What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/

by hn_acker • 30 days ago

951 505 30 days ago

"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.

its been said 1000 times here, but: age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate (something we have not done with any other law ever). there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes.

i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.

pokstad• 30 days ago

Exactly. The same way that selling alcohol doesn’t require a paper trail of every beer I’ve bought.

SecretDreams2• 30 days ago

To be fair, I buy my beers on CC. If someone really wanted to know the best IPAs and session able beers they could get, they could audit my CC records and then cross check to the breweries and pubs to see what I was buying. Just depends how much someone wants to learns bout good beer.

win311fwg• 30 days ago

Not anymore, at least. In these parts your alcohol purchases did require a paper trail once upon a time.

rationalist3• 30 days ago

I don't know about this, stores around me are scanning people's IDs to verify their age.

I guess I could make an ID (not a counterfeit government ID) that uses the same encoding for the birthday.

Aerroon4• 30 days ago

And yet in practice they do.

Well, not every beer but when you shop at Beers-R-Us they know.

hacker_88• 30 days ago

They can track you with cookies , now they have age and identity signals .

kazinator• 30 days ago

In tech, 10% unsuccessful today is 100% unsuccessful next week, when everyone learns how to join that 10% who got around it.

The shit is horrible if 100% successful, and yet not worth doing if it isn't.

mindslight7• 30 days ago

Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing? To me, the entire problem is framing the issue as "age verification" in the first place - this implies the web company is responsible for knowing and controlling who uses their service. Whether this is a full-on demand for drivers' license / face scan / verification can, or whether there can be a technical process that obscures some details doesn't change this underlying dynamic!

The other problem you're up against is in the low-friction online environment, 90% easily turns into a much lower percentage. Which will actually manifest itself as the initial methods that achieved "90%" being declared insufficient in favor of stronger methods of identity verification.

I say this as a parent staring down having to deal with the dumpster fire that is the modern web in the next short year or two - the only sane way to address this problem is through client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc. There is indeed a market failure here, so the sensible regulation is to make websites over a certain size publish labels about the suitability of their content for age brackets, whether a site is social media, contains user generated content, has algorithmic feeds, and so on - affirmative assertions about the content that carry legal weight and liability for them not being true. Device manufacturers over a certain size would need to include parental control software that can be enabled during the setup process.

If parental controls are enabled and a website has not published tags (too small, foreign jurisdiction, misconfiguration, etc), then it simply fails closed and refuses to display the site. This keeps decisions about content suitability in the hands of parents where it belongs, rather than putting it in the hands of corporate attorneys who will often make decisions directly contrary to what parents want! Remember this whole topic is being pushed by big tech to absolve themselves of liability for pushing harmful products!

john_strinlai20• 30 days ago

Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing?

well, i mean, you put a decently reasonable one in your own comment: "client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc."

another sibling comment mentions alcohol sales. government could issue a scratch card with UUID that's valid for some time, sold at anywhere alcohol/tobacco is already sold. most people are already comfortable with flashing an id at the beer store.

read any other the other dozen similar threads with hundreds of comments, and there are a handful of other neat ideas usually voted pretty high up.

sharperguy• 30 days ago

Doesn't _have_ to be except not enough voters can tell the difference which is exactly the goal.

sneak2• 30 days ago

This isn’t about kids at all. The ID requirement is the WHOLE POINT.

That it is technically possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving way is thus entirely irrelevant.

They want all online activity tied to ID so they can violently, illegally retaliate in the dark of night against protected expression online that they don’t like.

That’s all this is. Privacy-preserving techniques are irrelevant because they do not accomplish this goal.

inigyou24• 30 days ago

There is also, separately from that, a need to protect kids from growing up into the people in Idiocracy.

encom• 30 days ago

My government shouldn't decide what content I'm viewing or providing, and that's the end of it.

muh kids

That's the parents problem, not mine.

Any system the government comes up with will be insecure, inconvenient, invasive and cost the taxpayers billions, and you all know it's true.

Wowfunhappy9• 30 days ago

Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? I don't personally see a way to verify someone's age which doesn't involve either credit card verification, photo id verification, or some sort of facial recognition. If you know enough about someone to verify their age—even to a relatively low degree of accuracy—you probably know enough to pinpoint who they are in general.

Heck—in most cases, we can't even tell the difference between humans and bots anymore! And it's true that we basically accept that some bots will slip through the cracks—but identifying bots also strikes me as significantly easier than identifying children.

armchairhacker4• 30 days ago

Make unrestricted devices like alcohol: you need ID to buy (but the box containing the device you’re sold is indistinguishable from any other, so the device may have a UUID but it can’t be traced to your ID); kids caught with unrestricted devices in school have them confiscated; maybe fine parents, but I think discouragement and banning in schools is enough. Kids can have restricted devices, distinguished from unrestricted by appearance in a way that’s hard to fake.

michael1999• 30 days ago

Info-minimized oidc handshakes with certified identity providers could verify age-category of a user with no other information shared.

Consider "log in with apple" as it is today. Depending on what you share, a relying website might not even get your name or email.

zug_zug3• 30 days ago

Sure here's one example of decentralizing it -- it's going to be overly simple just as a toy example to show how easy it could be:

Whenever you want to prove your adult you go to "am I an adult.gov" and you use your credit card or whatever to prove you are an adult. At which point you get a 1-time 5-digit code that is UNIVERSAL TO EVERY SINGLE HUMAN and good for 1 hour (everybody who uses the site gets the same code that hour).

Then when you want to look at porn or something, you use this code. Boom simple and done.

There are even much better much more private techniques that use cryptography, and AI is happy to explain these graduate-degree level topics to you at your own pace.

Of course there are situations where people steal things, and use deep-fakes, etc, but those exist in every model.

john_strinlai20• 30 days ago

Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining?

sure, i'll put my favorite two. though you'll find much more detailed and thought-out versions of these (and others) in the dozens of other giant threads on the same topic.

- buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time. most people are comfortable with flashing their ID at the clerk. the UUID card is non-identifying.

- websites issue content tags, browsers consume them, you enter your age into the OS during setup.

oliwarner3• 30 days ago

That's because you're treating AV as a system that must be 100% correct immediately. This isn't banking or an election.

As soon as you loosen off the requirements to "reasonable effort", you can start looking at account age, facial features, social attestation, and include retrospective tools to revisit someone's verification if they get in and start acting like a child. Heuristically messy but far from impossible to demand a stronger form of verification if their original might have been borderline.

The goal is broad coverage, not complete. Screening doesn't have to get 100% to have an effect.

Aaargh203182• 30 days ago

The way identity wallets work:

The government issues an eID to your wallet. The ID is signed by the government and linked to the device to prevent transferring the credential. A public/private key-pair is generated by the secure enclave in your phone, the public key along with proof of possession of the private key is included in the request for the government eID. The government signs individual attributes combined with the public key with the government private key. The government certificate containing the public key is, well, public.

One of the attributes is ‘over_18’ (In the EU eID scheme countries can add other over_XX attributes if they want, but over_18 is mandatory).

When a website wants to requests attributes, in this case the over_18 attribute, they send a request to the user’s wallet app, including a challenge. The wallet sends back a package including the government-signed attribute, which contains the device public key and the over_18 attribute plus a response to the challenge (proving the credential didn’t get transferred).

The website only sees the ‘over_18’ attribute, which is backed by the government signature. They don’t see any other attributes (the wallet app shows in advance which attributes you are sharing). The government never sees which website wants to know if you’re 18+.

Of course this is all a bit simplified, check OIDC4VCI and OIDC4VP for details.

The only real issue is the wallet app and device binding. Because a compromised device could allow credentials to be transferred some form of attestation of device and wallet app is required. In practice this means no rooted/jailbroken phones.

netrap• 30 days ago

Perfect is the enemy of the good, right? I mean a page header or some other simple means to identify "adult" vs not is good for most cases? Just thinking about it.. obviously it can be bypassed but is there a good enough?

lotu• 30 days ago

Using existing parental controls parents could set their kids age and that could be used for the age controls. Could the parents let the kids around the age gate? Sure but they could do that even if a government ID and camera was required. This actually might be more effective than a lot of these systems because other adults could not let the kids use their IDs

lo_zamoyski• 30 days ago

This is a classic case for one time ZKPs. Sure, you can't get around attestation, but the party that needs to verify that you meet age criteria doesn't need to know your age or other private information.

