Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

There isn't really such a question. The law explicitly requires anonymous third-party age verification to be offered as an option. There are definitely concerns about how well that will work in practice, and I would definitely want to wait and see how it works in Florida before advocating for a wider rollout, but this Florida bill is actually the most reasonable of these age verification requirements rolled out to date.

I'm all for a healthy skepticism of government intervention, but my feeling is let's let Florida try this out and see what happens.

View on HN

You say there is no question, but it is already being raised by social media companies as an issue with the law. Anonymous age _verification_ is not something that exists. This requires government documentation, which means any solution that involves storing identity verification information would de facto allow the government to unmask users. This raises serious free speech concerns for everyone that uses these websites in Florida.

1) 3rd party service (Verifier) receives government documentation proving that the owner of {{account ID}} is over the age of 21.

2) Verifier records the fact that the owner of {{account ID}} has proven they are of the age of majority. They throw away all other identifying information, including their exact age.

3) The individual logs in to Verifier from Social Media. Verifier certifies to Social Media that the individual is over the age of majority.

There's no technical barrier preventing this outcome, and if you read the text of the law this is very clearly what the legislature envisions. Will it work? I don't know. Let's wait and see.

Let's just ignore the fact this doesn't exist for the sake of going through the mental exercise. Whether identity services are allowed to discard the logs is a legal question. The time in which a user makes a verification request for a website is de-anonymizing in of itself. The government could access both services either in real-time (remember this has already happened here) or depending on how things are stored at a later date to link identities to accounts. So the government has ways get all the information it needs to de-anonymize people who use social media in Florida if enforced.

You skipped over the Verifier expecting to be paid in some manner, being very likely to be paid using credit card, and thus having to retain those logs. Thus still making it easy to unmask users.

Social Media company would probably be the one to pay Verifier.

A fairly basic version of anonymous verification would be that local stores sell an age token. You show them your ID, like you would for buying alcohol, and they give you the token which could then be used with online services to prove you're over a certain age.

It only becomes a problem if stores are forced to store the ID and link it to the token in some way.

Teenagers are gonna be stoked when they can pick up their internet access chip AND alcohol in one stop

If you think kids won’t route around this then you don’t know kids. Its a political move for desantis to rally his base, nothing more.

Like I said, let's wait and see. I don't expect all kids to keep off social media—not all kids stay away from alcohol either—what I'd hope is that a significant enough percentage of them stay off that kids who do stay off have an easier time setting up healthier interaction patterns among their friend groups.

The more insidious undertone is that Florida is (or is establishing legal precedence for) policing information access.

If anything is detrimental to the health of a child, it's a restricted worldview.

"Anonymous third-party age verification" is an oxymoron. You can't verify age anonymously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com