What's wrong with EU age verification? Nothing

https://blog.vrypan.net/2026/06/29/260629-whats-wrong-with-eu-age-verification/

by Zababa • 23 days ago

3 8 23 days ago

blog.vrypan.net

Zababa3• 23 days ago

The article says the website doesn't need to know your date of birth, that the state will issue you a certificate once you're over 18. Since many people I think will do that as soon as they can, it's easy then to see patterns of "this person created an account on age restricted websites with the same email address, they didn't have one before, therefore they probably just turned 18".

I find it also sad (and maybe a bit suspicious) to see someone that has blogged since 2003 use AI to generate blog articles, especially for a controversial law that has been pushed again and again in undemocratic ways.

throw3108223• 23 days ago

Can you explain better what do you think the issue is? Btw, date of birth is one of those informations that is asked endlessly by all sorts of websites and services, and revealed by all sorts of calendars, birthday greetings and cards. It's probably one of the least private things about anyone and the easiest to obtain by any motivated party.

The real concern about age verification is that I don't want any party (the one that requires it or the authority that provides it) to track my identity or my usage of it. As outlined the system seems to work fine.

Zababa3• 23 days ago

Here are my issues:

- the author claims the website doesn't need to know the date of birth, but as said it is easy to derive it. Therefore the author was wrong on that point, which makes me wonder if he's wrong about the rest too

- the author list 10 "Things that would break the promise", saying we should fight for them to be respected. That seem to imply, to me, that as is they may not be respected, and even if the implementation he imagines is possible in theory, it might not be in practice. The author also hasn't considered that maybe people are against age verification precisely because the promise of a well implemented, privacy-preserving age verification is easy to break.

- the author hasn't considered adversarial use, for example using the identity verification from someone else, and what other checks could be added to ensure those. There is a slippery slope of "first we check your age in a privacy-respecting way, then we realize we can't really enforce it like that but you already agreed to age verification so we can reduce the privacy respect to better enforce it"

- the author is using a possible implementation at one point in time to transform a political/ideological issue into a technical issue, while not considering all aspects of said policital/ideological and technical issues; as explained above.

jjgreen• 23 days ago

Sad indeed; AI is cultural Alzheimer's.

amlord• 22 days ago

true zero-knowledge proofs get away from the surveillance issues people often worry about - just need to be aware of correlation with other sources to build a full picture of a user from multiple pieces

What's wrong with EU age verification? Nothing

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