I presume you're concerned by the attesting party's knowledge of both the signature and identify information. Yes, in principle these can be linked, but in practice, it may be difficult or made very difficult, and today, very little of our online activity is really anonymous anyway. It is generally not too difficult to infer identity based on the content someone generates and the bread crumbs they leave behind.

Of course, if the intent is to use age verification as a wedge to monitor everyone, then it will be difficult politically to secure the protections needed to prevent that sort of data fusion.

blahaj• 30 days ago

Cryptographically blinded age verification with a government signed digital ID

dfxm122• 30 days ago

If you don't think a checkbox saying "I am 13 or older" is adequate, with all the behavioral tracking available to say Meta, they can tell well enough. OpenAI talks about this too: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-age-prediction/

Knowing who someone is in general is different from having a photo of their face or government ID confirmation.

pyrale3• 30 days ago

you generate a random number and send it to website you want to visit.

Website you want to visit generates a one-time private/public key for the purpose of this login attempt, hashes your random number, and sends the hash back to you.

You connect to the government auth platform, auth yourself to your government, and ask them to sign the hash you received.

You pass the signed hash as well as the original random number to the website you wanted to access (the original random number is used by the website to store the one-time key they generated for you). They can see it is signed by the government. They can see it is made with the hash they provided.

You get access to whatever content you wanted. The website doesn't know who you are. The government doesn't know where you logged in. Sure, it won't hold up against collusion between website and government, but nothing would.

the principles explained above are slight adaptations of PKCE authentication.

soperj2• 30 days ago

just do what they did in Leisure suit Larry, ask some skill testing questions that only someone older than 18 would know. Give them a short time to answer so they can't look it up.

codedokode2• 30 days ago

Yubikey tokens support attestation. You can sell Yubikey tokens at places inaccessible to minors, like liquor stores, and having a token proves that one is adult. Another way is implementing "parent mode" when OS allows only installing apps from a government-approved whitelist and access sites from a whitelist.

karussell• 30 days ago

I think the German Personalausweis has an electronic ID function that does this: age verification without giving out other information like name etc. But the application chooses which information is requested and could/will request more.

Unfortunately few know and use this information although the usage via NFC is not that complicated. Have used it successfully already a few times for banks, but including name information etc.

tarentel• 30 days ago

A lot of these age verifications things have to do with "protecting children". If that's the end goal we don't really need to verify anyone's age. Apple/Google, any smart phone maker, should be forced to add proper parental controls.

Parents should be able to control what apps can be used, what websites can be viewed, who the phone is able to contact.

That doesn't require knowing my age, or anyone else's.

Also, as an iOS developer, it's not my job to parent your child. The age ratings are clear on the app store, if you give your child unrestricted access to a phone that's on you, not me. If the OS doesn't have proper controls that's on Apple/Android, again, not my fault and not something I should be forced to police.

Thanks to Texas, I can see roughly how old your kid is. I'm not supposed to keep that information though. ;) I'm sure everyone who makes app will comply with that and not use that information for any other purposes and you can bet Texas has the means to audit every app on the app store to make sure that they're complying. lol

ajsnigrutin• 30 days ago

Easy, when you buy the device, during first setup, you set up the date of birth of the user. If the user is underage, the parent/guardian sets a password to unlock the device if needed before the user is 18. That device then sends "is_below_18" flag to whatever service wants it.

AnthonyMouse3• 29 days ago

The correct way to do this continues to be for sites to tag the content with some kind of rating and let the client device decide whether to show it based on how the user's account is configured.

This requires no ID of any kind because the child's parent or teacher knows their age, and kids buying a device on their own is no more or less of a problem than kids getting some high school senior or homeless adult to lend them their ID.

paulsutter• 29 days ago

One approach is for parents to establish certain devices as “under 18” (or 16 or 13), leaving it up to the judgment of parents.

oliwarner3• 28 days ago

Attestation from other services is a good option. I have Apple, Meta, Google, PayPal, eBay, Microsoft, Twitter/X and Steam accounts that —through age of account, and their own identity checks and purchase histories— could attest that I'm probably an adult. This obviously isn't a feature they offer currently, but could. Most are available as a federated OAuth IdP.

You already entrust far more than an adult flag to these services so I doubt the news you like to touch yourself is going to be met with an emergency board meeting.

But if that were a problem, would it be that hard to separate identity from end service with an intermediate AV condom service? I'd personally prefer to not add another leaky abstraction layer but that's me.

XorNot3• 30 days ago

I am convinced that no one will make any progress on this issue so long as they refuse to understand that their aren't a group of shadowy figures pushing for this but rather a sizeable chunk of the general population, buoyed on by various moral outrage interest groups including a great many HNers who have been happily stoking the narrative that social media is the cause of every negative statistical ill.

Who wants this? God damn everyone. And in so much as Facebook might do something with the data, what they really want is a legal moat of sufficient depth to drown possible competitors.

bluebarbet2• 30 days ago

In fairness (i.e. looking at the data with an open mind), social media does seem to be the cause of (or at least strongly correlated with) a bunch of ills.

akmiller8• 30 days ago

Doesn't 90% successful mean you are stepping on 10% toes???

john_strinlai20• 30 days ago

Doesn't 90% successful mean you are stepping on 10% toes???

no, it means that <10% of kids under 16 or whatever age will still make it onto instagram

Retr0id7• 30 days ago

Where are these mythical sweet-spot solutions? Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset. Now that users have been conditioned to accept this, nobody seems very interested in figuring out how to collect less PII - only insulating themselves from liability by having the data processed by a third party.

john_strinlai20• 30 days ago

mythical sweet-spot solutions?

there are thousands of comments on these threads every time it comes up. there's tons of what i consider reasonable solutions proposed. there's examples below, too, which don't require face scans.

Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents

yeah, i agree that really sucks.

cogman105• 30 days ago

The UK has draconian laws.

But some of the easiest middle ground solutions that solve 90% of the problem are things like simple math problems. Get asked "3+7" and that will pretty quickly filter out almost anyone under the age of 6. If you can accept that there are some smart 4 or 5 year olds who can do simple math, congrats you recognize there's a 10%.

gambiting9• 30 days ago

Government builds a website where you can log in using any government issued ID or using one of the many many many available services that hold your details already(at least in the UK nearly everyone will have a DLVA account, HMRC account, HMPO account, NHS account.....all of these are government services which we can only assume hold our data securely already).

On that website, you can click "give me a verification code", it gives you a code that is single use and only valid 24 hours. You type that into whatever 18+ website you need to, they use a public API provided by the government to just check "yes this is a valid code and the user is 18" - bang, done, verified. The website knows nothing about you at all, except for the fact that you're 18.

In fact, the UK government ALREADY HAS THIS. For the EU settlement scheme, you can give your employeer(or anyone else who needs it) a special magic code that they type in on the government website, and it just says "yet his person has the right to reside in the UK" without spilling any of your personal information at all. The code is single use and valid a limited amount of time. And you can do the same with your driving licence, where anyone can verify you hold a valid licence without actually seeing it or any details on it.

Like, am I being stupid here? It seems like an almost trivial solution to the problem, especially given that it already exists for at least 2 services named above.

And yes, I know people will say "oh but that requires the government having this data on you, and that's bad" or "but then the government will know you've authenticated with pornhub!".

And yes, both of these are true - but on point 1 - like, I'd love some ideal situation where the government can simultaniously give me a passport or a driving licence AND not have any information about me at the same time, but that ain't happening, and on point 2 - yes, but that's still infinitely preferable to the current implementation, and it can be easily solved with legislation saying that the code authentication service doesn't log who requested verification, it just answers with yes/no and that's it.

dijksterhuis• 30 days ago

half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset.

what kind of websites are you visiting to get age checked on half of the sites you visit? i've only been asked to verify for dating apps and "sexy stuff". and i definitely don't spend 50% of my total browsing time on those sites.

maybe this says more about the kind of content/sites you're accessing if it is really as high as 50%? UK age verification mostly only applies to sites which might end up hosting the content quoted below.

pornographic images, and content that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for eating disorders, self-harm, or suicide.

or you're just being hyperbolic? 79% of statistics are made up, after all.

irusensei2• 30 days ago

They don't exist because the organizations who lobbied governments were YOTI, Persona, K-ID and others who have a vested interest in collecting data and rent seek by latching through regulations like diseased ticks.

ordu2• 30 days ago

age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate

I believe you are missing the point. "To protect kids" is just a cover, the nightmare dystopia is the real goal. So age verification have to be a nightmare dystopia or it would be useless for those, who push for it.

john_strinlai20• 30 days ago

I believe you are missing the point. "To protect kids" is just a cover, the nightmare dystopia is the real goal.

did i miss the point? because my last sentence literally says this.

amanaplanacanal3• 30 days ago

Well, some who push it anyway. There is another group whose motive is to get rid of all porn.

shevy-java4• 30 days ago

age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking

Personally I don't care how much age sniffing is mandatory in that I think it is inacceptable on any level. Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok? Because I can not buy into that premise. To me the whole assumption is wrong from the get go.

john_strinlai20• 30 days ago

Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok?

no, and you can read through other comments here and on the many threads of the same topic for proposals which have no tracking.

solid_fuel2• 30 days ago

Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok?

