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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

#941

Post by molszanski »

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…

> work at a European identity wallet system that uses a zero knowledge proof age identification system

> derives an age attribute such as "over 18" from a passport or ID, without disclosing any other information

Well, as soon someone points their chinaphone camera on a passport, it is already over.

This whole setup is a nightmare fuel.

You want to check over 18? Fine, let adults set their kids devices in a "child" mode. Problem solved.

No need to create a stasi dreamland.

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

#942

Post by zenbowman »

meowface wrote: post #22
zenbowman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% correct. At this point the harms to children from social media use are very well documented. Like everything else in society, there are tradeoffs here, I'm much more concerned with the damage done to children's developing brains than I am to violations of data privacy, so I'm okay with age verification, however draconian it may be.

We need to destroy privacy and anonymity online for the noble goal of the government banning teenagers from looking at Twitter and Instagram? If it's a concern, parents can prevent or limit their children's use. If all this were being done to prevent consistent successful terrorist attacks in the US with tens of thousands of annual casualties, I'd say okay maybe there is an unavoidable trade-off that must be made her…

"Preserving privacy and anonymity online" is not an inherent good. It depends on how it is being used and what the consequences on society are.

Thus far, privacy and anonymity have been used to get children addicted to garbage, distribute CSAM, create elaborate schemes of financial fraud (cryptocurrency), and develop drug distribution networks.

It's completely reasonable to limit privacy in order to combat these social evils.

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

#943

Post by account42 »

orthogonal_cube wrote: post #936
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…

I was working on a similar concept as a hobby project with PKI. The idea being that governments would have a digital registry with citizen information and issue a certificate to be stored in a Secure Enclave on a device. When a client attempts to access an age-restricted URL, the server redirects to a custom URI scheme which begins a negotiation for requesting verification. The server signs a message and provides it…

If the website and state want to collude to track the user they don't need to send any in-band metadata.

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

#944

Post by consumer451 »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #820

Looking at actual data regarding Australia's landmark legislation setting a minimum age of 16 for social media access with enforcement starting on December 10, 2025 indicates weakened data protection. The Australian data suggests that while the legislation has successfully cleared the decks of millions of underage accounts (4.7 million account deactivations together with increased VPN usage and "ghost" accounts to by…

It is quite interesting that, according to a generally reliable YouTuber, Australian age verification was pushed by an ad agency whose major clients were upset about upcoming legislation regulating online gambling. It was a very successful distraction.

> Australia's Social Media Ban is a Win for Gambling Companies

https://www.patreon.com/posts/146315894 (supporting links and transcript)

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-b... (the smoking gun)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJi6N_6RmtU

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

#945

Post by Pxtl »

steve_taylor wrote: post #760
Pxtl wrote: post #462

All of my kids devices are identified, at device level, as children's devices. They could've trivially exposed this as metadata to allow sites to enforce "no under 18" use. However, I'd disagree that my bigger concern for my kids isn't that they'd see a boob or a penis, but that they'd see an influencer who'd try to radicalize them to some extremist cause, and that's usually not considered 18+ content. And either way…

The problem with that is that sites/apps will retain the identifier, either to use the Digital ID for login (not just one-time age verification), because they want to retain as much information as possible for later usage or sale, or because a government told them they have to retain it so all their social media activity can be easily linked to them.

That's what we have now, but mandatorily, and without the anti-sockpuppet protection a true ID would provide.

I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about digital ID. The people who benefit the most from fake people posting are spambots, sockpuppets, disinfo peddlers, and astroturfers.

And either way, I firmly believe that a site should be free allow you to log in without a digital ID... I just would like to be able to know who doesn't have one so I can know who's a real human being and who is an appendage.

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

#946

Post by MisterTea »

lunias wrote: post #937

When I was a kid, my parents installed Net Nanny on our home computer. I installed a keylogger. No more Net Nanny; lots more EverQuest. I don't like age verification in general, for anything. The age gates in our society are very subjective. Many times my Dad would buy alcohol at the grocery store w/ me (underage) in tow, but they never asked for my ID or refused to sell to him. Now, when I go buy alcohol as an adult…

> When I was a kid, my parents installed Net Nanny on our home computer.

