Cryptographically there are techniques that let you prove you're one of the several hundred million adults in the US that don't reveal anything about which adult you are. It's much less complicated than bitcoin. I'm bringing this up because it's the perfect litmus test to show whether you really care about age verification, or if you want personal trackability for all internet behavior. I'd be okay with this for cert…
Can you send a link or explain how this can be done? As a not super tech savvy parent I find it impossible to keep my son off screens. He always finds a workaround. So I'm a fan of age verification especially after reading The Anxious Generation, despite all the hate it gets from hacker news.
He’s talking about zero knowledge proofs - it’s a neat use of graph coloring where you send an encrypted proof that a graph can be colored with three colors and no neighbors with the same color. The verifier makes a challenge to prove two nodes don’t have the same color, and the prover provides a key to decrypted just those two nodes. This process is repeated a number of times (with new colored graphs) until the verifier approaches certainty that the prover will always be able to show all nodes have neighbors with different colors.
This coloring problem is NP complete and somehow the thing the prover is proving is encoded in the graph structure. At the end of the day, the only thing the verifier is sure of is that the prover can make the three colored graph, 1 bit that corresponds to the thing the verifier wants to know (eg - does the prover have a token that can show they are over 18).
I don’t like this article. Irrelevant technical nuance is comingled with a philosophical opposition. The technical issues are all solvable. The free speech argument is foolish too: if limiting who can jerk off to pornography is an issue of free speech, surely so is limiting who can enter a bar and converse with the patrons. Opposition to ID checks because you believe the internet should be open and free is reasonable…
> Convenience stores scan ID, bars scan ID
These are new things, not old things. The idea that stores and bars should be able to record for all eternity the identities of the people who have purchased things from them is just as much of a horror. They can sell that information to anyone.
> hotels take copies of passports…
This is not really a new thing, although it is a fairly new thing (i.e. within the last 40 years, since cheap enough photocopiers.) But it comes from laws about keeping track of who is staying in temporary accommodation, 100 years ago you would have had to sign the register.
In my opinion, access to internet should always be behind a device controlled by an adult. And it should be this adult's responsibility to set appropriate restrictions for minors.
I'm not sure why we don't just make a law that parents must set parental controls on their kids' devices. We do this for most other things.
how about we start with a law that requires tech companies to provide useful parental controls? Can we please stop blaming parents??
You can have a shared family room computer! It works really well. No screens in the bedroom is a great idea. iPhones with strict Screen Time settings are awesome when the kids get old enough to use a phone for communication but not old enough to handle a phone with games and the full Internet
My 16 yr old just had his phone update and apply his old screen time settings from 4 or 5 years ago. Sorry kiddo, don’t remember the screen time password. Now why they came back, and weren’t working before? The restrictions were so full of holes that they didn’t really work as anything other than a speedbump.
I don't have an iPhone so haven't tried any of this, but can you not treat your kids devices like you would a business's?
It looks like normal user device enrollment with device management is optional, hence why I think business probably makes sense.
And since you have root certs on the devices, you can decrypt traffic and uniquely identify devices and block internet from your central management, at any time, regardless if the phone is on your wifi vs a friend's vs mobile data.
How do they work find and keep a job keep up with their kids school and keep government benefits. It doesn't matter that you could do those things before the internet the normal and often only or only practical flow involves the net. Counter offer we keep letting people manage their own kids' shit and they can control access to the degree they deem appropriate
Whilst I do kinda agree, I was just replying to the parent about what the punishment would probably be :) But the problem is that people are NOT managing their own kids' shit, and now we have to have things put in place to try and counter that - and end up overreaching. I'm more than happy to educate mine on how to be safe online, and to come and talk to us about stuff, other aren't, or are not aware they need to. Pe…
Such a waiver would be equally insane given the fraud and malfeasance that goes on every day it would be like signing a waiver saying whatever happens in the world is your fault for a drivers licence.
Instead how about we simply continue to make reasonable laws regarding behaviour and holding individual people and companies responsible when they violate the law.
Whilst we are at it we can keep content filtering for pre teens and imposed by parents and accept that teens are going to figure out how to get to the real internet at some point.
how about we start with a law that requires tech companies to provide useful parental controls? Can we please stop blaming parents??