Everything is going to contribute to tracking, though. It's really hard to ensure that data doesn't leak.

Example proposal: sites attach an X-AGE-RATING header to pages and browsers only render the page if X-AGE-RATING < USER_AGE.

Exploitable Issue: Send multiple requests from one page for various style sheets with different X-AGE-RATING headers. The ones that get loaded give you all you need to find the user's age cohort.

But, the unique combination of things like your screen dimensions, number of threads, charge percentage, default languages, available fonts, etc already makes tracking possible. I don't know if adding one more - carefully chosen feature - would really make the situation that much worse.

Aerroon4• 30 days ago

Yeah, and once you have the non-intrusive system in place you can just switch it out for the tracking one without the user knowing.

Or there's probably some kind of correlation trail possible that will track you even with the anonymous systems.

dfxm122• 30 days ago

i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.

Correct. The goal here isn't "to save kids". That's just one of the Horsemen of the Infocalypse [0] used to market taking away our freedom.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

63stack• 30 days ago

What's the point in making this distinction? This is HN, 99% of the users here are aware of what zero knowledge proof is and that it's possible to implement it that way.

The general consensus and what the article is alluding to is that it will be probably implemented in a way that allows individual tracking and identification.

john_strinlai20• 30 days ago

What's the point in making this distinction?

we're on a discussion board, so i started a discussion. that was the point.

intended8• 30 days ago

I don’t know? Maybe its the little give and take that helps build a solution that is mature and limits the kind of harms kid are facing, without sacrificing privacy?

It’s also the very cool, nuanced and technical tooling that people here tend to enjoy figuring out, and building.

It side steps the thought terminating tar pits of “privacy at all costs” or “save the children”.

jazz9k• 30 days ago

It was never about the children. They are rolling this out, so online comments can be tracked to names and addresses.

It's to suppress free speech and arrest people that post anything against the government's narrative.

Many people have already been arrested in the UK for this. This is the next logical step.

blaze33• 30 days ago

age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia

But I feel there's not a lot of trust that whatever implementation we could end up with wouldn't be such a dystopia. The real world equivalent would be checkpoints at every intersection verifying the driver's age, the cashier who carded the 20 yo with a beer now does it for everyone, makes a copy of your ID and stores it in a big folder shared with their 427 "business partners".

Imo we should scrap the whole idea of age verification. Kids get a kidPhone with kidOS, whitelist of age-appropriate resources & capabilities. You wouldn't let an 8 yo drive on the highway, yet they can have a supercar to drive unsupervised on the information highway, no biggie. Internet is full of adults doing all sort of stuff while kids need supervision and education: design safe spaces for children, not checkpoints at every corner.

Bjartr• 30 days ago

So let's see some of the champions of these systems acknowledge this downside and make the case that they should be built in a way that avoids it and not back down on that when it becomes inconvenient.

vitally3643• 30 days ago

Why would they ever do that? The spying is the point.

pc862• 30 days ago

there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes.

I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours.

i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.

Well there's plenty of idiots in power and I'm sure they have no idea. But there absolutely are evil ones who simply want more power and don't care what happens after they have it.

If this were actually about protecting children, maybe you could get something passed that wasn't just ground work for a panopticon hellscape. But it's not about children at all - the people truly worried about that are just useful idiots - it's about power, and so you can't pass anything without having the surveillance infrastructure forced in.

john_strinlai20• 30 days ago

I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours.

based on what?

1vuio0pswjnm73• 30 days ago

The so-called "social media" companies in the past have bragged to advertisers and the public about how much they know about their targets, also known as "users". Statements like, "We know more about you than your friends and family."

Now, is this really true. Probably not. It's exaggeration. It's hype

But these companies have learned that a 100% correct is not necessary to make money. For example, if they are correct 80% of the time, then maybe that's good enough

A law that achieves an 80% reduction in youth ad targets might also be "good enough"

The toes getting stepped on belong to the companies

The kids who will still access these companies' websites come hell or high water, the 20%, are unlikely to complain

Complaints come from the companies and those who rely on these companies to make money. Like the author of this blog post, they keep calling a handful of Big Tech websites/app endpoints "the internet"

Their toes are going to get crushed

"Social media" is not "the internet"

LudwigNagasena2• 30 days ago

The age verification that doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording is called parental controls and it already exists in most systems. It doesn't require any proof of ID, internet connection, complex distributed systems, and so on. And it has near 100% success rate.

terribleperson3• 30 days ago

It doesn't even need 'age verification'. Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see. That means all that's needed is a standard way for parents to make sure that websites know their children are children. They don't need identity, they don't need actual age, we don't even need a complicated cryptographic solution.

California had the right idea - establish a standard way for a client to identify that the user isn't an adult (or you could do it the other way around, but that's less permissive), mandate that websites obey the flag, mandate that OSes include the feature and that browsers use it. In the end, anyone who owns a device can set their age group flag however they want it - it would be up to parents to make sure their children only use devices set the way they want. The parents could set their 8 year old's age group to whatever age group they want, and rest assured that websites would respect it.

convolvatron• 30 days ago

or don't put the burden on the website at all, but let the parent choose whitelists of child-appropriate sites based on whatever criteria they want.

ibejoeb3• 30 days ago

Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see

This is not even ostensibly the goal. Ostensibly, the goal is that the government controls what a child can do.

Tangurena23• 30 days ago

the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see

This has been mandated in TVs sold in the US. No one sets the thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip

pendenthistory• 30 days ago

Sweet summer child. This is not about age verification.

john_strinlai20• 30 days ago

Sweet summer child.

my comment is only 81 words long, yet it seems that multiple people fail to make it to the end for some reason.

("full dystopia" should be a hint that i recognize the ulterior motive)

teddyh• 30 days ago

This would be great and all, but all parties who are in a position to choose to implement this kind of system or to keep the status quo are already motivated to keep (and expand) the existing systems, for any number of reasons. Everybody (except the end users) loves to keep that juicy metadata and incidental logs of everything.

(Repost from 2021: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560821>)

normalaccess• 29 days ago

I don't think age verification is the actual goal... I believe complete surveillance and information control is the goal. Age verification is just the justification they are using to coat the poison pill in sugar.

xinayder• 29 days ago

Age verification online shouldn't exist, period.

Santosh83• 30 days ago

You can't spy on kids without spying on everyone, and in any case they're interested in the everyone part. Ultimately they want 24x7, realtime facial & biometric monitoring of everyone using any "approved" device, and be sure that only approved devices will be able to join networks and do stuff upon them, so for those brave nerds thinking they can survive on GhostBSD from their basement, yes you can, but as Gandalf said, you can only fence yourself in, but not fence the world out. Sooner or later they'll come for everyone.

josefritzishere• 30 days ago

Security and Privacy are not the same thing.

curiousObject• 30 days ago

‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety’ — Benjamin Franklin

This isn’t a simple solution to the problem but it reminds me that it is not a new problem. We should remember that

simultsop• 30 days ago

This is a very strong argument simply put

Sankozi3• 30 days ago

This is a manipulation tactic not an argument. Almost nobody wants to prevent spying on kids. Main goal is to prevent harmful content like porn, gore and gambling.

oceansky• 30 days ago

Those digital surveillance rules passed in Brazil under the Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents law.

Protection of kids is definitely the most common arguments for them.

IshKebab• 30 days ago

Sorry but this isn't a strong argument at all. Nobody who thinks age verification laws are a good idea will be remotely persuaded by any of this.

actionfromafar7• 30 days ago

Could we instead disallow algorithmic skinner-box addiction machines for everyone?

gampleman4• 30 days ago

I think this is really the only serious alternative.

jonathanstrange4• 30 days ago

How about taking some personal responsibility for your life?

