[HN Gopher] Calif. Law to Protect Children's Privacy Could Lead ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Calif. Law to Protect Children's Privacy Could Lead to Invasive Age
       Verification
        
       Author : pseudolus
       Score  : 128 points
       Date   : 2022-10-08 13:27 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (reason.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (reason.com)
        
       | LegionMammal978 wrote:
       | I'm surprised how little this issue has come up in the past,
       | given how much many here are focused on privacy. This issue can
       | be seen even today on YouTube. When I browse videos, I usually do
       | so in FF's private browsing mode, primarily to prevent the
       | recommendations from spilling over into my main account. However,
       | videos marked as age-restricted _cannot be viewed_ without
       | logging into a Google account. Even yt-dlp couldn 't download
       | age-restricted videos without credentials when I last attempted
       | it! (I hear there has since been a patch to fix this, but I have
       | not tested it to see if it still works.) And apparently, EU users
       | are sometimes required to upload their government ID to YouTube
       | to prove they are over 18.
       | 
       | I get that privacy issues can be most sensitive to those under
       | 18, but it's important to recognize that enforcing far stronger
       | privacy restrictions alongside strong age-verification
       | expectations (no more "are you 18+? yes/no" or "what is your
       | birthday?" questions) can only come at the expense of anonymous
       | browsing.
        
         | kybernetyk wrote:
         | https://github.com/zerodytrash/Simple-YouTube-Age-Restrictio...
         | 
         | https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/423851-simple-youtube-age-...
         | 
         | Works fine for me on FireFox + Greasemonkey
        
           | 14 wrote:
           | I want to come back to this comment later and try these out.
           | Thanks
        
           | O__________O wrote:
           | Note that you have to trust the proxy injecting age
           | verification on behalf of the user is not logging data, being
           | malicious, etc; if they are running targeted attacks, this
           | would be very hard to detect; for example, say the proxy was
           | run by China and user requests a video that's clearly anti-
           | China; to be clear, NOT saying this is the case, just that it
           | does require trusting a proxy, which generally speaking are
           | hostile to users.
        
         | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
         | "... can only come at the expense of anonymous browsing."
         | 
         | False dichotomy.
         | 
         | (Also known as false dilemma, bogus dilemma, either-or fallacy,
         | black-and-white fallacy.)[FN1]
         | 
         | If the website protects the privacy of _all_ persons, not just
         | those under 18, then there is no problem complying this law.
         | 
         | It's like the folks who claim the web cannot or would not exist
         | unless advertising is permitted. It is a self-serving statement
         | of an opinion. It has no evidentiary basis.
         | 
         | This false prediction, nonsense reasoning is probably accepted
         | by generations that did not experience the internet before
         | advertising was permitted, before online advertising became
         | pervasive, and/or before online advertising was based on data
         | collection and targeted. The fact is the internet and web did
         | exist without advertising. There is no technical limitation
         | that requires a website to collect data and/or serve ads.
         | 
         | Common retorts to such historical facts include such gems as
         | 
         | "I would never want to go back to 199x", or
         | 
         | "All the wonderful content of the web today would disappear."
         | 
         | 1. Computers and networks are never going to return to 1990's
         | prices and speeds. Speeds keep increasing and prices keep
         | decreasing.
         | 
         | 2. Who would have guessed, but today's commercial web content
         | is actually being generated mostly by website users themselves
         | rather than website operators. "Tech" companies operating high
         | traffic websites have promoted their own "business", online
         | advertising, to lure people into uploading to their websites
         | without expecting payment in return. Like some sort of opaque
         | lottery. This is why the web has become a cesspool of
         | "clickbait" and garbage "content".
         | 
         | FN1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
        
