Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.
We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.
Stop putting plastic wrap around people's freedoms, liberty, and right to privacy.
We will look back at handing kids phones with instagram like giving kids cigarettes and think wtf were we doing.
In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like.
Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way.
Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 1984. It makes them more money.
https://blog.vrypan.net/2026/06/29/260629-whats-wrong-with-e...
First it's 'over 18?', then it's 'over 25?', and then 'biological sex?', 'employed?', 'enjoys posting on HN?', 'active in the early morning?' and after half a dozen questions, all with binary answers that are safe individually, you can zero in on a 23 year old woman who has a job and posts on HN in the morning.
Ask a few dozen questions like that and you'd be able to sieve an individual from a group of millions, especially if they're unlucky enough not to be absolutely typical.
Done.
I made a formal submission to the Australian Government in the very small consulting window they held for the Access and Assistance bill. Pleading with them to consider simply not introducing the law, as there was no justification for it at all. Google also made a submission against the bill, as did many large local and overseas corporations.
The government went ahead anyway.
What are the chances of me swinging any government when Google et al are on the other side, determined to provide privacy and anonymity destroying products to bolster their bottom line?
Probably worth mentioning that the Access and Assistance bill permits the Australian government to secretly (even just verbally) compel anyone building age assurance technology to secretly backdoor it to collect metadata, or any other information they choose. There's no level of safety from the government one can achieve with any app. If they resist they go straight to the Australian version of a secret national security court. The bill doesn't even make it clear whether briefing their solicitor about the request is legal. It doesn't matter how good the crypto is if the app is recording details outside of that. Its all just theatre at this point. There's no safe app, so we should completely resist all attempts to do things the government could restrict, leak or misuse.
I dont see how this is even slightly contentious in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty six, after decades of leaks affirming governments do this stuff, decades of governments and corporations dangerously failing their citizens privacy, when a particular government is hell bent on using all the personal data it can hoover up to persecute migrants and refugees. How are people blindly monofocusing on the crypto while trusting everything else?
reddit isn't the vast majority of the population, fren. it's 1% of 4%.
unless you've got polls you could show to back your claim?
Age assurance is being used in more than a single scope. I dont disagree that the revolution isnt happening, but theres no need to be so reductive.
>Of course the social media companies object to their product being banned. It's like cigarette companies objecting to plain packaging.
They aren't objecting to age assurance tools. They are objecting to the current ham fisted model, but when they can organise something less nebulous than the current regime they will be fighting to implement it first.
So I have little sympathy that the resulting laws are not optimal for them.
It was solved. Dont collect information.
The problem is making shitty psychotic apps, not determining who can use them.
I would much rather they cut meta into pieces and sold them off as scraps, than just scarfing up the PID of the users to make arbitrary determinations about who can have what brainrot.
Done.
> Today, we open sourced our Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries, fulfilling a promise and building on our partnership with Sparkasse to support EU age assurance.
I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful.
But if they reveal nothing, isn't it wide open for abuse? Couldn't one over-18-person's proof become everyone's proof, because they can't tell it's the same proof, and the issuer can't tell where or how often the proof is being used? Or are there ways to construct data leaks that are not user-identifying but are abuse-identifying (and what would that even mean)?
When you want to provide information from that document to a third party a protocol is used which allows you to demonstrate to the third party that (1) you have a document from the government bound to your hardware security device, (2) you have unlocked the hardware security device, (3) and the document says what you say it says (e.g., "the birthdate field in this document contains a value that is more than 18 years in the past").
This third party gets no additional information about the contents of your document. The protocol takes place entirely between your device and the third party, so the government that issued you the bound document has no idea when or if you use it.
Someone over 18 person could indeed decide to help others prove age, but they would either have to do it in person or be willing to loan their unlocked security element to those others.
Yep!
This is why the concept of zero knowledge age gating is such a trap for technically minded people. They imagine receiving a private cryptographic object that can be used to anonymously confirm that the government says it was issued to someone over 18.