This shouldn't even be a consideration concerning adults.

macintux• 30 days ago

It's clear by now that the societal impact is significant. I can banish all the social networks from my life and they'll still be corrupting the political process, promoting divisive content, etc.

actionfromafar7• 30 days ago

I assume you are also for heroin vending machines at every school corner if you watch a 30 second ad slot. You don't have to use them, you know.

rootusrootus11• 30 days ago

This shouldn't even be a consideration concerning adults.

Ban the boxes for kids

anmalkov2• 30 days ago

Exactly. Fix the addiction machine, not just who gets checked at the door.

inigyou24• 30 days ago

How can you tell what one is? Reddit in 2010? Facebook in 2005? IRC in 1999?

actionfromafar7• 30 days ago

I think I would be fine with a positive enumeration. Some ideas for serving content:

    - purely random
    - sponsored but without user tracking (like old school TV ads)
       - sponsored for user selected geographical area feed
       - sponsored for user current location geographical area feed
    - follow "friends" or influencers
    - purely timeline

    - discussion boards
      - timeline (IRC like)
      - threaded
      - user votes (not magic platform votes)

    - follow keywords

amanaplanacanal3• 30 days ago

If the users chooses what they are shown and the order they are shown in, then it's fine. If the platform chooses, then it's not, because they will always choose what creates the most engagement.

micromacrofoot• 30 days ago

That's the problem, recommendation algorithms on networks beyond a certain scale should be publicly auditable.

If they're not, I should be able to opt-out of them.

infinitezest• 30 days ago

Is heroin the same as beer? Who even knows.

speak_plainly• 30 days ago

In Canada the approach is going to be that social media and AI companies will need to figure out a system where those under 16 can’t access content. The government will be able to grant exemptions if the company can satisfy regulators that they have built and maintained adequate, alternative structural safeguards to protect children on their platform.

Further to that, companies are required to do this in a strict data minimization approach, results need to be anonymized and destroyed immediately after the check is complete.

The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media. If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.

rootusrootus11• 30 days ago

The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media.

You have a flair for understatement.

If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.

Same. I joke that when I retire I'm throwing out every computer in my house. Turns out the gov't may effectively do that for me, because I will not be handing out my ID to web sites. That is a hard line for me.

anmalkov2• 30 days ago

This reminds me of being refused entry to a nightclub in the US because I’d forgotten my passport, even though I had a European ID card and I’m over 40. Offline, age checks already often become rigid “approved identity document” checks. Online, that problem seems even worse, because the check can become a persistent identity layer across the web.

asdff3• 30 days ago

Maybe it is just a lax west coast thing but they hardly ID here. Bartenders straight up don't ever card at all. Only place you'd get carded is if they put a bouncer out front, which only happens when it is getting really busy, and even then they are mostly there to keep out teenagers and break up fights, only give you a 1 second glance at your card to not chance a liquor license violation.

Certain night clubs (haven't seen these antics in CA but have in NYC and Miami) often do stupid stuff to guys though. If you show up with a group of guys they will probably not let you in. You need an even ratio of men and women. They will let in a group of all women with hardly any check.

nitwit0052• 29 days ago

I always remember when a club opened the door for me without question, because I was holding several pizza boxes. Got to skip the line and everything. Clearly belonged inside.

seethishat• 30 days ago

My main concern is transparency. How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?

If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair. However, if some people are exempt from monitoring because of their connections, relations, etc. then that would be unfair.

And if some people are allowed to harass and stalk others based on some attribute (race, religion, nationality, etc.) because they are in a monitoring position (while others are not) then that would be unfair as well.

We need full transparency.

inetknght• 30 days ago

Transparency doesn't matter without consequences. Many of the currently ruling governments have demonstrated that already.

js83• 30 days ago

You're wrong, it still matters. It's the first step, and it's an important step in maintaining fairness.

wqaatwt• 30 days ago

exempting themselves from monitoring

Wasn’t that in the Chat Control proposal? i.e. politicians and other important individuals are exempt

shevy-java4• 30 days ago

Of course. The lobbyists don't want to be called bribed people, so they only want to monitor the peons. Slavery 2.0.

vaylian• 30 days ago

If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair.

Not everyone is an exhibitionist. Some people thrive when they are very public about their life. Some prefer a much more private life.

js83• 30 days ago

"Fair" doesn't always mean according to everyone's preferences. I might want to have a full cake but getting a slice is fair.

cryptoegorophy• 30 days ago

They are 100% abusing until proven otherwise. Naive to think otherwise.

patrickmay• 30 days ago

If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair.

It might be fair, by some definition, but it would still be wrong. The government shouldn't be monitoring us to the extent required to implement age verification on the 'net.

at_compile_time• 30 days ago

How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?

Ah, so except for THE ENTIRE FUCKING PROBLEM, this is fine.

And if some people are allowed to harass and stalk others based on some attribute (race, religion, nationality, etc.) because they are in a monitoring position (while others are not) then that would be unfair as well.

Yes, we wouldn't want racial profiling in our Orwellian hellscape. That would truly put it over the edge.

rootusrootus11• 30 days ago

We need full transparency.

A couple years ago I would have tended to agree with you, transparency would be a good first step. But then I have recently seen demonstrated that transparency just proves that you do not need to hide corruption as long as a powerful bloc of voters actually agrees with your corrupt position. I think what we really are going to need is consequences defined ahead of time, along with an enforcement mechanism not easily corrupted itself. This is hard. But it is a topic we will hopefully be spending quality time working out over the next few years anyway.

al_borland2• 30 days ago

How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?

It's not even just about the current people in charge or with access. Who's next? The "trust us" approach doesn't work when trust has already been broken with the people, or in a scenario where the data will change hands to an unknown future administration.

The best way to win my trust is to not even want the data in the first place.

1970-01-01• 30 days ago

If it's stupid but it works it ain't stupid.

bell-cot• 30 days ago

Assume that saying "X is stupid" is pejorative shorthand for "I strongly disagree with the other side's criteria judging whether or not X works".

gampleman4• 30 days ago

What an exceptionally bad faith way to put this whole thing. A five year old watching hours of the most depraved porn available is harmful to that child. Even if you disagree with that statement, you surely must acknowledge that it is an entirely reasonable opinion to hold and one our societies have generally held to this sort of thing for ages.

I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented.

There is also a reasonable debate to be had about the merits of various technical and legal schemes being implemented to achieve these goals.

But this take is neither of those. For one, surveillance isn't the number one harm being prevented (even though, a number of legal codes attempt to make this the case).

As has been pointed out previously, there absolutely can be age verification that is without surveillance. The fact that these solutions aren't always legally mandated and therefore age verification can be used to increase surveillance is a reasonable thing to attempt to amend to the implementations of these laws.

akmiller8• 30 days ago

Your example is in bad faith as your example assumes that the only thing blocking a child of 5 from porn is age verification of some type. There are lots of blockers today for 5 year olds to get access to porn.

I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented

Nobody on the "we need age verification" side wants a debate. They want to run face first in to dumb legislation giving governments and companies even more power to track every movement and know exactly who you are.

gampleman4• 30 days ago

The blockers generally don’t work (I’ve tried). A big part of the problem is that it is in the interest of the providers to subvert them. The main benefit of age verification is changing that responsibility by making it the business of providers to ensure it works, not consumers.

You can make the same argument with alcohol: surely it’s sufficient that parents supervise their children not to drink. But it’s prove to be more effective to distribute that responsibility to the providers as well.

dormento• 30 days ago

Disclaimer: I do not agree this take was made in bad faith. I think that raising a kid comes with its own set of expectations around caring and curating experiences of said kid. Therefore, I do think that offloading that responsibility to the state (and by extension, businesses that offer age-gating tech to that state...) is not the right way to do it. And even in the absence of that, my experience taught me it is entirely possible to grow up with unsupervised internet access and turn out an OK adult. The internet is not only "depraved porn". It is also a lifeline for that weird kid who has been bullied and effectively barred from social experiences.

Of course, YMMV.