           | LegionMammal978 wrote:
           | Perhaps I worded that somewhat confusingly. I'm in favor of
           | privacy regulations existing in the first place. What I'm
           | against is having privacy regulations suddenly become
           | stricter below age 18. Most website operators want to
           | minimize the time and money spent on compliance, and the
           | lowest-friction way to do that is to implement a privacy-
           | invasive age gate and deny any user who does not pass it.
           | (Either the website receives your identity directly, or the
           | government learns which websites you've been accessing. I've
           | since been informed that less invasive age gates are
           | technically possible, but they would require competent
           | regulations to implement.)
           | 
           | The usual ethical difference, as I've understood it from
           | prior discussions, is that a legal adult user can always
           | consent to a company using their data, so long as the data is
           | knowingly given to the company, the user has been honestly
           | informed of what that data is used for, and the user can
           | revoke the company's access to their data at any point. (Some
           | people recognize less-strict conditions as acceptable, I'm
           | just taking these as a baseline.)
           | 
           | However, many of these new regulations outright prohibit
           | minor users' data from being used in certain ways, even if
           | those users have freely consented to it, with the
           | justification that minors are unable to evaluate the full
           | consequences of their data being used. Since businesses face
           | major liability for violating these regulations, they have
           | two options: either implement the strictest possible age-
           | related regulation for every user, or implement an age gate
           | that cannot be circumvented short of the user committing
           | fraud.
           | 
           | In this particular regulation, some of the wording is vague,
           | requiring a "compelling reason" to collect minor users' data,
           | regardless of those users' consent. Businesses abhor that
           | kind of liability: how do they protect every user as if they
           | might be a vulnerable minor, under every possible
           | interpretation of the regulation? The easier path by far is
           | to require an age gate.
           | 
           | Thus, I'd argue that the better path would be to require
           | _uniform_ privacy regulations, recognizing that random
           | websites don 't want to be in the business of age
           | verification. Either require the same strong privacy
           | regulations for all users, or don't implement the new
           | regulations for minors at all.
        
         | O__________O wrote:
         | >> strong age-verification expectations [...] can only come at
         | the expense of anonymous browsing
         | 
         | No, this is not true, there are numerous ways for a system to
         | authenticate a user without the endpoint requesting the
         | authentication knowing who the user is -- or the system
         | verifying the user knowing what endpoint system is requesting
         | the authentication; only the user knows both who they are and
         | the endpoint they want access to.
        
           | soulofmischief wrote:
           | You have to ask yourself if we should be building these kinds
           | of censorship tools to begin with. If I wasn't allowed to use
           | the internet the way I did as a kid, I wouldn't be here
           | today.
        
           | mindslight wrote:
           | In an ideal world, yes. Blind signatures and all that.
           | 
           | But that isn't how collection-maximizing surveillance
           | companies work. Right now, the lowest friction is to ask for
           | birthdays where they can get away with it, but never really
           | verify. If the law gives them a reason to verify, then the
           | incentive is to expand their plaintext-based all-knowing
           | systems to perform verification.
           | 
           | Sure, we'd likely see a startup that promises to do privacy-
           | respecting age verification, but it would go nowhere. What
           | incentive would there be for Google et al to adopt it, as
           | opposed to say just requesting your driving license number
           | with a message implying that California "made" them to do
           | this ? The companies without the cloud to demand personal
           | info would then outsource the verification to the bigger
           | surveillance companies.
        
             | mistrial9 wrote:
             | unfortunately, there are Thiel-like support services in the
             | wings actively building business bridges at every step.
             | Some elements in society really do try to get paid to
             | surveil others, and that will continue. I predict only
             | hard-won litigation, meaningful laws with enforcement, and
             | public discussion like this, will slow the slide on the
             | slippery slope.
        
               | mindslight wrote:
               | "Some" ? The entire market cap of modern Silicon Valley
               | is based upon monetizing surveillance.
               | 
               | This topic demonstrates one of the main pathologies of
               | the US model of governance. Instead of pushing
               | constructive actionable privacy restrictions for
               | everyone, the government is poised to create another hook
               | that merely emboldens corporate control.
               | 
               | What we need is a US GDPR with an analogous definition of
               | consent - if implementing functionality to examine and
               | delete my data is too hard, then just don't store
               | surveillance records about me in the first place! But
               | what we'll end up getting is ineffectual nonsense to be
               | nullified with more clickwrap legalese that nobody reads.
        
               | mistrial9 wrote:
               | > The entire market cap of modern Silicon Valley is based
               | upon monetizing surveillance.
               | 
               | no, its not.. but a bulk of FB/Google dollars that are,
               | dwarfs a lot of other things.. its a sick situation, I
               | can agree with that.. important to speak out
        
           | LegionMammal978 wrote:
           | How could the user verify that the endpoint never learns
           | anything about the user's identity, and that the system never
           | learns anything about the requesting endpoint? In situations
           | where privacy is particularly sensitive, either or both could
           | have a motive to learn more about the user.
        
