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Comment by addy34 | Hacker News Reader

The government currently tendering for providers of different systems. See here [1] and here [2]:

Tender documents released on Monday show the technical trial is slated to begin “on or around 28 October”, with the provider also expected to assess the “effectiveness, maturity, and readiness” of technologies in Australia.

Biometric age estimation, email verification processes, account confirmation processes, device or operating-level interventions are among the technologies that will be assessed for social media (13-16 years age band).

In the context of age-restricted online content (18 years or over), the Communication department has asked that double-blind tokenised attribution exchange models, as per the age verification roadmap, and hard identifiers such as credit cards be considered.

[1] https://www.innovationaus.com/govt-readies-age-verification-...

[2] https://www.biometricupdate.com/202409/australia-launches-te...

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The source for "double-blind tokenised attribution exchange models" is this report from July 2024, from the Australian eSafety Commissioner: https://www.esafety.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-07/Age-A...

They note that existing age verification setups largely either rely on providing ID, or on a combination of manual and automated behavior profiling (face recognition, text classification, reports from other users), both of which have obvious privacy and/or accuracy issues. The "double-blind tokens" point to a summary by LINC explaining how they _could_ be implemented with zero-knowledge proofs, but I could not find an article or a practical implementation (could just be a mistake on my part, admittedly)

At _best_ you end up with a solution in the vein of Privacy Pass - https://petsymposium.org/popets/2018/popets-2018-0026.pdf - but that requires a browser extension, a functioning digital ID solution you can build on top of, and buy-in from the websites. Personally, I also suspect the strongest sign a company is going to screw up the cryptographic side of it is if they agree to implement it...

> "a functioning digital ID solution"

A functioning digital ID solutions seems like table stakes for anything in 2024.

The operative part being "that you can build on top of", because the "ID token" approach means it now has to act as essentially a mini-OAuth-provider for many other websites, not just government services

Yes. But I don’t think this type of regulation should care about whether it’s technically possible to do today. You could make a New York proposal type ban e.g banning algorithmic feeds to minors, even if it’s difficult to tell who is a minor and who isn’t. Social media companies would solve the ID problem or simply stop using those algorithms outright.

Sales of stick on mustaches will skyrocket

It's a bit wild that instead of parents just being responsible and teaching their children properly, we'll resort to neutering privacy and freedom on the Internet.

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