That said, if such a nanny state is inevitable: zero-knowledge-proof-based age verification would not only be possible, it would further protect these kids from a bad state actor. In that spirit, I agree with your last point. The fact that any other alternatives are even being considered makes it on principle a non-starter to me, because it betrays the actual goals of the political actors involved.

lern_too_spel• 30 days ago

California's proposal is better than the one you're proposing, so Californian legislators goals are actually to solve GP's problem. Articles like this one that don't consider other proposals like California's are idiotic because voters actually want to solve GP's problem, and pretending they don't exist does not convince voters.

BigJono• 30 days ago

You can't use the words "reasonable debate" in your post after you've immediately jumped straight to some mythical worst case scenario of a 5 year old being given a device with no supervision and somehow managing to immediately find their way to some sort of super duper snuff porn that will scar them for life.

farfatched• 30 days ago

I agree going to the worst-case is a weak technique, and this is what the OP does:

"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.

CPLX11• 30 days ago

This comment should not be downvoted. The original article lost me in the first sentence with this:

"The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet"

Sorry, but a firehose of unlimited pornography, violence, racist, misogynist, and divisive content for developing children is bad. You can "well actually..." me all day I don't care at all.

I agree that there's no good solutions here, and I think this is a genuinely complicated and difficult issue for exactly the reasons people often state. But every argument that pretends that it's a one-sided discussion should be dismissed out of hand. There are two sides to this, both thorny.

glaslong• 30 days ago

Who gave the child access to that?

economistbob• 30 days ago

The bigger threat to kids is all the browsers now bypassing domain filtering by default, even if you specify a DNS server. There was a time when multiple vendors sold protection software, but apparently some unsavory elements wanted all the browsers to build in DNS bypassing to go around it. The best protection for children is blocking the bad stuff at the DNS level.

shevy-java4• 30 days ago

What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

Thank you.

It has never been about "protecting the children" either. That was always a lie - the red herring. Many pointed that out from the get go too.

The much more fascinating thing is how legislation is still being actively changed to sustain that narrative. This is like a pre-scripted event what we are seeing here. I find it quite fascinating. It shows how real lobbyism actually works.

My prediction is that mandatory age sniffing will come, they will continue to claim it is all for children, and the openness of the world wide web will factually be transformed into a two-class apartheid system. The latter has already happened actually - you have walled gardens e. g. discord rather than oldschool phpBB webforums (aka privately controlled access to information), Google already ruined its search engine, AI slop continues to ruin more here. These are all not isolated. This is a deliberate mega-slop attack, combined with payments to key lobbyists. We see a degradation of services here. That they attack VPNs is very logical - after all VPNs allow people to break out of the global ghetto system they are building here. They want to know who is who.

Interestingly I see this attack also related to them trying to abolish the right to repair movement. Now, there is no direct connection here, but right to repair also attempts to put people at the center - you purchased something, you should be able to freely change it to your own liking, without some random private company being able to proxy-deny any change to that. With mandatory age sniffing coming, it also means that people will lose the ability to change software. Recently a university here in Europe started to demand that students must own a smartphone AND must install an app from a private company (via google store) in order to be able to read email sent to them via a webmail account. I also found this fascinating, because now people need to submit to Google, in order to study in a small european country, if they study at that university (which is paid for by taxpayers by the way). These interdependencies will keep on increasing here. Even Linux will fall victim - systemd already added data fields to track your age. More to come in the future despite Poettering's claim that it is all very, very harmless. Until it is not. And then it is too late.

monssooon• 30 days ago

I dreamt about this. In my dream it was very clear. Like ray dalio says we are in the last inning of the current great debt cycle. The end of the NWO or the great reset or what it is named, brings about great losses to the west. We attemt to save our economies with mass immigration. Along side the downfall of our industries and currencies the middle-class falters and the crime and violent facfions in society becomes stronger. Parallel societies become financed by outer geopolitical entities to escalate the wests downfall. In desperation the western governments try to get in control of their populations before real civil war erupts. One attempt to avoid complete chaos is total surveillance... Just; if ray dalio is right this is not a nightmare but our current trajectory. The leaders know and are preparing...

tuieriojwpoiejf• 30 days ago

Perhaps save kids from peter file gangsters first? If local police protects child molesters, and government supports it... Very difficult to take this child internet protection seriously!!!

Aunche• 30 days ago

The new laws in the US don't require any real verification. Parents who care will just select a flag on device/OS setup that gets passed to websites. They can also just lie if they really want to. In the EU, they are trying to verify age with zero knowledge proofs.

It would be nice if the author actually spelled out the specific weaknesses of those approaches or even just referenced those laws instead of fear-mongering about "spying on kids", but I suppose that would be to much to ask of someone who made a career out of vibes based rage. Ironic that Doctorow is so eager to capitalize on the enshittification of journalism.

Aerroon4• 30 days ago

The specific weakness of these systems is that the governments cannot be trusted with this. They have demonstrated this - Snowden leaks for the US and several EU states, and the general monitoring clause in the Data Retention Directive for the EU as a whole.

Even if these governments come up with a zero knowledge system, it's only one click away from being replaced with a full-knowledge system, because the user is already used to it. These governments have already tried spying on everyone (and they almost certainly still do).

thenewtoolsmith• 30 days ago

i was thinking of having a mobile/tablet with kiosk mode and full restrictions on the content.

foo-bar-baz529• 30 days ago

I don’t think saving them from spying is the main concern. Instead it’s the direct negative effects of the usage upon the kids that’s the concern. Not that age verification isn’t problematic

rootusrootus11• 30 days ago

Then ban underage smartphones altogether, that would probably make the single biggest improvement in child safety and mental health. Trying to police content is an utter waste of time.

krupan2• 30 days ago

The possibly too subtle point of this article is that the spying is what makes the negative effects so powerful. Social media spies on what you are viewing and then sends you more of that, and send the info to other people so they can send you more of that too

therealdrag0• 30 days ago

Am I the only one who looked at NSFW websites at 10 years old and played games with voice chat with players of all ages too, and I turned out to be well adjusted productive member of society? People need to chill.

salawat• 30 days ago

Seconded. The amount of time and characters spent here trying to coax someone into trying to help these damn layers materialize just tells me the point isn't the kids. It's trying to preserve business model in spite of negative externalities.

narnarpapadaddy• 30 days ago

Same, I care little about NSFW. We used to all live in caves together where kids saw adults having sex, in conflict, and cleaning game.

But I also grew with a different internet than we have now. There’s a level of targeted manipulation that’s novel. I’m not sure the cat goes back in the bag no matter what we do.

account428• 29 days ago

But the targeted manipulation is also bad for adults.

llbbdd2• 30 days ago

Same here. Every time a thread like this comes up it brings out that a surprising number of paranoid helicopter parents browse HN, which is a contradiction in perspective that I can't really emphasize with.

nitwit0052• 29 days ago

That's the system. You're supposed to freak out about your kids doing the same things you did when you were young.

account428• 29 days ago

As long as freaking out means ranting at the dinner table and not making dystopian laws for everyone, sure.

tom9102• 30 days ago

The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum

Just for example Russia build infrastructure for blocks website for child safety, but it started to used much further

rootusrootus11• 30 days ago

The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum

The US is an instructive example in real time. Roughly everyone worries about what happens when their opponent gains control of the government and then promptly forgets how much they worried when their side has it.

palata24• 29 days ago

The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum

If that was considered the real problem, we would be fighting against surveillance capitalism. Instead we cheer for LLM companies who made it an order of magnitude worse.

Let's be honest, the only time we care about being tracked is to access porn, for some reason. And if we're being honest, we are already tracked when doing it.

pseudalopex7• 29 days ago

If that was considered the real problem, we would be fighting against surveillance capitalism.

You don't?

Instead we cheer for LLM companies who made it an order of magnitude worse.

You do?

Let's be honest, the only time we care about being tracked is to access porn, for some reason.

You do?

And if we're being honest, we are already tracked when doing it.

You are?

tom9102• 29 days ago

Even some bad aspects/issues doesn't justice that we need to support even worse cases

Also want to mark that `surveillance capitalism` companies can not be comparable with totaletar countries which want to control people. This is orders of magnitude worse

2OEH8eoCRo0• 30 days ago

My solution is simple: Fine companies that allow minors. How you implement that is not my problem! Something that is severely lacking in tech is liability!

What's with the "we can't do that" helplessness that pervades this topic?

atoav2• 30 days ago

I grew up during the 90s/2000s and I used the internet, first social media platforms, messengers, etc. – a lot. My parents had no idea of computers, how to use them, how to use the internet, what is out there etc. Yet I am convinced that the way my parents dealt with it is still the gold standard.