             | rkagerer wrote:
             | No matter how you design this, at some point it involves
             | trusting a third party who views your ID doesn't leak PII
             | to other parties.
             | 
             | This problem doesn't exist with today's simple prompts that
             | just ask for your birthday and blindly trust the end user.
        
               | LegionMammal978 wrote:
               | Indeed. It seems like most proposals delegate this role
               | to the government, since they already have your basic ID
               | anyway. The question is, how can the website operators
               | interact with the government in such a way that the
               | websites don't learn which government ID you have, and
               | the government doesn't learn which websites you're
               | visiting?
               | 
               | Surprisingly (to me at least), certain cryptographic
               | tricks can do a pretty big chunk of that, by having the
               | website/government and user/government interactions occur
               | ahead of time. But as far as I can see, there's still the
               | issue with these tricks that 18+ people could share their
               | access with under-18 people, which the government would
               | want to prevent.
        
               | O__________O wrote:
               | I actually do have an economic technical solution to the
               | issue of remote authentication of user's physical
               | presence using zero-trust systems that makes sharing a
               | one-time token impossible, but currently not motivated to
               | share it, since it's possible I might want to use it
               | myself formally; super simple, very possible someone else
               | has already used it before. Realize you have to take my
               | word for it, but to me, that's non-issue.
               | 
               | Also, does appear Privacy Pass covers the other aspects,
               | which is covered on this page, but still trying to work
               | through if it covers all aspects of a system that at
               | least for myself I would be agreeable to use for things
               | like: age verification, citizenship, captchas, etc --
               | basically anonymous verification of identity attributes.
        
               | LegionMammal978 wrote:
               | Huh, I read up on Privacy Pass, and it really does seem
               | to have the properties I'm looking for. Taking the
               | government as the issuer/attester, it seems like the
               | endpoint (origin) gives a challenge to the user (client),
               | the user requests a token from the government (which,
               | critically, the government can verify without knowing the
               | user's ID), and uses this token to respond to the
               | endpoint's challenge. Thus, the government might learn
               | that some user accessed that particular endpoint
               | (depending on the exact setup used), but cannot learn who
               | it was. And since it does not know the user's identity,
               | it cannot censor a particular user, only potentially a
               | particular endpoint.
               | 
               | I also don't really see how present physical identity
               | could be proven in a privacy-preserving manner, if you
               | don't trust the government or endpoints not to abuse that
               | physical data. Alas, even if I take your word for it, I
               | doubt that governments would implement such an indirect
               | system for age verification in practice, especially since
               | they might want to revoke any erroneously-issued tokens.
               | 
               | (And even if anonymous non-circumventable age gating were
               | to become a reality, I still wouldn't be a fan of
               | differential privacy regulations for minors, since many
               | ordinary sites would become inaccessible to teenagers
               | from following the path of least resistance. Either
               | impose the regulations on all users, impose them
               | gradually depending on age, or don't impose them at all.)
        
             | O__________O wrote:
             | I have seen it explained before, believe it was done using
             | a combination of combination of differential privacy and
             | zero knowledge proofs, but might wrong. Currently trying to
             | find a detailed explanation of how to implement such a
             | system using existing technology. In mean time, if anyone
             | else is aware of such a system, please post a link.
             | 
             | EDIT: This appears to cover some aspects, still reviewing
             | it and to confirm it covers all the system attributes I
             | described:
             | 
             | https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/96232/zkp-
             | prove-t...
        
               | LegionMammal978 wrote:
               | Hmm, I don't think that protocol as described would be
               | sufficient for the government. What would prevent Alice
               | (age 18) from sharing her signed age statement with her
               | friend Charlie (age 17), who passes it to Bob to falsify
               | his age? The government would not want underage users to
               | collude with 18+ users to gain access to age-gated
               | endpoints.
        