> Can we please stop blaming parents?? No? They are surely somewhere in the top 3 influences that can actually have a meaningful difference here.
Do you have kids? I'm not being glib.
Yes, I have set up technical guardrails.
But when your kid needs Internet access to do their homework, and you forget to turn off the WiFi to their device after they're done... then they sneak that Chromebook to their room and watch videos all night, you lose.
When you have a extra phone that was sitting on your desk that you were preparing to resell and your kid sneaks that to their room to watch a few hundred YouTube shorts before you catch him, you lose.
When you have parental controls set up on your wifi network, but it's trivial to shut the wifi off and use the cellular network instead, you lose.
When your friends all have personal cell phones but you don't, you lose.
Parents have their hands full enough. Make it easier for parents, don't poke at them with a pointy stick.
The core issue here, as often, is that it pits ethical and economic concerns against one another. There has been a systemic choice by web/tech companies to prioritize maximum profit, often at the expense of necessary user support and compliance. Because of that, user support/relations are deficient and there is little accountability for what they're doing, even if, as we often read here, a tech company cancels user accounts, projects, or monetary accounts, without anyone or anywhere to appeal. Age verification presents the same problem. If companies maintained a professional, human-centered user relations function, they could implement a non-intrusive, real-time validation process.
If we were in the real world, with for example a barman needing an ID, that single person could confirm the age without copying or indefinitely keeping the ID card. The digital equivalent would be a decent support representative who could conduct a live brief video interaction to confirm a user's age, without even storing a copy of the ID, and who could even require the parents to be there with the minors signing in. That would address both the need for verification and the data minimization problem.
Yes, that would cost the companies a lot of money, but that would solve both problems at the same time: verifying the user's age and ensuring privacy. And guess what, the same person could also serve as an entry point for other issues that no one can really appeal against now, like the frozen accounts and other horror stories mentioned above. Yes, parental control is necessary, but it is insufficient. Zero-Knowledge Proof thingies could allow a device to validate parts of the process, but the possibilities of circumventing this are so enormous and endless that they look to me as completely insecure (and using a third party validating this adds another layer of trouble).
The most effective way would be to reintroduce a human element in the process, but we have already given up, because we are at the mercy of the web companies due to their free tools. The governments trying to introduce some ethics to those processes are not the problem at all, they should be commended for that. We are the problem because we accept that what should be the web companies' responsibilities is not being fulfilled because we don't want them to make less money as we would lose some freebies. That's on us, not on the laws. So the answer to "Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?" is : because we collectively accept it is not exactly showing our ID in person.
Paradoxically this is one of those features/requirements that i feel should be on the end-user-device with zero knowledge proof. It would make sense to have the enduser verification ondevice with a simple reply to any online property : Passed age verification/or not. Otherwise the centralization and eventual leak of this data is a can of worms in waiting.
EU implementation of age verification is actually base don zero knowledge proofs https://ageverification.dev/
If I remember right, a problem with this is that you need to get those proofs by submitting your id or similar, you only get a limited amount of proofs at a time, they expire in maybe a few months, and you can only get them using a government specific app that is only for "secure" devices. Instead of being tracked by the site you're being tracked by the government, you now need a Google Android phone in order to browse adult sites on your PC, and depending on your habits you may need to re-show your id potentially multiple times a day unless you opt to being tracked by the sites instead.
It really should be just once that you need to show your id and then you should be able to generate as many proofs as you need whenever you need on any computer device, but they have an obsession on making very sure that it cannot be circumvented, as if it was insanely important.
Cryptographically there are techniques that let you prove you're one of the several hundred million adults in the US that don't reveal anything about which adult you are. It's much less complicated than bitcoin. I'm bringing this up because it's the perfect litmus test to show whether you really care about age verification, or if you want personal trackability for all internet behavior. I'd be okay with this for cert…
Can you send a link or explain how this can be done? As a not super tech savvy parent I find it impossible to keep my son off screens. He always finds a workaround. So I'm a fan of age verification especially after reading The Anxious Generation, despite all the hate it gets from hacker news.
Not OP and I don't claim a cryptographically secure solution. However https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223051 is as good as the controls around other age-restricted products IRL: alcohol, tobacco, and adult magazines. And it preserves anonymity.