Their parenting equipped me well to deal with weird, dangerous or otherwise harmful things I encountered. They were the kind of parents who would let us play in the woods till 9 in the evening, no questions asked if there were scratched knees or dirty cloths. If there was something they thought might be problematic, they talked to us in a way that left the ultimate decision how to deal with a situation with us, displaying a high level of trust into our ability to make good decisions ourselves (and sometimes letting us make bad ones just to talk about it after the fact).

Turns out if you want your kid to be able to deal with unexpected situations you need them to deal with situations, period. And the opposite of that is what I even back then saw with many of my friends parents: trying to shield their kid from every encountering (and mastering!) even the tiniest of dangers themselves, alone. You think you tell your kid about the dangers of the world, so they know, but the actual lesson you teach is that only their parent knows what is and isn't dangerous and that they themselves can't be trusted to judge it. That is a bad lesson.

Don't get me wrong, we did stupid stuff, like jumping of bridges into rivers and so on. But we were very careful about how we did it, diving beforehand, etc. The real stupid stuff in my youth was all done by other kids that had never learned to judge risks themselves and who in one brazen attempt of rebellion bit off more than they could chew in one go. That landed them in the hospital. My brother and I were the only kids in our friends circle who made it to 18 without having broken a single bone in our bodies, despite being regular skateboarders, snowboarders, climbers, cliff jumpers and all other kinds of borderline insane past-times, some of which don't even have a name.

One aspect: Since my parents had no idea what was on the internet and how to protect against specific dangers lurking within it an educational method that didn't have to rely on them knowing and enumerating every danger in the world proved to be a really smart choice in hindsight. Since the landscapes of social media especially for kids and young teenagers is shifting constantly at a high pace, any parenting ideas would need to keep track of all this as well. I can't even imagine how that would work.

The alternative is to ban everything. But how do they build a healthy immune system if they are never even exposed to the mild dangers first?

GrinningFool• 30 days ago

When the dangers consist of invisible targeted manipulation of thought processes it's a whole different category of risks that kids (and most adults) are not equipped to handle. The effects are playing out around the world as we speak.

I don't know that universal tracking is the answer. I also don't think unrestricted access to children by manipulative predators (companies in this case) is the right answer. But then, I don't think they should have unrestricted access to adults either.

atoav2• 29 days ago

Don't get me wrong I believe there are certain things kids should only be exposed to once they are at the appropriate age. I myself was probably one of the last kids too get a modest mobile phone in my class for example. Especially in this day and age it is important to not train your kid as a screen-junkie from young age onwards as tempting as it may be for young parents. As you rightly mention, this also means parents have to keep their own habits in check.

Please understand that my point was something else. Even with surveillance and bans you can't shield a kid 100%. At school or outside it other kids will bring things your kid will get in contact with. Obviously turning your kid into an forcefully isolated hermit to avoid that risk isn't a good solution, because it comes at a cost. The better solution is to prepare your kid to be confident and rational enough to draw the line themselves as you may not always be there when it needs to be drawn. And you do that be repeatedly let them judge small risks themselves while you're present while showing them you trust their decision.

In practise that basically means letting your kid do things where they could eventually fall and hurt themselves instead of helicopter parenting and padding them in safety cushions constantly.

rootusrootus11• 30 days ago

I think the best thing most parents could do is ban the Internet from their own life. I grew up in the 80s and I have watched the evolution of parenting since then. The world is measurably safer today than it was then. Stranger danger is vanishingly rare. What the hell happened? Fear happened. Things like 24 hour cable news accelerated it, and the Internet turbocharged it. We cannot untangle the horrors we are exposed to on the Internet with what real life dangers face us, we conflate them to the detriment of our children.

Maybe our children will figure it out as they become parents. I hope so.

ok123456• 30 days ago

Stranger danger was always rare. It was a media hype-cycle. Child abductions have always predominantly been by family or other close persons.

pembrook• 30 days ago

This is the only insightful comment in this entire thread but it will be ignored because people love a good moral panic.

Millennials having kids has turned them into their boomer parents, bringing out the pitchfork for whatever braindead hysteria was featured in CAPITAL LETTERS on the 6 oclock news that day.

The kids are going to be fine. None of the moral panics of previous generations are even talked about anymore, because it's all irrational kneejerk reactions to change ("this new music is different, it's destroying our kids!"). Social media doesn't even exist anymore, its just short form cable TV.

The adults on the other hand...that's the actual group we need to be worried about. They don't adapt like kids do.

The boomers mismanaged the entire developed world into a giant debt spiral and are collapsing every social welfare system their parents generation created.

The real question is: What institutions and assets the boomers created (like the internet) will the the millennials ruin with their poor governance?

rlt2• 30 days ago

In general I'm opposed to this kind of regulation, but as a thought exercise, we do have the primitives needed to do age (or any other attribute) verification in a privacy-preserving and decentralized way.

You could imagine a hierarchy of organizations (governments, financial institutions, schools, etc) that a website trusts to verify some attribute (minimum age, citizenship, etc). Those organizations can attest that some identifier like an email address has been verified to belong to a real individual with that attribute, and that organization belongs to the hierarchy the website trusts, without revealing anything else about the user, the exact verifying organization, or the requesting website.

mzajc• 30 days ago

If the website sees (and possibly stores) the e-mail address, and the government or another party knows who it belongs to, the scheme is anything but privacy-preserving.

rlt2• 29 days ago

I’m confident you could devise a way to ensure the verifying party doesn’t know which website requested the verification, and vice versa. I’ll have to think about it a bit more.

betorabinovich• 30 days ago

here's alternative legislation that should be at least as effective without the mass surveillance aspect:

* as your kid's legal guardian you're legally liable for whatever the fuck your kid does, including but not limited to harming themselves: Parents should care for their kids

* platforms will do their best to not be available to minors unless minors are actually their core audience, will inform monthly how they did that, and the bottom 10% of achievers will pay an escalating percentual of their valuation as fine for each instance where they're found lacking: Platforms should care about kids as a category of people

* posession of personally identifiable information about an unrelated minor by any unrelated person/company without a clear and preapproved reason is grounds for a child abuse investigation on every person anywhere in the chain of custody of said data: Children's PII should be such a hassle to manage it's not worth taking

rootusrootus11• 30 days ago

Could we step back a little and maybe revisit the premise that we need the gov't to be protecting children to begin with? That's what parents are supposed to be doing.

CPLX11• 30 days ago

No let's not.

Let's actually create and maintain a society.

There are still places in the world where you and your family can literally fend for yourself against nature and rival gangs and so on if you're just super attached to the concept though, it's not like this option has been foreclosed.

rootusrootus11• 30 days ago

This discussion is about the Internet. I.e. that we already have police and regulate in-person things like selling alcohol to minors, etc, is not a great argument in support of policing information.

ramblerman• 29 days ago

What a ridiculous strawman. OP wasn't proposing removing the police, and any charitable take would have understood that given the topic of the article.

nekusar• 30 days ago

This whole shitshow thread is a bunch of techies coming up with more inane and erudite ways to implement spying on every web activity, but 'technically better'.

And people here are NOT asking why its even needed at all. This is what those ethics classes are for - not asking HOW to make, but whether we should at all.

And invasive country identity level online personas is NEVER something we should ever go for. This is basically "FLOCK ONLINE". And we see how devastating Flock is, even when pigs only have access.

No ID scans. No eyeball scans. No face scans. Im done with all of it.

techteach00• 30 days ago

We're cooked. The young kids I teach are unfortunately completely accustomed to go guardian spying on them at school. The admin constantly reinforce the need to dissect the internet, treat Chromebooks as media consumption devices, not computers. I hear it will be even worse here next year. Not sure how.

These people are obsessed with risk mitigation that it's not even worth having tech class anymore. No risk. 100% control all the time.

ipaddr• 30 days ago

This idea sounds like the death of social media. Remove anyone under 18 ensures they won't signup after. Forcing id verification means 70-80% of adult accounts will be dead. Network effects disappear. Those who remain will be businesses pushing something, hackers/spammers and some die hard group.

hylaride• 30 days ago

Have you been on instagram lately? We're already there.

