> government passes law that requires companies to age verify users
> said government provides no way to actually verify a human's age
> hilarity ensuesNot saying it’s good or bad. Just that it’s intentional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID
Need to buy "toys", vape products, alcohol... anything adult online?
There's a 3rd party web app (you rightfully don't trust) as an age check in the shopping cart / user account of any of these adult shops, and this has multiple ways of verifying your age - and one of them is the bank's api, you pick it, your bank's identity sharing page loads, you log in, it shows exactly what information will be shared in a bullet point list, you tap OK, immediately a request like "this app wants to know your age, please verify" pops up in your smart banking app on your phone, you tap ok, fingerprint scan, DONE.
Problem solved. The 3rd party app knows just what it needs to. All of this takes maybe a minute and your personal info is perfectly safe (unless you don't trust your bank at which point you have bigger problems to worry about...)
There is no centralized ID number, the closest is your social security number but this is basically only outbound for PAYE tax and haphazardly correlated to your pension payments in late life.
Everything operates on a “trust system” where you often present paper (!) with whatever address you claim to be living at as proof you are real (e.g. opening bank accounts).
Passport loss is rectified by seeking out “professionals” with government-approved occupations that are not related to you that can vouch you are actually the person you are trying to replace a passport for.
The entire thing is a mess and living in digital-identity-native Europe is a dream come true that you should be extremely thankful for.
Until you find out that due to a cock up years ago the National Insurance numbers are not guaranteed to be unique, and you realize that somehow the best proof of identity British people have is a humble driving licence because DVLA is at least somewhat competent.
It's not that it was hard to fake before if you wanted to, but when you can just get a real PDF as a starting point, and edit it slightly it's just theatre.
Two of the well-used solutions to identity in the U.S. are login.gov (government-managed) and id.me (private, but used by government). Basically to get setup, at some point you have to have physical presence to get an actual government-approved physical ID, which can still be a barrier to some, but it doesn’t require a bank account.
Just don’t implement your own like Discourse and Tea.app.
Another victim of auto-correct!
FWIW discord did not implement their own (sensibly), but since the british government does not provide this service it basically mandates possibly dodgy middlemen.
My understanding is that discord uses (contracted?) https://www.k-id.com/
This right here. Just look at what happened with visa/mastercard this week, private institutions can and will cave to special interest groups advocating to block access to legal content.
For example, our id's have a qr on it that contains some basic info. Why not provide a platform for age checks with that qr? Anyway, fuck them. Education goes a lot further than trying to force identity verification on private companies when there is no real life threat in play.
If I've understood it correctly, Pornhub can't see anything except that you've turned 18 (no names, no date of births, nothing) and your local government can't see that you've signed up for Pornhub using the app.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-europ...
Having to use passports or poor solutions like face scanning isn't good enough. I guess the reason they don't do this is because they fear the cost, anything governments price up these days seems to be in the billion range. So the politicians who don't understand how cheap it is to build software assume it's way out of their price range.
It is literally illegal to slap a few lines of glue code and say “there’s your age verification, look how cheap it is.” The public would be happy about saving money right up until there’s a massive privacy breach and all the ways you cut corners are exposed.
I don’t know if leaving the standards unspecified is the right thing to do (it’s probably not), but don’t pretend like a government verified solution could ever be cheap when dealing with citizens’ identities.
Then a small team of highly skilled engineers from Google/Facebook etc were brought in to fix it. They stabilized and relaunched the system in weeks at a fraction of the original cost. It showed that the problem wasn't the complexity or the standards, it was how the project was managed and who was building it.
The major advantage of bringing in the engineers (only one ex-googler, most were oracle and redhat, again IIRC) was that they were all already bigwigs and knew how to take ownership of large systems, and were given the authority to do so.
The idea that a small group of people can't produce something that can scale to millions of people is just false.
It also wouldn't just be cheaper; it would be better. The "government" way of doing things would be far more likely to be broken glue code with privacy issues because all those committee meetings and bottom of the barrel contractor selection don't produce better end results
No. Regards, Palantir, Microsoft, HP (and other government providers)
* You create your account as part of your license renewal and have a normal-ass login. As part of that your account is manually marked as being 18+ (or just your age) by the person behind the counter.
* The government publishes a few public certs which will be used to verify.
* Then you go to your account page and click the button to generate a certificate signed by one of the government's private keys. The cert is valid for say 7 days.
* You upload the cert to the website you want to access and the website validates it.
Done. You make it illegal to provide your tokens to minors like it's illegal to provide booze to minors. Good enough for government work. It's literally just an EV cert.
The problem gets a lot easier when you have a country wide IRL ID system already in place and can write laws.
every time a country wide ID comes up, people freak the fuck out about state's rights and it being a power grab. people are already freaking out about RealID. it will take a very authoritarian system to force this through, yet it's the supporters of that leader that are the most vocally against it.
Briefly, the government can give you a digital copy of your driver's license or passport or whatever that can be bound to a hardware security key you have. Most modern smartphones have a suitable security key built.
To verify your age for a site a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) can be constructed for the site to prove that you have that document, it says your age is above the threshold needed for the site, and that you have the hardware key it is bound to, and you were able to unlock that hardware key. Nothing else is revealed to the site.
Note that once the government issues that digital ID bound to your security key they are out of the picture. They have no idea what you use that ID for or when you use it.