               | O__________O wrote:
               | Agree, still trying to find full explanation, seen it
               | described before. Aside from sharing the token, other
               | issue is if the endpoint cached the token, it's unique
               | and could be cross-referenced to deanonymize the user if
               | 3rd-party or government gained access to list of tokens
               | an endpoint collected.
               | 
               | Obviously looking for example, but if you're able to
               | think of an additional issues that need to be accounted
               | for, let me know.
        
               | LegionMammal978 wrote:
               | Yep, that's another thing I was thinking of: if Alice
               | uses the same token all the time for every endpoint, then
               | the endpoints could trivially use that as a unique
               | identifier to track Alice. Perhaps the government could
               | create a service for Alice to create new age tokens
               | whenever she wants.
               | 
               | Even then, if the government actively compelling
               | endpoints to hand over their data is within the threat
               | model, the government could inspect any cached temporary
               | tokens to deanonymize the users. This could perhaps be
               | mitigated with some way for users to irreversibly
               | transform the temporary tokens given by the government,
               | but I'm not sure if that's possible while retaining the
               | ability for endpoints to verify the tokens.
               | 
               | Overall, though, the sharing problem seems to me to be
               | the biggest issue by far with this scheme. What makes a
               | user an individual human? In current implementations,
               | their unique government ID (perhaps made illegal to
               | falsify) is used for this. But I can't see how individual
               | humans can be distinguished in a privacy-preserving way.
        
               | O__________O wrote:
               | My memory was that the tokens enter a pool of tokens and
               | that neither government or endpoint is able to trace
               | which user used which token and they're one-time use
               | tokens, so users are unable to share them.
               | 
               | Never really gave system much thought at the time, since
               | governments rarely want less data or to provide anonymous
               | access -- and average person does not care about
               | anonymous access, in fact, in my experience they want
               | everything logged. Same topic could easily be applied to
               | numerous functions such as border crossings, but
               | governments want to track who is crossing instead of just
               | checking individual authorization to enter.
        
               | LegionMammal978 wrote:
               | Another possible issue, for any scheme that uses
               | government-issued temporary tokens (even blinded tokens)
               | that have an expiration date: the government could stop
               | issuing tokens to a user at any time, preventing them
               | from accessing any gated sites after their current tokens
               | expire.
        
               | O__________O wrote:
               | Agree, more to the point, once some attributes are
               | verified, for example age, it shouldn't require
               | government to reverify. That said, some attributes should
               | require if needed real-time verification, for example if
               | an individual is legally allowed to drive, enter a
               | country, etc.
        
               | LegionMammal978 wrote:
               | Wouldn't caching verification data require the endpoints
               | to hold user sessions? Thus, if the government withheld
               | verification services for a user, wouldn't it prevent
               | that user from creating new independent sessions on their
               | current endpoints, as well as preventing that user from
               | verifying on new endpoints?
        
               | O__________O wrote:
               | Not 100% sure understand you, but believe this comment
               | might address your question:
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33133749
               | 
               | Ideally, endpoints would not even know the specific
               | authentication provider, but that the authentication came
               | from a authentication service that's authorized to
               | confirm a given identity and related attributes; for
               | example, being over X age is a binary attribute and
               | numerous entities should be able to authenticate that and
               | it be honored by a jurisdiction similar to how passports
               | are uniform.
        
               | IX-103 wrote:
               | Unless it's a blinded token. In which case the endpoint
               | cannot match the token that was issued to the token that
               | was spent. They can only verify that the token is valid.
               | 
               | I first saw them used with Clouflare's Privacy Pass
               | https://www.hcaptcha.com/privacy-pass, they've also been
               | used with Google's trust token proposal.
        
               | LegionMammal978 wrote:
               | Would these be susceptible to the issuing organization
               | refusing to issue new tokens to some individual?
        
               | O__________O wrote:
               | If you load link below and look for "Problem:
               | Malleability" it say, " It's possible to create an
               | arbitrary number of pairs of points that will be
               | verified. The client can create these points by
               | multiplying both T and sT by an arbitrary number a. If
               | the client attempts to redeem aT and a(sT), the server
               | will accept it. This effectively gives the client
               | unlimited redemptions."
               | 
               | Which to me might mean it might address if user is
               | refused new tokens, it might not account for if the
               | tokens are revoked or the authorizing entity ceased to
               | exist, but the attribute was uniform, for example age.
               | 
               | https://privacypass.github.io/protocol/
               | 
               | All and all, at very least, appears to be an extensive
               | and extendable standard, assuming those involved are
               | reasonable and there's no conflicting interests.
        
