on either blocking any attempt at reform while hyperventilating about vague authoritarianism…

> Meanwhile in the world of smartphone data providers, social media networks, and the meta/googles of the world: they all know your personal information and identity up to the wazoo - and have far more information on every one of you than what is possessed by your own governments (well except for the governments that are also buying up that data.)

This is where I'm concerned too. We are seeing a proliferation of third party verification services that I have to interact with and that have no real obligations to citizens, because their customer is the website.

I'd like to see governments step in as semi-trusted third parties to provide primitives that allow us to bootstrap some sort of anonymous verification system. By semi-trusted, I mean trusted to provide attestations like "This person is a US citizen over the age of 18" but not necessarily trusted with an access log of all our websites.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#178

Post by jolmg »

chriswarbo wrote: post #171
techdmn wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to break it to you, you're on social media right now.

If HN is social media, then so are PHPBB, NNTP, BBS, etc. and the term loses its semantic relevance. My heuristic is that social media focuses on particular people, regardless of what they're talking about. In contrast, forums (like HN) focus on a particular topic, regardless of who's talking about it.

Doesn't matter what you want it to mean. What matters is what those in power want it to mean. It's very easy to stretch the definition to cover all sites where people can post content for strangers to see, or stretch it even wider to all digital media where people can interact with a social group.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#179

Post by Seattle3503 »

stvltvs wrote: post #162
zmmmmm wrote: post #114

I feel like the EFF has stretched a bit far on this one. They need to be advocating for good solutions, not portraying age verification as fundamentally about surveillance and censorship. As many are pointing out zero knowledge proofs exist and resolve most of the issues they are referring to. And it doesn't have to be complex. A government (or bank, or anybody that has an actual reason to know your identity) provide…

What good solutions are there that prevent the age verification service and the website from comparing notes (because Big Brother told them to) and figuring out who you are and what you're doing?

This is only hypothetical for government ID's, but in theory government IDs could provide pairwise pseudonymous identifiers with services. Your ID with a single service is stable, but it is different with each service.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#180

Post by rockskon »

nostrademons wrote: post #95
rockskon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero knowledge proof is either trivially defeated by re-using the same credentials or doesn't have useful privacy guarantees. There really isn't an in-between here for something like age verification.

Age verification in general is not intended to defend against people lying or using stolen credentials. If you’re 13 but know the password to your dead grandpa’s account and the website in question has no idea he’s dead, there’s no way to defend against that, with or without a ZKP. What the ZKP does is let you limit the information the site collects to the fact that you are under 18, and nothing else. It’s an applica…

What prevents one kid in a friend group or in a school from sharing the same identifier?

After all - if it doesn't share anything other than a guarantee of the "age" of someone who is authenticating with the website then how would the website know there's re-use of identifiers?

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