Putting up artificial walls is inviting someone to look behind them.

Back in 1999 I was attending a city university and their computer labs were a mix of older Pentium machines running Windows 98 secured by netnanny. They disabled floppy booting in the BIOS and password protected it. Thing is, the old Dell cases were real easy to pop open and pull the CMOS battery out. That killed the BIOS password so I was able to floppy boot the machine and rename netnanny.exe to nutnanny.exe and Win 98 ran unimpeded. When I was done I would rename the exe, reboot and go on about my day. Nice try, uni admins.

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

#947

Post by Hizonner »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #870
godelski wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". Regulatory capture at its finest. Such a ruling gives Apple and Google a duopoly over the market. Maybe worse, it encourages the push of personal computers to be more mobile like (the fact that we treat phones as different from computers is already a silly concept). So when are we goin…

> So when are we going to build a new internet? Finally, the year of IPFS. Government messing too much with the internet will end up pushing people to use more "dangerous" internets that are completely unregulated and that is surely the opposite of the the stated purpose to protect young people.

IPFS doesn't even try to do any kind of anonymity or censorship resistance. In a practical sense it's probably worse than BitTorrent, although neither one of them is up to the task. Actually resilient data distribution is hard, and I don't think there are any systems that have all the needed elements.

... and if you create one, they can, and it's starting to look like they will, outlaw using it, regardless of what you use it for.

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

#948

Post by testing22321 »

lunias wrote: post #937

When I was a kid, my parents installed Net Nanny on our home computer. I installed a keylogger. No more Net Nanny; lots more EverQuest. I don't like age verification in general, for anything. The age gates in our society are very subjective. Many times my Dad would buy alcohol at the grocery store w/ me (underage) in tow, but they never asked for my ID or refused to sell to him. Now, when I go buy alcohol as an adult…

The US is strange about alcohol.

I remember plenty of times in my early 20s buying alcohol and they wanted to see the ID of everyone waiting on my car.

In Australia you buy alcohol at the drive through. One person is 18 and you’re good.

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

#949

Post by rjmunro »

horsawlarway wrote: post #234
armchairhacker wrote: post #55

Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account. If that's criminalized (like alcohol), it will happen too often to prosecute (much more frequently than alcohol, which is rarely prosecuted anyways). I don't see a solution that isn't a fundamental culture shift. If there's a fundamental culture shift, there's an eas…

I don't understand how this is any better. It's my job as a parent (and I have several kids...) to monitor the things they consume and talk with them about it. I don't want some blanket ban on content unless it's "age appropriate", because I don't approve that content being banned. (honestly - the idea of "age appropriate" is insulting in the first place) Fuck man, I can even legally give my kids alcohol - I don't se…

> I don't want some blanket ban on content unless it's "age appropriate"

I'm currently struggling with FitBit. Since about the start of the year, my kids can no longer sync their watches to their phones. The "solution" is to completely disable all parental controls on their Google accounts.

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

#950

Post by mapt »

godelski wrote: post #816
EmbarrassedHelp wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months. It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked, which is a total no-go for pr…

> It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". Regulatory capture at its finest. Such a ruling gives Apple and Google a duopoly over the market. Maybe worse, it encourages the push of personal computers to be more mobile like (the fact that we treat phones as different from computers is already a silly concept). So when are we goin…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTnYVh7K6xQ

There are (to make up a number) ten desirable properties of the modern internet, and so far it's "Pick two", but novel combinations of the things you mentioned offer "Pick three" or possibly "Pick four" if adoption picks up.

For text, phone, and even image communication in urban and suburban areas, it sounds like there's real promise here. But we're not going to achieve parity with a global fiber + datacenter network by any means.

You don't need all ten to, say, organize a revolt.

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