That’s completely useless because a single leaked token could be used forever, so nobody actually considers this.
All of the real proposals have various compromises baked in. Some people want to require device attestation, so you could only do this handshake from a government approved device running a government approved operating system. Forget using Linux or maybe even a general purpose computer at all.
Other proposals involve online government handshakes in various ways, with a pinky promise that the government won’t keep logs or tap it for national security purposes. So we get back to anonymous by trust only.
The governments’ focus might be on protecting genuine users (adults or not), not fighting fraudsters.
In other words if ZKP works for the vast majority of technically illiterate people with their EU ewallet, the job is done.
:(
1. Imagine what the protocol would look like without privacy (zk allows you to “sign” a computation, so just do the computation in the clear)
2. Imagine what the protocol would look like by revealing a hash of the passport only (the idea of a “nullifier”, a unique identifier that hides the data and and can be revealed to prevent replays)
The first one should already answer your question: the way you would prevent replays or portability (I use your proof) is to attach some sort of session context to your proof
See https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/age-verification-id/#dev... for some more detail.
- you enter ph and must age-verify. It says 'your secret: "capable peanut", enter age proof below'.
- you go to age-knower (e.g bank or government page). You provide the secret phrase, and you get back a cryptographically signed json with the secret phrase, a claim 'above18', and a field stating who attested for the age (e.g government or bank or whoever).
- you paste this signed json (maybe encoded as base64 or something) into ph. It will verify that the attestee is good, then use it's public key to verify the signature, before checking that the secret is the correct one, and that it contains the age-claim.
Is the problem that if ph and the attestee colludes they can compare the secret string and figure out who you are?
For some isolated scenarios, that collusion risk may be completely fine. But not for something that is poised to control access to the internet as a whole, or in any way relates to maintaining safe free speech on the dominant public platform for doing so (the internet). People need protection from their government (present and future), or it's not a "right", it's just temporary retroactively-revokable permission.
You could build a merkle tree to say "we exist after X" but not "there is no other X". And publishing that tree for verification would seemingly violate "zero knowledge", unless you know of some way to scrub that, and also hide timing information, because timing information can identify visitors to observers.
I hate to be cynical but I worry that this isn't going to matter, because it really seems that a lot of the pressure behind age verification isn't actually very interested in the age verification part...
When not doing privacy oriented cryptocurrency (cough money laundering cough) with ZKP's, if you really want private verification you are in a position where a single actor can authenticate the entire world and no one will know it happened. And to prevent it you assemble the pieces necessary to deanonymize anyone.
Make no mistake. ZKP age verification, as proposed, will just require multiple parties to collude to figure out your identity.
They can't even implement ZKP for remote attestation due to the auth-the-world problem.
So you should assume the government can track you, because you should assume both will be streaming those identifiers to it.
Ideally, no age verification would be required or proposed. However, if it is, this implementation should be the base minimum, should it not?
This is a gazillion percent better than a foreign corporation being in charge, isn't it?
All current age verification measures open up a torrent of attack vectors on user PII and privacy. Limiting the number of entities that are able to access data is one of the best ways to prevent it's leak or abuse. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good.
But therein lies the fundamental problem with surveillance capitalism. Until the sale of personal data/metadata is outlawed, the practice of targeting content based on an individuals personal data/metadata is outlawed, there is a highly punitive cost for violations and leaks that make storage outside core business functionality a major criminal and financial risk, and the compilation of this data by "intelligence" agencies it treated as a critical attack vector to national security – the attack on each citizens civil rights that it truly is – most privacy laws and regulations are just virtue signals designed specifically avoid the root causes, and further entrench the power of monopolies and incumbents.
FYI I don't believe Google sells user data. They sell products which leverage user data to give them a critical advantage over every competitor who does not have trackers in everyones pockets/computers, does not store their entire web search/browsing history, etc. It's in the interest of big tech to protect their market advantage (like ZKP, which would prevent competitors from having a new gov-mandated vector to compile user data).