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The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

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Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#571

Post by bitmasher9 »

donmcronald wrote: post #553
antitoxic wrote: post #390

I work at a European identity wallet system that uses a zero knowledge proof age identification system. It derives an age attribute such as "over 18" from a passport or ID, without disclosing any other information such as the date of birth. As long as you trust the government that gave out the ID, you can trust the attribute, and anonymously verify somebodies age. I think there are many pros and cons to be said about…

> It derives an age attribute such as "over 18" from a passport or ID, without disclosing any other information such as the date of birth. How? If it’s analyzes my ID 100% client side I can fake any info I want. If my ID goes to a server, it’s compromised IMO. I think the zero proof systems being touted are like ephemeral messaging in Snapchat. That is, we’re being sold something that’s impossible and it only “works”…

Attestation from government sounds like the ideal solution. This could actually provide _more_ privacy because we can begin using attestation for things we currently use IDs for such as “Has the privilege of driving a car” or “Can purchase alcohol”

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#572

Post by rectang »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #565
rectang wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck. why-not-both.jpg Maximizing corporate freedom leads inevitably to corporate capture of government. Opposing either government concentration of power alone or corporate concentration of power alone is doomed to failure. Only by opposing both is there any hope of achieving either. Applying that principle to age-verification, which I think is inevitable: Prefer privacy-preservin…

> Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-verification services, where the service validates minimum age and presents a cryptographic token to the entity requiring age validation. This is the wrong implementation. You require sites hosting adult content to send a header indicating what kind of content it is. Then the device can do what it wants with that information. A parent can then configure their child's device n…

Your proposed architecture also achieves the goal of discouraging content-distributing entities from holding hard identification data, so it sounds good to me.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#573

Post by Aerroon »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #33
Aerroon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs money. Getting an ID here costs about 5% of minimum wage if you order it online + travel (you still have to travel there for the photos and pickup). It costs even more if you apply in person. You could buy 19 gallons of milk for that money (80 liters).

So do you buy an ID every month or can we depreciate that over 15 years?

You have to get a new one every 5 years.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#574

Post by Spooky23 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #261

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

It’s weird that you blame the victim.

The real question is why do we leave it to parents or intrusive surveillance instead of holding companies accountable?

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#575

Post by fuzzfactor »

dragonwriter wrote: post #499
techblueberry wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here. I get your position, but like. The whole idea of the promise of the internet has been destroyed by newsfeeds and mega-corps. There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted. This isn't a few bands with swear words, and in fact, I thi…

> I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here. That’s because “freedom” is complicated and doesn’t precisely map to the interests of any of the major actors. Its largely a war between parties seeking control for different elites for different purposes.

Yes, seeking more control for themselves and completely at the expense of everybody else's loss.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#576

Post by kypro »

kuon wrote: post #332

Even if you design the perfect system, kids will just ask parents for an unlocked account, many parents will accept, myself included. My kids have full access to the internet and I never used parental control, I talk to them. Of course, I don't want to give parenting advice, that would be presumptuous. But, my point is that a motivated kid will find a way, you have to "work" on that motivation. Many of the worst pres…

> Many of the worst present on the internet is not age gated at all, you have millions of porn websites without even a "are you over 18" popup. There are plethora of toxic forums...

This is what I find most insane about the UK's age verification law. It's literally so easy to find adult content without proving your age... You can literally just type in "naked women" into a search engine and get porn...

To call it ineffective would be an understatement. Finding adult content on the web almost just as easy as it's always been. The only thing it's made harder is accessing adult content from the normie-web – you can't access porn on places like Reddit anymore, but you can access porn on 4chan and other dodgy adult sites.

If the argument is "think about the kids" there are more effective ways to do it... Requiring device-level filtering for example would likely be more effective because it could just blacklist domains with hosting adult content unless unrestricted. It would also put more power in the parents hands about what is and what isn't restrict.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#577

Post by user3939382 »

Corporate interests don’t care about data privacy or security they care about liability and compliance which are not the same thing.

Major banks and government institutions can’t even be bothered to implement the NIST password guidelines. If they got their gdpr soc2 fedramp whatever it’s green lights and the rest is insurance.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#578

Post by ozim »

Gormo wrote: post #527
pokstad wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is like tobacco. We went after tobacco for targeting kids, we should do the same to social media. Highly engineered addictive content is not unlike what was done to cigarettes.

No, it isn't. Tobacco is a physical substance that alters users' biochemistry and creates a physical dependence. Social media is information conveyed via a computing device. You can criticize social media for what it is in its own right, without having to engage in these kinds of disingenuous equivocations.

Sounds like you need to read up on dopamine and addictions a bit more.

Gambling isn’t introducing substance into user system it is making use of existing brain chemicals.

Social media companies engineered every piece of addictive mechanisms from gambling to alter brain chemistry or reactions of users.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#579

Post by throwawayk7h »

belorn wrote: post #290
JohnMakin wrote: post #261

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

I am a bit confused by that comment. Are parents social responsible to prevent companies from selling alcohol/guns/cigarettes to minors? If a company set up shop in a school and sold those things to minors during school breaks, who has the social responsibility to stop that?

Parents can't easily prevent their kids from going to those kinds of stores once they're at the age where the parent doesn't need to keep an eye on them all the time and they can travel about on their own.

The difference though is that parents are generally the ones to give their kids their phones and devices. These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist, and parents apparently don't use existing parental controls properly or at all.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#580

Post by user3939382 »

Wobbles42 wrote: post #461

The purpose of a system is what it does. Undermining data protection and privacy is clearly the point. The fact that it's happening everywhere at the same time makes it look to me like a bunch of leaders got together and decided that online anonymity is a problem. It's not like kids having access to adult content is a new problem after all. Every western government just decided that we should do something about it at…

No, this is proven false by reducing this theory to the individual level. Anyone who has tried to design/imagine -> actually build something, be it an artist, architect, song writer, programmer, or otherwise, knows there is inevitably a gap between design and realization. No one involved in that process would at any point consider the gap to be part of its “purpose”.

People do hide their intentions but that doesn’t give us a license to reduce complex system dynamics to absurdities.

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