The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly expresses that minors have rights to freedom of expression and access to information online, as well as the right to privacy.
These rights would be steamrolled by age verification requirements.
Am I age verified if the first thing that popped into my mind upon seeing that logo was “GameCube!”
no, the GameCube intro is iconic and the government overreach is chronic
No, these rights work perfectly well with age verification systems in general. It’s the planned implementation that is bullshit. And that’s not a coincidence but intentional to -again- sell us surveilance through the back door.
(For reference: No one but the EU and member’s governments are more qualified to produce an actual, working age verification system in the form of “Yes, that person has the required age. No, you don’t need to know any other personal information because we already checked and certified it”. Because they already have the data base neccessary. But you can’t outsource such a system to private companies that actually want to get paid mainly in aquired data…)
The point of an age verification system is to make sure that certain classes of people cannot access certain categories of information.
Is there really no problem there?
In case of minors and pornography, most societies have come to the conclusion that there is no problem with that.
If some people want to fight this, they should fight this issue (this would be very much a losing battle in all places in my opinion), not age verification systems, because the second would not exist without laws like the first one.
There is no way to remotely verify someone’s age across the Internet without violating their privacy. If there was, there would be no way to use it that doesn’t violate their other rights.
It security engineer here: zero knowledge proofs are exactly that. Proof your age isg higher than X, but not even how much higher. They can’t even profile you based on that information as they can’t recognize you across visits.
Some government identity cards already support that. For everybody else there are companies that offer that service.
BTW I’m against age verification. We had access to porn at a certain age, I want my children to be able to look when that gets interesting to them. But then again I’m pretty progressive and open with sexuality in general and I take time out of my day to actually talk to my kids about dangers on the internet.
If I search for zero-knowledge proofs relating to age verification the only thing I see is the hash chain method “based on a 2013 paper by Angel & Walfish” which is clever enough but does not in itself solve the problem of proving age while maintaining one’s privacy. It allows Alice to demonstrate to a verifier that she is over the age of 65 while revealing nothing else other than her name or some other identifying piece of information. Avoiding the reveal of any such information is what we would want to avoid.
Is there some better way to do it?
What do you mean by violating privacy?
If you have a passport, citizenship, or birth certificate your age is already documented.
yes, however the government should NEVER have access to what social messaging apps ANYONE uses without a warrant.
Isn’t that a matter of implementation whether they even receive this information or not during validation?
Your government… you know… the people that already have all your data and issue your passport… cannot include a flag (properly cryptographically signed by them) that tells a service “Yes, the guy that just inserted this valid passport is an adult. You don’t need to get any other info. We already checked for you.”, no other connection or transfer of data neccessary?
If you know a way to do it without invading people’s privacy you’d better go tell the government of Spain about it, because they didn’t manage to find it when they designed their eIDAS scheme which they hoped would become the Europe-wide standard. Not sure if that’s still seen as likely but I haven’t heard about any other concrete proposals yet.
I’m talking about things you can do technically.
Governments don’t plan completely idiotic ideas because they don’t know better but because their actual reason for choosing the system they chose is NOT creating a workable system that protects your privacy.
That’s the whole point. Articles like this aren’t completely wrong. The systems planned are indeed a risk to privacy rights. But we need to stop pretending that it’s an accident and the government simply don’t know better or there is no better solution at all. Actual solutions exist and we need to talk about the fact that those are ignored intentionally because a working system that protects your privacy is simply not the goal here.
If it is about protecting children, just create age based VPNs and whitelist the services with appropriate content.
This must be used above all to track the activity of every adult among all popular services. Having to proof adultness cannot be done without creating a link between the identify of the adult and the account at the service.
In theory, it’s possible, if the age verification authority keeps the link secret. But that’s impossible to uphold.
What are the elites planning to do that requires this huge amount of surveillance? The article says that they need it already in the second quarter of 2025. We will find out soon.
Having to proof adultness cannot be done without creating a link between the identify of the adult and the account at the service.
It can be done.
Do you really have no other complaints?
How can it be done?
-
You connect to an age-gated site.
-
Your browser receives an age verification request that does not contain information about the site.
It would contain the time, a random number, and the query: Is user over 18/16/14/whatever?
- Your browser sends the request to a government-licensed service.
You identify yourself to that service in some way. The service could also be a program on your own device that uses a chip on your ID-card. If the service confirms the age, it digitally signs the request.
- Your browser returns the signed request to the age-gated site.
The site checks if the signature is valid and done. There’s never any connection between the age verification service and the site. If the request is more than a few seconds old, then it will be rejected to prevent sharing.
Of course, this assumes that sites will cooperate and implement such schemes at their own expense. Obviously(?) that will only be done by the larger sites, so it will be quite pointless. I don’t know why that is not a consideration. Understanding that doesn’t actually require any deep technical knowledge. But that’s typical for EU tech regulation.
How do you prevent people from selling access to children by calling the age verification service for them?
Btw,
Do you really have no other complaints?
Which other complaints could I have?
How do you prevent people from selling access to children by calling the age verification service for them?
The high volume of requests would be detected pretty quickly. The verification service would not know what sites you visit, but it would know that you are making requests.
To succeed, that would need a fairly large number of stolen or fake identities. There’s really no point when you can just sell adult products, including pirated media, directly.
-
