EFF launches Age Verification Hub • Hacker News Board

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#271

Post by kmoser » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:13 AM UTC

atonse wrote: post #121

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…

Yep this is the first time I've disagreed with the EFF on anything civil liberties related. My view is that there's no reason why we can't come together and come up with a rating system for websites (through HTTP headers, there are already a couple proposals, the RTA header and another W3C proposal). Once a website just sends a header saying this is adult only content, what YOU as a user do with it is up to you. You…

> My view is that there's no reason why we can't come together and come up with a rating system for websites

There's no way everybody will agree what constitutes "adult only content," therefore there's no way to come up with a rating for websites.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#272

Post by kmoser » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:18 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #239

maerF0x0 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to me that porn does not have more age verification than just "Yes, I promise I'm 18+" (or whatever). If I go to the liquor store, I can't just promise "I'm 21+" If I go to vote, I can't just promise I'm 16+ If I go to buy a lottery ticket I cant just promise... I think I made my point.

And yet this has been the system for the last 35 years and somehow the sky didn't fall. Either you're old enough to understand what porn is and have desires to consume it in which case you won't be scarred by it and don't need protection from it, or your not in which case you won't seek it out. You need id checks for alcohol because people too young to consume it want it, and given how much teens drink and how not a…

Not true; kids too young to understand porn can stumble across it, or find it because they searched for it simply because they heard about it from their friends. I'm not saying they'll be harmed by it (most of them won't be), but there will always be a small percentage of people who find a certain thing and then go on to get harmed by that thing. That doesn't mean the rest of us should have to jump through hoops to responsibly use that thing.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#273

Post by baobun » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:20 AM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #136

pksebben wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> None of them are part of the Age Verification discussion because kids are not the actual point of Age Verification. The EU age verification solution says implementations SHOULD implement[1] their ZKP protocol[2]. Not linking it to the user is stated as an explicit goal: Unlinkability: The goal of the solution is to prevent user profiling and tracking by avoiding linkable transactions. Initially, the solution will r…

One thing to keep in mind when reading about any "ZKP protocol" is that on its own the term has the same inherent vagueness as "end-to-end encrypted" - especially when like here there are more than two parties concerned to solve a single verification.

What information is not disclosed to whom? In what way is it ZK?

One example is Googles "zero-knowledge age verification" where AFAICT, Google still has full insight into all the sensitive data and metadata. It's not like they inherently need to be the designated middleman but that is how the scheme is designed. Therefore I find it ingeniously marketed. A bit like saying "Facebook Messenger protects all your messages with end-to-end encryption", which is arguably technically true but misleading and not an honest statement.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#274

Post by yardstick » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:21 AM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #101

Bender wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A server header exists to say something is adult and could be used for user-generated content as well. [1] It just needs legislation and an afternoon from interns at assorted companies. It's not perfect, nothing is but could easily trigger existing parental controls and parental controls that could be added back into user agents. No third parties required. I think I've beat this horse into dust [2] so I should just h…

I like the first part of the idea, which is the header. Heck, even enable it by default. As long as the tracking of the toggle isn't a thing its a perfect compromise. While we're at it, respecting do not track headers would also be nice. This completely leaves it up to the families / parents to control and gives some level of compliance to make the effort worth while. There may even be a way to generate enough noise…

They tried this years ago with ICRA and others. Long gone, but it worked by the webmaster adding metadata to self classify a site. Browsers and other agents could then allow/deny after inspecting the tags.

https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/childmedia/chpt/internet-c...

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#275

Post by kmoser » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:21 AM UTC

socalgal2 wrote: post #60

That is an extremely poor title. Reading it I'd expect the average person to be like "yea, it's about time" and skip the article.

I first interpreted it to mean the EFF had created their own site to perform age verification. So yes, a very poorly written title indeed.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#276

Post by mrtksn » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:33 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #256

I have a friend attempting to solve this. He's basically creating oauth for age verification. You sign up with his service and verify your age. After that it works similarly to oauth, but instead of return your identity, it just returns your age. It's not a perfect solution, as he would still know who you are, but it's built in a way where you create a token locally to pass to the site that includes your age, and tha…

When I read the title I hoped that EFF was going to do exactly that.

There’s also a way to improve it: Sell “age verification cards” in physical stores. Just like they are verifying that minors aren’t buying alcohol or cigarettes, they can verify that these cards are bought only by grown ups. Sure wouldn’t be perfect but it greatly improves anonymity and especially in paid-for adult services can be used as a payment method so repeat verification will happen for top ups.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#277

Post by Epa095 » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:44 AM UTC

cocoto wrote: post #270

Epa095 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be possible to make a website which proxies other sites, but strips this header, right (maybe with some added ads)? If so I would expect such sites to appear, and the only way to secure a child device is to have a whitelist of webpages (to avoid the proxies), putting us back close to where we are today.

Such sites would be illegal if not sharing the header back from the source website and be banned as much as adult websites incorrectly setting this header. It’s not a real problem.

Making them illegal does not fix it. There will be a indefinite whack-a-mole game which is very hard to solve without draconian control over the Internet.

The problem is that it's easy to make, easy to deploy, easy to make money on, and a single site opens up the whole Internet. It will happen even if it's illegal.

Compare this to adult webpages setting the header. They will probably be quite willing to do so, since they want to make their money legally, and there is probably little money in serving to kids anyway. And even if a single out of thousand adult webpages refuses, it still only opens that single site.

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#278

Post by spragl » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:50 AM UTC

The push for age verification must be about something else. There are good solutions to this, but they are ignored. Its always about some complex setup leaking information all over the place. It must be either ignorance or indeed about surveillance, as many here think it is.

Shameless plug: I wrote about hash chains some time ago. They are a nice and simple solution to age verification. https://spredehagl.com/2025-07-14/

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#279

Post by stvltvs » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:55 AM UTC

Seattle3503 wrote: post #253

pseudalopex wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They imagined a scenario where the state ordered 2 companies to identify users. How would replacing 1 company with the state improve this?

What would the state force you to do in this case?

Is your question about what authoritarian states do with information about everyone's private lives?

Re: EFF launches Age Verification Hub

#280

Post by miki123211 » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 8:09 AM UTC

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 […

How do you know this?

I see this argument repeated over and over on HN, with 0 evidence for it. Any "evidence" people cite is usually of the "politicians are evil, so this should be obvious by definition" kind, sometimes of the "they tried x in the past, so surely some unrelated y they're trying to pass in the future is also about x" kind.

I haven't seen a single leak, a single admission from somebody trying to pass a law like this, that surveillance is actually the goal here. There are far too many politicians trying to pass laws like these, in very different countries across the world, for some kind of giant global conspiracy to stay undetected.

Plain ignorance seems far easier to believe.