               | O__________O wrote:
               | Thanks, know I have looked at Privacy Pass before, not
               | 100% sure after quick review of the related links if it
               | covers the all system attributes I described; still
               | looking it over.
               | 
               | For those interested, here's the related paper covering
               | it:
               | 
               | https://www.petsymposium.org/2018/files/papers/issue3/pop
               | ets...
               | 
               | And yes, my understanding was tokens entered a pool of
               | one-time tokens and neither the government or endpoint
               | was able to cross reference them to a specific user.
        
           | cm2187 wrote:
           | That would require some privacy focused gvt infrastructure.
           | The reality is that pretty much all gvt these days are all in
           | on privacy invasion and monitoring.
        
           | Stupulous wrote:
           | Have there been instances of governments providing
           | cryptographic identification services yet? That seems like a
           | hugely beneficial thing they could do in this space (with the
           | side benefit of social websites that aren't overrun with
           | children). The only part that would be challenging is
           | preventing the government authentication servers from knowing
           | which websites you're visiting.
        
             | O__________O wrote:
             | Trying to post everything in same spot, see this comment
             | for more information:
             | 
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33133010
        
             | teaearlgraycold wrote:
             | Google and Apple are both implementing an ISO that will
             | allow for you to prove you are over 21, 18, etc. It's just
             | a super verified boolean. The tech can also provide much
             | more, but you can think of it like OAuth scopes. The user
             | is shown what will be shared from a set of discrete
             | properties.
        
               | greggman3 wrote:
               | There is no way those properties won't include PII
               | 99.999% of the time. Your option will be to identify
               | yourself or not access the site
        
               | btown wrote:
               | The option in "Sign In With Apple ID" to provide a
               | randomized email address that proxies to your own,
               | alongside the boolean, would do a lot to mitigate this.
               | Of course, Apple can associate you with your usage of the
               | site (and it's worth keeping a close eye if they start to
               | pivot more towards advertising as a revenue stream), but
               | the site itself would be unable to.
        
               | teaearlgraycold wrote:
               | That is a yet to be solved problem. But people are
               | working to make sure that doesn't happen.
        
             | LegionMammal978 wrote:
             | > (with the side benefit of social websites that aren't
             | overrun with children)
             | 
             | I've commonly seen this cited as a benefit of
             | uncircumventable age gates, but I think that most proposed
             | systems I've seen are far stricter than they need to be for
             | this: they have a hard line exactly at 18 or 21, and allow
             | neither read nor write access to gated-off sites. Should a
             | 17-year-old teenager be able to access no more social media
             | than a 7-year-old child can? And must read access always be
             | gated, even though gating write access would be sufficient
             | to prevent this overrunning? Teenagers have to learn how to
             | operate in the adult world at some point, and I worry that
             | pushing so much access to age 18 all at once could have
             | major unintended consequences.
        
               | everforward wrote:
               | Those are probably a reflection of legal issues. 18 year
               | olds are clear from child protection laws, and 21 year
               | olds can be shown ads for alcohol (and maybe tobacco, I
               | think that's 21 in many states now).
               | 
               | As long as there is potential, significant liability
               | attached to showing under-18's certain content it's safer
               | to just not show them anything questionable until they're
               | 18.
               | 
               | I'm with you, I think a gradient would be developmentally
               | better, but our legal system discourages that. I think
               | the same thing exists across other parallels; people get
               | a _ton_ of options dumped on them at 18. It would
               | probably be better to phase that in over time.
        
               | Stupulous wrote:
               | This is a fair point. Primarily the reason that children
               | can dominate a website is that they have so much more
               | time to participate (and probably are more likely to
               | contribute in a low-effort way), so putting the mark at
               | 16 or 17 would still significantly reduce the issue. I
               | think having places that are certified <12 would be great
               | for kids and could be over-moderated without great
               | consequence. A spectrum of age gates would make a very
               | cool internet, and I'd extend that as far up as ages go
               | (35-55? Centenarians only? Why not?).
        
