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- Hacker News
- It seems that age verification (much like chat control) is getting more and more inevitable.
Instead of arguing on the bad this brings, we should push our authorities to enforce mechanism that still respect the anonymity of a person.
France's "France Identité" started to implement an approach that respect anonymity by using what they call a "double anonymity: a principle that ensures that neither the adult site nor the age-appropriate provider can know who is accessing what. Using advanced cryptographic technologies—digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs—the system generates proof of age without revealing identity or browsing history." (source: https://entrevue.fr/en/police-justice/verification-dage-sur-...)
French's state should already have these informations from us (as a French citizen) so asking them to provide a certificate that guarantee my age seems like an obvious choice, and giving that digital certificate to any site without having to tell the issuer where I'm going is, I think, the best solution for the worst project.
(There a lot of news about this, but mostly in French. If you are curious:
- https://www.franceinfo.fr/societe/pornographie/l-arcom-impos...
- https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2962099_france-id... )
by cx42net - Techies have a real blind spot here. This stuff is very popular, like bipartisan support popular. Yes, it's a precursor to terrible things and they will happen but you have to convince people the the harms outweigh the benefits. Just asking "Why can't they tell the point of this" is not helpful or true. "The point of this" is decided by those pushing it, those pushing it are not politicians, they're parents and they're pushing it because they're scared of social media, not because they want to censor you.
You need to explain to and convince those parents that this will result in something worse.
by FergusArgyll - I don’t see a groundswell of parents pushing for this. In fact, I suspect the only messages my representative received about this were negative, from parents.
A table will be leaked with your child’s name, birthday, pattern of online access, and brand of phone. To protect your child is to fight that leak. Your representative might say, “oops, cybersecurity so hard, who could have seen this coming?” but his party shields pedophiles.
Someone posting nasty comments online gets to enjoy anonymity. My kids, who know better than to comment at all, still end up on that table.
by enoint - Maybe it should be possible for a parent to set a child age in a device.
Everyone else can stay anonymous.
I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.
- If the server can trust the device, then you don't need the parent, you can use a digital-enabled id card or passport.
This is in fact the EU age verification app
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/european-ag...
The concern here is the trust in the device appears to be tied to proprietary os/device vendors.
by riffraff - You're describing California AB1043 which passed a few months ago and is now the law in California. We all got very angry about it when it passed.by microgpt
- Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.by big85
- How does the parent prove they are the parent. All you need is to think about the next step, come on now.by vasco
- If you look at how workers are mistreated in authoritarian corporations and how some people say it is perfectly fine because you get paid a lot of money to be used and abused, I can't imagine what a reality like this would look like. It does not stop with what you post online, we still can't really tell how our phones know about stuff we talk about irl to serve ads.by mawadev
- In the intel industry, it is known that metadata is more or less enough to identify people. That's state/military intel. Several countries have already implemented bulk acquisition / collection of data that "crosses the borders", which is a ridiculous concept.
If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.
When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.
by TrackerFF - Isn't that the point of e2e encryption? Maybe I have a privileged US take but I've always not cared much for a border crossing in a round trip. It always seemed like a needless expense to have a full vertical server stack in each country to me.
Wondering if someone can explain the logic
by knollimar - The objective of these digital id laws being pushed through age verification is to be able to easily ! legally ! prosecute the dissidents. That's one thing the intelligence agencies could not do with their illegally collected data.by zrn900
- This is already happening if you want to visit the US. Customs officers will look at your social media accounts to make sure you are compliant.by iamflimflam1
- And if you say you don't have any, they'll assume you're lying and deny you.by microgpt
- We're been doing this for years in the UK. Not just at airports either, but the police actively surveil social media and arrest people for anything that might be considered remotely offensive.by kypro
- surveillance of foreigners (particularly) with residence in a different country is a different issue from surveillance of own citizens.by raffael_de
- This is a reminder to curate and prune all your past social media contribution, because when this goes thru, you KNOW they will apply it retroactively. You'd loathe to lose your cushy job over a moment of lucid honesty back in 2011.by btbuildem
- Facebook keeps backups.by bigbuppo
- It's already too late for that but you can at least, by deleting now, reduce the chances they see it.by microgpt
- I can see it now: boards of directors will only hire CEOs from the amish population, it's the only way to avoid criticism.by phendrenad2
- I haven’t had any social media accounts since I gave it up for Lent in 2018 and I’m increasingly starting to wonder if that’s a liability for me because there’s no social graph that whatever agency would otherwise use to, idk, confirm I’m not a threat or something. The lack of a digital footprint like that may look weird.by remarkEon
- I think we should go one level higher and question when having opinions and being a multi-dimensional human became a professional risk. That has certainly not always been the case.by simplyluke
- I've been posting under my real name for over 20 years because this was always going to be the case. Using my real name is a constant reminder to not to post things I might later regret.by jay_kyburz
- Cory Doctorow had a very profound talk about it very long time ago (10+years).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
by freefaler - Age verification starts the gating of Internet access by governments.
Any site, with any concern about age of user liability, is likely to adopt the practice. Strong laws, sold on their face value safety benefits, will increase that liability.
You won’t see any laws removing or limiting that liability.
The trend will be many more sites becoming government-gated, than we are imagining now.
Beyond surveillance, it’s a real step into government permissioned internet access, on an individual citizen level.
by Nevermark - I agree. But it's not clear to me that the downsides of this outweigh the upsides.
The government has control over many areas of life, and in most cases I feel that to be on balance a good thing, even though governments can be corrupt or inefficient.
Consider some other domain, like roads. In every country, the government issues licenses that include photographic ID to residents to drive on roads; driving without a license is illegal and can result in fines or even imprisonment. But this level of government control feels normal to people, and most would say the safety benefits outweigh the government interference.
- That might be an argument if it wasn’t already happening. US social media platforms already kowtow to domestic and foreign policy and you need look no further than the suppression by Google and Meta of content about Palestine.
What’s fascinating to me of that there are people who win vehemently oppose age verification yet have no absolutely no problem with anti-BDS laws, Gaza suppression, etc. Or worse, they’ll support those things.
by jmyeet - It gives a new spin to:
> Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.
Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.
Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269
by firefoxd - Age verification is just one part of this crackdown.
Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.
by RachelF - Age verification is the visible, easy-to-sell layer. Device attestation is the more structural one...by Ouman