And just like in those cases, what is to prevent someone who is of age giving their ID to someone underage?
If you handed over your id, and the person checking it made a photocopy and handed it to a police officer who put it in a file in a briefcase they carried, you might feel differently.
However, you can buy fake IDs online, and the IDs are reportedly beating those machines. So if you trust the machine for age-verification, you might let in underage people.
Parent have an obligation to loosen the restrictions, and, what, the government has obligations to tighten them and deprive them of the spaces where they can act independently?
I don't care to talk about the premise itself. This reasoning is absurd.
We have many place in real life where we already have to prove our age or identity but somehow the internet should be excluded
The author described a narrow path that provides "kid safety in the internet" without sacrificing the general population privacy.
Is it technically possible to implement the way he suggests? Yes. Will it be implemented that way? No.
There are people who can affect the way this verification will be implemented who are genuinely interested in more surveillance, heck, remember chat control that is an ongoing fight in a very similar vein, there is a global desire in politicians to get more control over the communications.
To me the author seems either naive or straight up malicious.
I actually don’t think it is. Fundamentally this kind of certificate is going to be revocable. It’s untenable politically to hand out irrevocable attestations that can be handed off to minors. If you allow that, the system has failed to prevent minors from accessing adult materials, and if you don’t then the system has failed to preserve privacy.
> To me the author seems either naive or straight up malicious.
I think just naive.
Maybe the EU knows it's untenable and is still moving forward because they will be able to demonstrate to the public that privacy enables abuse, creating pretext to make the system not private anymore after it's already been implemented.
The same applies online/digitally except that you can very likely distribute the same ID to many minors without getting a new one allocated.
I’m in the “we should protect kids online” camp, but I am not sure there’s a real way to do it without compromising privacy for everyone.
This “it’s the parents job” is also reductionist. It is, but somehow we still have made it illegal for minors to buy hard liquor and pornography from physical stores in the United States and few argue that restriction is wrong.
This system is good for a bunch of reasons:
* It gives parents control such that they can tailor the experience to their kids. This is a problem with current proposals.
* It doesn't bring identity into the mix at all, completely defusing the risk of mass surveillance.
* It's easy to verify if adult sites are complying: hit them with a curl request containing the header, check the response. This is much easier that verifying that Discord is checking user ages properly using their face-scanning technology.
Can they also provide other ZKPs? Specifically to attest that someone is a unique human being? Humanity verification is incredibly important to fight against propaganda online[1]
1 - https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
Guess who is heavily using social media today and unreflectively repeats fake news.
I am not worried for myself and for others who are technically inclined, we will just silently find and implement solutions for ourselves and any others who have the energy and inclination to use them. This is worst, as usual, for the most vulnerable among us. Those most in need of the information which they will not be able to access. Every freedom comes with risks and responsibilities, freedom of information maybe more than any, but the harms of limiting information are much more unacceptable than any caused by its unhindered natural flow. You can propagandize and scheme to your hearts content. You can lobby your governments to implement your halfbaked schemes. But in the end it won't work... Because people like me and millions of other will just not comply. We will build our own networks if need be, but we will do just about anything rather than accept your terms.
For adults.
There is information and images that are developmentally harmful to children. As the author says, this is no different from drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or gambling.
If you can’t understand that, you either don’t have children, have a screw loose, or are a child predator.
I actually don't have to show my ID when I buy alcohol because I'm old. There's a material difference between an electronic record being submitted, passed through and stored on several different servers, and somebody seeing you and seeing a grey beard and saying, yeah, you can buy that beer. The worst case scenario in real life is that the bouncer at the bar looks at your ID, seems real enough, checks the date, matches the picture, and that's it. There is no record being stored, there is no log. It's not equivalent to the vast majority of online age verification mechanisms in use today.
That is beside the point. I'm talking about the incoherent argument about a parent's supposed obligation to stop parenting and the government taking over. There are three premises here asserted by the author: 1) the child's need for independence, 2) a parent's duty to stop parenting, and 3) the government stepping in. Number 1 is contrary to 3, and I don't agree with either 2 or 3. What do you think?
The government does not get to put child locks on my liquor cabinet, or even keep me from leaving booze out on the counter. They get to restrict businesses from selling to people without identification. Note that this has already always been the case on the internet, too.
Today I can walk into a shop and buy alcohol without showing my ID.
I can also walk into my local library and read any book I wish to, some with adult themes. I could do this as a teenage too. I also did this in my own school library.
Demanding to see ID to access online content is a terrible idea and it is the parent's responsibility to look after children. It should be an understanding between the parent and child on what they should be accessing online. If that breaks down then the parent should do their job of being a parent. Take the device away and punish the child.
No scheme is going to issue cards/tokens that can be traded between people, that's obviously unworkable.
Untraceable is for the consumers of the cards obviously, but in order to have trust they need to be traceable for somebody to verify them. The government can already determine who you are and already requires you to prove that at certain points, this is not a new invention of government it is required for governments to function.
ulrikrasmussen•45m ago
> Here is cryptographic proof that I hold a valid credential proving I am over 18. You can verify the proof, but you learn nothing about who I am.
Is this true though? I am genuinely interested as I haven't looked into the details, but must the user not at least also disclose who the issuer of the credential is so the verifier can verify it against a public key? This also reveals at least the nationality of the user and could be misused to block access to foreigners using VPN.