         | neuralRiot wrote:
         | I find ridiculous having to login in YT (which i have no
         | account nor will) to view "age restricted material" when you
         | can watch hardcore porn just by clicking "I'm over 18 years
         | old"
        
         | btdmaster wrote:
         | You want yt-dlp on the latest version since YouTube
         | breaks/throttles quite often otherwise. Try yt-dlp --update.
         | (You could also try a custom repository for your package
         | manager, though the best solution in this case is a rolling
         | release distribution.)
        
         | ng12 wrote:
         | Reddit added this as well within the last week. You can no
         | longer view 18+ subreddits without being logged in.
        
         | dheera wrote:
         | We should legalize the use of fake IDs with private
         | organizations as long as there is no intention to commit a
         | crime.
         | 
         | Only the government should need real IDs.
         | 
         | For example, if I am actually over 18 and intend to watch a
         | video intended for over 18, I should be able to use a fake ID
         | for it.
        
       | lisper wrote:
       | The Right Way to do this is to develop a standard for web pages
       | to identify themselves as not suitable for children, and then
       | build clients with a setting that locks out those pages (which
       | could be disabled only with a passcode or some such security
       | measure). Then it becomes the responsibility of parents to insure
       | that the lockout is enabled no the devices their children have
       | access to.
        
         | bell-cot wrote:
         | That would be reasonable and easily workable, but...
         | 
         | ...daunting for millions of parents, who'd imagine (often
         | rightly) that their kids, aided by friends & on-line
         | instructions & such, would all-to-easily bypass the parental
         | controls.
         | 
         | ...dis-empowering for politicians lusting after attention &
         | votes, who think that moral panics and big-government-control-
         | freak "solutions" are their best friends.
        
         | EarlKing wrote:
         | No, the right way to do this is to stop trying to use
         | legislation to do the jobs of parents. Stop expecting the world
         | to nerf itself so you can be a lazier parent.
        
         | mjevans wrote:
         | Reverse that.
         | 
         | All things should be considered UNRATED (adult) by default.
         | 
         | Adults that want to should set a flag in the OS account, which
         | should be passed along (or optionally also set as a child
         | account) by browsing software. In child safe mode such software
         | would then follow a set of local policy decisions and refuse to
         | operate with content not declared child safe. Such an account
         | feature might also forward the data to other accounts for
         | review (parent, guardian, teacher, etc).
         | 
         | THEN, the enforcement, sites which incorrectly claim to be a
         | given rating should get hit with the charges that enables.
        
           | out-of-ideas wrote:
           | Agreed; the ISP is paid by an adult, adult paid for
           | computer/tv/ect, and its the adult to state when said child
           | can operate such equipment. Last I'm aware said adults dont
           | let children watch TV completely unrestricted (having an
           | adult locking adulty-content). It should be up to
           | parent/guardian to oversee what kid is doing and lock them
           | out, with younger kids getting more supervised attention.
           | Keep our IDs/PII/phonenumbers out of browsing the web.
           | 
           | We could go a step further by banning highly accurate
           | fingerprinting and make things nice n generic; hopefully
           | making ads as generic as the wonderful ads as-seen-on-tv.
        
           | jvalencia wrote:
           | I really like this. An industry enforced standard with
           | consequences would stop most problems.
        
       | gtirloni wrote:
       | What I don't like about these news is how abstract they are.
       | Sure, it could lead to age information leaking but my imagination
       | isn't working to figure out how that would impact me in a
       | concrete way. Anyone could share possible bad outcomes?
        
         | novok wrote:
         | It forces internet usage to be attached to real identities, in
         | order to make sure your not breaking the laws with children,
         | and all the bad, bad consequences that can come from that.
         | 
         | And if you don't see how that can be an issue, you have lived a
         | blessed life where you or your family & friends were not
         | prosecuted by violent authoritarian governments arms, that
         | exist in liberal democracies today or discriminated against for
         | minority attribute X, both of which exist even in Scandinavia
         | today.
        
           | gtirloni wrote:
           | OK, so the theory is that age will be another signal in
           | profiling users for $purpose. Thanks.
        
       | cscurmudgeon wrote:
       | Once again good intentioned but bumbling idiots make things
       | worse:
       | 
       | https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-st...
        
