Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 1001 posts

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

#651

Post by lurking_swe »

friendzis wrote: post #386
jmye wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I know it's a hard line for parents to tread and it's really easy to criticize parenting decisions other people are making, but the "everyone else is doing it so I have to" always seems as lazy to me today, as it probably did to my parents when I said it to them as a teenager. Is it more important to prevent your son from being weaponized and turned into a little ball of hate and anger, and your daughter from…

Is it more important to prevent your child from , or to not be seen as an adversarial monster?

presumably being a parent is different from being a your child’s friend. There is overlap, but yes, sometimes being a good parent requires “laying down the law”.

With that being said, i think explaining _in detail_ why you’re laying down certain rules can go a LONG way toward building some trust and productive dialogue with your child. Maybe you’ll find out they are more mature than you give them credit, can loosen up a bit. Or maybe a reasonable compromise can be found. Or maybe they’ll be bitter for a few months, but they’ll at least understand “why”.

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

#652

Post by palata »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #579
belorn wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 parent…

> These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist

And there would be ways to work around it. If people find that privacy-preserving age verification is not good enough because "some kids will work around it", then nothing is good enough, period. Some will always work around anything.

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

#653

Post by txrx0000 »

techblueberry wrote: post #432
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 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 just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

How about we reject all institutional nannies?

It is much easier to implement user-controlled on-device settings than any sort of over-the-Internet verification scheme. Parents purchase their children's devices and can adjust those settings before giving it to their kids. This is the crux of the problem, and all other arguments are downstream of this.

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

#656

Post by hiciu »

Aurornis wrote: post #596
bitmasher9 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

Amazing how fast these systems go from "zero knowledge" to "route the request through the government system every time you use your ID"

there is no "route the request through the government system every time you use your ID".

you get your sd-jwt document signed once and you reuse it for like 30 days or so.

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

#657

Post by GaryBluto »

duped wrote: post #315
numbsafari wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold providers accountable, before we start going after parents. The only real solution is to keep children off of the internet and any internet connected device until they are older. The problem there is that everything is done on-line now…

Step 0 is physical device access. Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.

Today's young people are already technologically retarded (in the literal sense) and barely know how to use Microsoft Word or navigate with a file explorer, this would make the problem significantly worse.

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

#658

Post by worldsayshi »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #230
worldsayshi wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better and there are really really bad ways to do ID checks. In a world that is increasingly overwhelmed by bots I don't see how we can avoid proof-of-humanity and proof-of-adulthood checks in a lot of contexts. So we should probably get ahead of this debate and push for good ways to do part-of-identity-checks. Because I don't see any good way to avoid them. We could potentially do ID checks that only show…

> We could potentially do ID checks that only show exactly what the receiver needs to know and nothing else. A stronger statement: we know how to build zero-knowledge proofs over government-issued identification, cf. https://zkpassport.id/ The services that use these proofs then need to implement that only one device can be logged in with a given identity at a time, plus some basic rate limiting on logins, and the pr…

Yes this is what I'm thinking about!

The challenge here though is to prove to the user, especially without forcing the user to go into technical details, that it is indeed private and isn't giving away details.

The user needs to be able to sandbox an app like that and have full control of its communications.

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

#659

Post by inejge »

txrx0000 wrote: post #643
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 much easier to give individual users control over their own device than to give a centralized authority control over what happens on everyone's device over the Internet. Local user-controlled toggles are just easier to implement. All parental moderation mechanisms can and should be implemented as opt-in on-device settings. What governments need to do is pressure companies to implement those on-device settings. A…

> we invented this new thing called fire [...] So the tribe leader (who, by the way, gropes your children) proposed a solution: centralize control of all the fire

Of all the things, a "save-the-children prolegomena to the Prometheus myth" certainly wasn't on my bingo card today. So thank you for that, but I'm not aware of any reports of fire-keeping in the way you've described. Societies and religions do have sacred traditions related to fire (like Zoroastrians) but that doesn't come with restrictions on practical use AFAIK.

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

#660

Post by pwndByDeath »

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…

As a parent blocking websights is a joy, maybe the rule should be to allow guardians more ability to control that. Trying to block some services is not trivial

As a human, I'd love to see the rest of you fools quit that. If HN ever starts to algorithm me I'll be gone too.

Post reply on HN