B56b• 30 days ago

yay?

kittikitti• 30 days ago

I also dislike how confident people are in children's technical skills. It's really not hard at all to block VPN's. It's actually relatively easy to block certain content on your internet devices. I get it, kids are smart, but why do we think everyone is a malicious person who also has the ability to bypass all the restrictions?

Perhaps it's the parents who are too dumb to understand how to configure a network?

abdelhousni• 30 days ago

Arab spring, Gaza genocide and genZ revolutions lately has the attention of the oligarchy... The war for youth attention and minds

ToucanLoucan• 30 days ago

I'm just gonna say here that all of this, whatever solution whatever unaccountable political group decides is the one, can only be built by tech workers. All of these require fingers hitting keys to produce code to function.

If we unified and refused, it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. I am begging my fellow developers in this space to remember that you are WORKERS. The owning class will throw you into the meat grinder with every other worker the second it's convenient to their wealth extraction.

Throw down your tools and say no.

If you find yourself tasked with implementing age verification shit you think is profoundly unethical, don't build it.

If you find yourself building products you know to be harmful, refuse.

If you find yourself put against a wall to ship garbage you know doesn't work to check boxes for some fucking CEO, stop.

We are the tip of the spear in the global effort to make the world more surveilled, more dangerous, less free, and more expensive. We have a CHOICE and we have to start making it.

And yes, it may cost you your job. It'll certainly cost you status. Your boss will hate you. But the last year or so has made it abundantly clear that whatever professional "safety" we feel is not warranted. We are just as replaceable as the delivery drivers who get caught pissing in bottles.

rootusrootus11• 30 days ago

If we unified

That's cute. About half my coworkers are socialists and the other half fire breathing MAGA. The only thing we have united on was that we don't talk politics at work. But I assure you, there is not universal agreement at all that authoritarian technology is bad. Some people, including many developers, absolutely support it.

What you propose requires agreeing on the definition of harmful. And immediately it fails.

bluegatty4• 30 days ago

The slippery slope argument is hugely valid, but having kids not have access to alcohol, porn and guns is very normal. We don't even discuss it in the 'physical world' because it's absolutely normative.

Even in 'Europe' kids aren't going into the liquor store stocking up obviously - there are always age and responsibility-related conventions.

The 'online' nature of this piques our anti-authoritarian triggers and tends to err our judgment a bit.

There are valid reasons to do this, and there is 'a right way' - maybe we should have some hope and promote that.

I'm not hugely optimistic that they'll get it right, but we should aspire for to build the world we want. There's enough momentum that it's plausible.

asdff3• 30 days ago

In europe drinking age is what 16? By the time you want to regularly drink you are already legally allowed to. Meanwhile in the US you get screwed by both the law and your university for drinking in a dorm at 20 years old.

pseudalopex7• 30 days ago

We discuss age requirements in the physical world not much because the physical world allows age checks without mass surveillance.

bluegatty4• 29 days ago

age checks are not mass surveillance. mass surveillance is mass surveillance

budududuroiu• 29 days ago

The analogy would be an alcohol shop employee with a photographic and infinite memory which then staples an AirTag to your skin to see where you're headed off after you've purchased your booze

bluegatty4• 29 days ago

except that's not the analogy at all.

krupan2• 30 days ago

Parents largely control what their kids have access to, whether it requires a device, a data plan, home Wi-Fi, whatever. Where parents don't/can't control their kids' access, no amount of regulation and technology will fix it.

This applies not just to social media, but drugs, alcohol, porn, etc. Yes, laws and IDs add friction and that's good, but if a kid really wants those things they are going to find a way.

Social media already had built in friction without needing new regulations and ID requirements. To access social media you need a relatively expensive (for kids) device and some way to connect that device to the Internet, which is also not free.

The biggest problem I see is that unlike alcohol, drugs, and porn, there are seemingly benign reasons for kids to use social media. Sports teams, dance classes, youth groups, etc. all want to keep in touch and allow group communication. Too often the adults in charge turn to Instagram or whatever social media app for the group communication. Now, unfortunately, your kid needs an IG account.

al_borland2• 30 days ago

Even as an adult who doesn't use social media, I find the use of Facebook as a company home page, or using it as a forum for group communication, to be problematic. Especially as Meta makes it more and more difficult to see content without an account.

ghtbircshotbe• 29 days ago

Or even worse - as the homepage for local government/department.

sublinear• 30 days ago

Too often the adults in charge turn to Instagram or whatever social media app for the group communication.

This was always the problem going way back. Lots of responsible parents pushed back hard and advocated for doing everything in person during the scheduled times. Even before that there were already concerns that kids were stuck indoors and addicted to entertainment.

They ultimately lost out to the lazy majority who kept mindlessly repeating "who cares?" and "oh every generation says that when they get old!". Organizers also saw it as a way to do less work.

Well here we are now. Even the younger people agree this is dumb.

asdff3• 30 days ago

Glad that absolutely nothing in my life uses social media for communication like this. What a shitty way to reach people too. Your post is going to be served days late whenever its churned by the algorithm to the intended user, if at all. Meanwhile, email always works. There are even services that will mass text people.

account428• 29 days ago

Too often the adults in charge turn to Instagram or whatever social media app for the group communication. Now, unfortunately, your kid needs an IG account.

Maybe this needs to be outlawed/discouraged instead and not just for communication targeting kids but anything that someone is "required" to participate in.

Publicly funded schools should not encourage people to use private communication platforms and that includes extracurricular activities.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 30 days ago

Actual title, original title: Spying on kids to protect kids from spying is very, very stupid

soperj2• 30 days ago

"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.

Hilarious that the author doesn't think that this isn't already happening.

fsflover4• 30 days ago

You can always have more of it. Currently, you can use some technical tools like Tor Browser to protect yourself. Age verification makes it easier to block them.

catoc2• 30 days ago

Age Verification is not about “saving kids from spying/social media”.

Same as Regulatory Encryption Backdoors are not about “protecting kids from child predators”

This is framing. Abusing kids is bad. But that is not what this about. Let’s keep the discussion on topic: the goal is 1984-level oversight… not just of the kids

[Edit: I guess HN agrees: meanwhile the title changed from “saving kids from spying” to “is actually mass-surveillance” - good]

anigbrowl3• 30 days ago

The headline already summarizes the premise of the article in fewer words.

catoc2• 30 days ago

Yeah, the headline changed while I wrote my comment

gaiagraphia• 30 days ago

I'm against mass surveillance, but gambling sites managed for years.... Can't addictive social media algoshit be thrown in the same bucket?

codedokode2• 30 days ago

There are at least two methods to verify age without disclosing identity:

1) Yubikey-like tokens supporting attestation and sold at places not accessible to minors like liquor stores

2) "parent mode" on desktop and mobile devices - the device would refuse to load any inappropriate sites and install inappropriate apps like Telegram, Omegle or Facebook.

johnc1• 30 days ago

We're already been protecting children from printed porn, alcohol, drugs (legal or illegal), guns, etc. Children don't even have to buy those items, sometimes they can get them from friends or even find at home. It's always been parents responsibility to protect from that, and the Internet doesn't change that.

What the Internet does change is granularity of controls. With physical goods, parents can choose to give children travel magazines but not porn magazines. With Internet, parents don't always have a choice to give children a device to read travel websites but not porn websites.

Solving that granularity is all we need! And the good news - it's already largely solved: just give your kids one of the locked down phones/tables with parental controls (i.e., almost any phone/tablet today).

The law can and should make a few things better: - introduce minimal requirements for parental controls, certify devices as kids safe (i.e., implementing these requirements) - ideally, require websites to tag content - same way we tag it on TV for ages; this one is harder to enforce in practice (what about offshore websites?) but also not really needed - AI can tag content pretty well as part of parental controls

I know all of this was said before many times, but somehow it feels not enough people understand it.

gampleman4• 29 days ago

As I pointed out elsewhere, the problem is that these parental controls don't work. It's a matter of incentive: at the moment, it's in the interest of providers to help subvert the filters. Device makers also don't have the strongest incentives to make the filters great, since that would presumably lead to less engagement from large market segments.