       | O__________O wrote:
       | Really strange to me that given its obviously possible to
       | securely verify someone's age without requiring personally
       | identifiable information at the endpoint requiring verification
       | (or for the system verifying attributes to know the endpoint
       | requesting verification) that anyone would even want that
       | information flowing through their systems -- unless they wanted
       | the information for other reasons. To me, unless the prior
       | technological features I just mentioned are baked into the law,
       | this feels like it's either intentional or laws are being crafted
       | by people that have no clue what they're doing.
       | 
       | More generally speaking, governments should start seeing the
       | hoarding of data by itself and others as a national security
       | threat, open source any government systems -- and offer bounties
       | for anyone able to maintain the objectives of a system while
       | reducing the system's access to sensitive data.
       | 
       | ______________
       | 
       | * EDIT: 100% sure that it's technically possible to have an
       | endpoint anonymously verify age and a verification system to do
       | so without knowing the endpoint requesting the verification, but
       | unable to find technical explanation of how this might be done
       | using existing technology; might be wrong, but believe it
       | included a combination of differential privacy and zero knowledge
       | proofs. Does anyone have a link to detailed explanation of how to
       | implement such a system?
        
         | erwinmatijsen wrote:
         | IRMA [1] comes to mind. From their site:
         | 
         | With IRMA it is easy to log in and make yourself known, by
         | disclosing only relevant attributes of yourself. For instance,
         | in order to watch a certain movie online, you prove that you
         | are older than 16, and nothing else.
         | 
         | Their docs[2] are pretty good.
         | 
         | [1] https://irma.app/?lang=en [2] https://irma.app/docs/what-
         | is-irma/
        
           | O__________O wrote:
           | Thanks, agree system provides privacy protecting attribute
           | verification (age, legal-voter, citizen, income, etc) -- but
           | after quickly reviewing it, does not appear to support
           | anonymously doing so in a way that only the user knows their
           | identity and the endpoint identity -- but neither the
           | endpoint or government know both, even if they or an attacker
           | have access to the security tokens from the endpoint and
           | governments servers.
           | 
           | Did I miss something?
           | 
           | Another user suggested Privacy Pass system, which I have
           | reviewed before and currently reviewing to see if it fits
           | system profile I am describing:
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33133758
        
           | akira2501 wrote:
           | You just have to be comfortable with a single application on
           | your phone holding all your details for you, it having
           | implemented the protocol perfectly, and having amazing
           | protections around the handling of the third-party request
           | phases.
           | 
           | And this is all to improve the privacy of children?
        
         | readams wrote:
         | It's the last one. It's just very poorly drafted legislation
         | that hasn't been thought through. this is our one party rule in
         | action. With no meaningful opposition, laws are not scrutinized
         | and unintended consequences never considered.
        
           | loeg wrote:
           | It's poorly thought out legislation, but it's not like the
           | GOP is known for writing good law.
        
           | jeffbee wrote:
           | There are 29 members of the state legislature who are not in
           | the "one party" and exactly zero people voted against this
           | bill at any stage. It passed 72-0 in one chamber and 33-0 in
           | the other.
        
             | wrayjustin wrote:
             | Arguably, "one party" in this sense could mean "rulers."
        
               | jeffbee wrote:
               | It could mean that, if you're juvenile or just stupid.
               | It's a democratically-elected, bicameral, proportionally
               | representative legislature with an independent executive
               | elected in a non-partisan race.
        
           | tick_tock_tick wrote:
           | Just look at AB5 for a perfect example.
        
         | sandworm101 wrote:
         | Simple questions: CD or vinyl? That will identify everyone old
         | enough to remember. Then the classic: how do you tame a horse
         | in minecraft, which identifies everyone under 18.
        
           | bitwize wrote:
           | If you attempted to set it to its dirtiest mode, the game
           | Leisure Suit Larry would ask you a series of sports and pop
           | culture questions from the 1970s in order to verify you were
           | an adult (in the 1980s). Of course, kids just looked up the
           | answers and swapped them on crib notes on the playground.
        
           | MichaelCollins wrote:
           | Somebody who was 10 when horses were added to minecraft is 19
           | now.
           | 
           | But minecraft has always been an "all ages" game, not a kids
           | game. And it was first advertised/promoted on 4chan.
        