Google has released an open source library to help with this kind of system, discussed here [1].
Eh, at least until they require all sites to ensure all posts and pictures are signed by a valid digital ID. You know, to prevent terrorism.
Here’s Google’s doc:
https://developers.google.com/wallet/identity/verify/accepti...
Looks like it will support zero knowledge proofs?
I hope they just improve that performance, rather than see this and back out of it entirely and require ID checks.
Some of the age verification systems that use digital ids (mDLs) do the same thing but people freak out about how they work because I think they misunderstand the tech.
They system basically asks the mDL via an api call "is this user above the age of 18/21" and the app only responds with a yes or no. It doesn't pass the users fulls details over or anything like that.
As in, if I repeatedly ask for age verification to the same service, does it know:
1) the identity of the user making the request, and 2) whether repeated requests comes from the same user (even if they don't know who it is?)
The vendor is https://www.k-id.com in Discord's case
> Identity documents are deleted after a user’s age group is confirmed, and the video selfies used for facial age estimation never leaves their device.
Not the broken anti-competitive Google play store integrity (which is passing for any handset not patched for the last 8 years but with Google buttplug in it, effectively nullifying assurances from the attestation), but a proper hw attestation.
We want a broken and easily bypassable system that only exists to make do-gooders think they did good.
And that's why it's been bypassed already
On the other note, can one attach chrome devtools to any electron application?
A law must mandate that an "adult" version of OS (or device) may be sold only to adult users. It is not difficult for Microsoft/Apple to implement this yet they do not want to for some reason.
This would allow more reliable age verification, without revealing identity of account owners. Well, maybe the govt wants exactly the opposite.
The Industrie enforces new rules and suddenly it costs $150000 and has awkward requirements to get your OS certified adult.
For the years to come only the most recent windows versions and customer devices like phones will work. No Linux will pay to get a standard they haven't asked for. Embed devices will stop working as more and more stuff gets simply flagged "adult only"
Just don't ... :)
Edit:// see Silverlight, or why it took years until something like Netflix was even legally technically possible
I don’t understand why other countries can’t do the same.
How about we don't make lists of people visiting porn sites? How about we accept that children are part of society and not try to put them in little cages like songbirds?
But whatever age-verification solution I have seen so far sucked, really badly. And I can't believe people promote something like a government based age check. People need their privacy.
It's the correct idea but the way it should be done is by coming to a democratic consensus that helicopter parenting is bad, not by attempting to hobble the infrastructure of government. If only for the practical reason that it'll simply be outsourced and privatized. In US states where the police can't scan license plates, there's a private industry doing that and then selling the data back to the police. The same result but now you pay a premium.
Lee Kuan Yew was fond of making this point. Weak "horizontal" administrations will creep in ways that are more opaque and without checks than strong "vertical" ones.
First, a vocal minority of security freaks lead by Tony Blair who think that forcing everybody to carry ID cards around is a proportionate way to protect Britain from terrorists, illegal immigrants and other foes.
Second, a large proportion of the country who think that the introduction of optional ID cards is a slippery slope towards the first group getting what they want.
Third, another large proportion of people who think that the risk of the first group getting what they want is overblown, or else think that the convenience of being able to prove identity more easily outweighs the inconvenience of having to carry an ID card around everywhere.
In the great ID card battle of the late-00s, the second group won decisively and politicians have been too scared to take up the issue ever since. Except for Blair, but having the face of your political campaign be a war criminal is of negative value to that cause.
> This bill would require, among other things related to age verification on the internet, a covered manufacturer to provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder, as defined, to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the sole purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store and to provide a developer, as defined, who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a real-time application programming interface regarding whether a user is in any of several age brackets, as prescribed. The bill would define “covered manufacturer” to mean a person who is a manufacturer of a device, an operating system for a device, or a covered application store. The bill would require a developer to request a signal with respect to a particular user from a covered manufacturer when that user requests to download an application.
> This bill would punish noncompliance with a civil penalty to be enforced by the Attorney General, as prescribed.
[0] https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/2025 [1] https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/id/3134744
If you want to know more about this lovely bait-and-switch tactic used by the Golden State's legislature, see here: https://californiaglobe.com/uncategorized/gut-and-amend-bill...
(iOS Safari)
Okay turning off content blockers did the trick. AdGuard was blocking the whole site for some reason.
Personally, I will never use Discord and they just gave me another reason not to.
Either way, when I see a person or business advertise a Discord link, I immediately think of either as immature.
I miss the days of forums, and wish something like them could thrive again instead of rather private, but importantly ephemeral chats.
Open source projects have long had ephemeral chats, private to the people in the chat at that moment - it just used to be called IRC.
This Epic, which famously had to pay half of billion USD settlement when they got caught for law breaking (collecting personal data without consent. Clearly against the law, because they knew they're collecting details of children) : https://www.exterro.com/resources/blog/data-privacy-alert-ft...
Did you never wonder why VPN ads don't really list any actual use cases, yet they're wildly popular? If you know what you need it for, the ad doesn't have to tell you - just has to tell you which company to give your money to.
(I still don't really know what people are actually using VPNs for.)
> Concerned parents, it said, should block or control VPN usage.
Hilarious. I wonder if they realised...
Ridiculous.
And yeah, absurd.
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