One of the explicit goals of age verification laws is to throw the legal responsibility of preventing access from minors onto the providers, thereby inverting the incentives.

metalman• 30 days ago

we we call "mass surveillance" is actually genocide preperation

jmacc93• 30 days ago

Every time I see stuff about age verification (which I do admit is likely just a justification for control and surveillance over the internet) I can't help but wonder if there's some way to coordinate a large enough number of internet users to adopt a parallel internet that inherently cannot be regulated, or at least one in which no law can be reasonably enforced. For instance a fully encrypted p2p internet. I guess ultimately the problem is banks and other tie-ins to the real world like businesses with public reputations. And so I guess since endless content streams (including porn and other child-unfriendly media) follow the money primarily, any non-monetized / volunteer parallel internet would likely contain mostly unmonetized content like information (eg: wikipedia, Q&A sites, etc) and slow, un-gameable social media

In a perfect world, I'd prefer law and regulation minimization, but obviously that's just not reasonable in our actual world. As much as I have libertarian tendencies, I just can't argue that regulation is necessary. The really interesting part is which regulations are the ones you actually need, which do more harm than good, and which should be refactored -- all as measured (probably) by something like counterfactual real world preference (in the best case, at least). My sense (which isn't worth much; only should act on empirical evidence and falsification-resistant modelling) is such a parallel internet, plus an analogous parallel economy (like bitcoin), would be a net positive

ibejoeb3• 30 days ago

In most of the developed world, you need to register with a government to operate a communications device, whether it's radio, land line, mobile phone, whatever. If you're theorizing some kind of peer-to-peer system, where you let someone use your service to bypass mandatory registration, you're going to be liable. There will be very limited takers.

superkuh• 30 days ago

As time goes on the opportunities for human persons to interact directly with each other, without some corporation mediating it, become fewer and fewer. Sometimes it's not even possible to buy food without having a third party corporation promise to pay some days in the future; there are places that literally don't take your order unless you have a credit card. This is how they get around the "cash must be accepted for all debts" law.

Online it is happening too. No human persons will be allowed to open accounts or even communicat with other human people unless a corporate entity does it for them. This mass surveillence is just a smaller part of the greater attack on human autonomy. Only corporate persons have rights these days.

forgetfreeman• 30 days ago

Our lives are being thoroughly surveilled by a combination of phone tech, financial records tracking, pervasive internet user tracking, smart appliances, data brokerages, and our cars. That this is what triggers an avalanche of pushback while the rest of it is ignored wholesale reeks to high hell of either an overt astroturf campaign or industrial grade hypocrisy.

I offer no opinion on the concept of age verification beyond noting it's detractors consistently refuse to advance alternatives that address any of problems it's proponents claim it's intended to address.

g42gregory• 30 days ago

I keep reading about freedom and democracy on Fox News and New York Times. What is that all about?

cadamsdotcom• 30 days ago

No one in politics is going to listen unless solutions are provided.

Government research departments like DoD and CSIRO could commission work to solve this problem, that’s how we used to do this.

Relying on private boffins to complain creates too much noise in the room and the bureaucracy can’t tune into the signal.

It used to be done via gov sci. What changed?

niemandhier2• 30 days ago

I see that one point of criticism of the EUId is that people think it will lead to bad things because people will need iOS or android.

Ok, we are an international collective of wealthy nerds obsessed with privacy:

How much money do we need to collect to get /e/OS to be suitable?

A few million? I’d pledge 500€.

palata24• 30 days ago

If you're obsessed with privacy, I suggest you look at GrapheneOS instead of /e/OS, though.

frm882• 29 days ago

The post you are replying to refers EUId, which implies European software, so Graphene is not an option.

frm882• 29 days ago

I'm in.

trallnag• 30 days ago

The total fertility rate in basically all western countries is below replacement level fertility. Without immigration we are shrinking. There are fewer and fewer children around. And now protecting children on the internet got top priority. For real? We point to Russia for controlling the internet more and more. Yet the EU does the same and will probably even overtake Russia on this thanks to more resources / competencies.

palata24• 29 days ago

Not that I am in favour of age verification, but I find it interesting how many people complain about age verification for being "mass surveillance", but just don't give a shit about AI and TooBigTech and surveillance capitalism.

Let's be honest: "they" already know our age.

r-woolsey• 29 days ago

I typed out a whole story and thought better of it.. I never post but this one hits home so hard for things I’ve worked on. I like being alive and would prefer to quietly go work on robots/ai in peace so.. no story.

I’ll just say that if the government says any age verification technology is for the kids safety it is most definitely not their idea.. they are being worked like a sock puppet by the real corporate power and the shadowy contractor intelligence gradient.

I watched this same sort of narrative play out from behind the curtain with a project in US back in the day. I currently work with some similar systems and data brokers. I’m working on leaving to use my skills to build shit that actually helps the people who need help (SMBs, consumers, etc). I’m tired boss.

If you’re hiring a startup tech wizard who has done it all and works hard hit me up.

quadhome• 29 days ago

Big Ad Tech is helping push age verification because Big AI Tech took away human eyeballs. It's not that deep.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 29 days ago

Who will be conducting this "mass surveillance"

The government? Nope. Guess again

This blogger thinks age verification legislation somehow supports these companies or has no negative effect on their bottom line

Who knows. Maybe that is correct. We are going to find out

But many would argue that unless and until computer users allowing Big Tech to collect data, for any purpose^1, start to be interested that data is being collected (cf. how it is allegedly used), nothing will change

Perhaps "age verification" could be what finally causes them to be interested. Trying to argue that this is what Big Tech companies want, or that they don't care, is pure nonsense, but online commenters are certainly trying

1. There's no way to verify how it is used or who is using it

h4kunamata• 29 days ago

In Australia, ordinary posts on X is flagged and requires ID so I solved the problem like any homelab person would.

I run OPNSense and have a Mullvad VPN, every time I access X or any service that enforces digital ID, firewall rules forward those requests to the Mullvad VPN gateway.

This whole mess started because of the Australian activists Collective Shout.

1. They went after Steam +18 games but Steam didn't give them attention

2. They went after Visa/Master and due to political influence, Visa/Master blackmailed Steam

3. Steam removed thousands of +18 games

4. The following week, UK pushed digital ID

5. Countries worldwide followed but Japan

What happened at end?? Million of people having their personal information leaked, it has never been so easy to become a victim of identity theft.

The same Collective Shout against +18 games, supported a movie on Netflix exploring kids s**lly.

XChrispy• 29 days ago

The main concern with age/identity verification tools seems to be the concern with storing your personal data for mass surveillance. Yet, their privacy policies say they'll remove it soon after the verification. Is the main pessimistic concern that they will not do that? And that it could be proved they do, age/identity verification wouldn't be an issue?

account428• 29 days ago

No the main concern is building a system where the government gets to decide what you can or cannot view on an individual basis.

Nevermark2• 29 days ago

I am terrified because the majority of discussions are not treating Problems #3 or #4 seriously.

Problem #1: Verify ages for adult-appropriate content.

Problem #2: Do not create a new surveillance system for the government.

Problem #3: Do not create a --dynamic-- per-user internet-access permissioning/control/denial system for the government. This would be madness.

Problem #4: Do not create a --general-- per-user internet-access permissioning/control/denial system for the government.

Problems #3 & 4 are very very serious. Any age-verification system, or generalized control-system, will become a pervasive requirement for a large percentage of internet sites, simply by being convenient for risk-adverse sites to adopt. Which means, this will be (not could be: will be) a pervasive government managed system of per-user internet control/denial.

We need zero knowledge proofs. Or similar. Minimum.

Form of solution:

• Any third-party institution meeting publically-defined government requirements, can be an attestor.

• Attestors provide persistent age-verification tokens per user-device, on user request/verification: Using actual identification and one-off-anonymized device identifiers.

• Sites are given one-off, device and user-identity anonymous, attestation tokens, derived from the device token, on request.*

Maximum anonymization is necessary so:

• Governments can't identify your devices.

• Sites can't identify your devices or you.

• Government and sites cannot collude to remove anonymity (via this system), enabling a new surveillance system.

Attestation tokens need to be persistent so:

• The government is not being given dynamic control of our internet use.

Age-attestation tokens, must be provided independent from any other types of attestation, so:

• We didn't just invite the government to link multiple permissioning systems together, which will inevitably be used in coordination. And so failure to supply age-attestation tokens is a clear documentatable act.

Unrestricted (other than by public standards), third-party attesters:

• So users can choose an attester they trust. So there are multiple points of attestation. So there is individual accountability, natural documentation, and reputation risk for any denial of attestation.

Anything less anonymized, independent, persistent or available than this is a nightmare situation. Really.

I am terrified because the majority of discussions are not treating Problems #3 and #4 seriously.

What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

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