           | yellowapple wrote:
           | > CD or vinyl?
           | 
           | As someone who prefers tape I feel discriminated against.
        
           | O__________O wrote:
           | Understand the trick, but think we all know people are
           | clever, especially when they're motivated, and bypassing
           | systems like that would likely be trivial and even
           | potentially result in the endpoints requiring age
           | verification helping bypass them covertly.
        
             | sandworm101 wrote:
             | The goal isnt to actually block children. They goal is to
             | satisfy the corporations legal obligations: whatever scheme
             | requires the least effort, the least information from the
             | applicant, but still meets the minimum standard.
             | 
             | Better idea: webcam verification of government ID. Client-
             | side/in-browser AI software matches only name and birthday
             | before passing OK to website. Zero information is actually
             | transmited/stored. Patent please.
        
               | asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
               | What is to stop someone from modifying chromium to always
               | report "yes" in that case? Or is the idea that we will
               | add another widevine style opaque binary blob to our
               | system that handles this with an encrypted response that
               | can't be examined by the user?
        
               | O__________O wrote:
               | Nothing would stop someone from hacking the system if
               | everything was client-side.
        
               | O__________O wrote:
               | Not following, how would the system know the document was
               | authentic without transmitting data; understand that
               | client-side it would be easy to cross-reference the ID-
               | face and Live-face and scan the barcode to extract any
               | data attributes, such as age. Also, worth noting that
               | assuming the individual had a smart phone, scanning
               | document would likely provide no additional security and
               | there numerous apps that provide real-time end user
               | verification using biometrics.
        
               | sandworm101 wrote:
               | Perfection is always the enemy of "good enough to meet
               | legal oblugations". Compare the minimal ID checks for
               | buying cigarettes ... or handguns.
        
               | O__________O wrote:
               | This is not about perfection, as is, unless I missing
               | something, your suggested solution does not solve the
               | problem.
               | 
               | There are numerous ways for a system to authenticate a
               | user without the endpoint requesting the authentication
               | knowing who the user is -- or the system verifying the
               | user knowing what endpoint system is requesting the
               | authentication; only the user knows both who they are and
               | the endpoint they want access to.
        
       | exabrial wrote:
       | Kyc can easily be done with provable privacy, but that's now how
       | it'll be implemented because SV and the people that work there do
       | not value consent nor privacy.
        
       | deathgripsss wrote:
       | This was floated around in the UK for porn websites and was an
       | absolute disaster for the government:
       | https://theconversation.com/amp/why-age-verification-is-anot...
        
         | kybernetyk wrote:
         | Germany did this for porn sites and there's 0 German porn sites
         | anymore. At least 0 that do officially business out of Germany.
        
           | deathgripsss wrote:
           | Can you access American porn sites in Germany without
           | verification?
        
           | 4gotunameagain wrote:
           | In Germany you have to verify yourself with google to
           | download dating apps.
           | 
           | They only accept credit cards (debit cards being the norm in
           | Europe), effectively forcing you to send a photo of your
           | passport to Google.
           | 
           | Very nice. Bravo.
           | 
           | And Germans supposedly pride themselves for their privacy
           | concerns.
        
           | thebooktocome wrote:
           | Czechia is a very nice country and is right across the
           | border.
        
       | mintaka5 wrote:
        
       | sul_tasto wrote:
       | why can't we just protect everyone's privacy?
        
       | jjluoma wrote:
       | Google provides two alternatives for age verification, a credit
       | card payment and sending an electronic copy of a valid government
       | issued ID.
       | 
       | This explanation seems to be quite terse, "If you use a credit
       | card, any temporary authorization will be fully refunded. If you
       | use an ID, Google will delete the image after verifying your
       | age."
       | 
       | Both methods would require me to provide them (or some other
       | entity) new personal data. In the case of credit card payment,
       | credit card number (and thus what bank I am using, maybe also
       | what kind of card I have) and my home address.
       | 
       | My government issued ID has also other information like a photo
       | of me, my signature, social security number, all my given names
       | and card number. I wonder if they would accept an electronic copy
       | that would have all those covered.
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-08 23:01 UTC)