Comment by mysterium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mysterium | Hacker News Reader

Hot take: I'm in favour of this.

There's actually been significant progress in developing privacy-preserving attestation technologies in the last few years, that could enable anonymous age verification for adult websites.

There's an IETF protocol called Privacy Pass (see RFCs 9576-9578) that can attest facts about clients (e.g. their age) in an anonymising manner. You reveal your age by showing your ID to an age verification service (e.g. a government run service, or a bank), but crucially not the reason _why_ you're proving your age (i.e. the bank doesn't know if you're visiting a porn site or a casino). That service gives you a bunch of signed tokens proving you're over the age of 18/21/whatever, and you can redeem a token on the porn/gambling/alcohol-purchasing website for access. It uses various fun bits of cryptography (e.g. blind signatures) to ensure anonymity for the user.

With such technologies, anonymous age verification becomes achievable. Now, whether age verification is inherently "bad" is up for debate, but that's a matter of opinion. Obviously this technology isn't infallible and it will be possible to work around, but we don't need a perfect solution here. Preventing 99% of children that would have viewed violent pornography from viewing it is a massive win, and the fact that we can do it in a provably-privacy-preserving manner using cryptography is very very cool.

My concern is that the existence of such technology doesn't mean that it will be required -- and as more private technology often has a cost or a downside, it kind of has to be required for uptake -- and even further doesn't at all imply that it is even on the radar. If you want to be for this, you shouldn't be for this because it COULD be done well: you should insist that you will only be for this IF AND ONLY IF it WILL be done well, and if the draft laws don't say this then we should then not be for it.

Very reasonable, and indeed the July deadline will make it very likely that they _don't_ use a privacy-preserving method like Privacy Pass (and it's very reasonable for people to raise concerns).

My main issue is whenever the topic of age verification is raised, the consensus from the tech community is "the only way to achieve age verification is mass surveillance and I won't stand for it!", and as someone who works in an adjacent field to this, I feel the need to dispel that notion. We should be directing our collective energy into ensuring age verification is secure and private, not fighting against the notion entirely.

The obvious question to me is why pornography? There is _a lot_ of content on the internet potentially harmful for kids, from political radicalisation through drug apologies to brutal violence. Is viewing pornography worse than seeing the aftermath of a shooting?

It seems very clear that if one really wants to protect children, enforcement of protection should go somewhere else - banning kids access to unlimited devices for example. But this is not the intention of course. No one is blamed for handing a toddler a phone with TikTok on.

This feels like a perfectionist fallacy. One has to start somewhere, pornography is something we can pretty much all agree children shouldn’t be watching. It’s theoretically a mostly-achievable goal.

Solving one problem doesn’t mean we can’t also work on solving the others.

My point is not "if we don't solve everything it's not good". My point is "if you focus on this very specific part of the supposed problem while never mentioning the rest, I very much doubt the sincerity of your goal" (you being the government in this case). This is just "think of the children".

The thing is that it's already illegal for minors to see pornography.

It's not illegal for minors to access their technology devices or watch disturbing news footage.

This is merely an enforcement vehicle for rules that already exist. It is an acknowledgment that the law that has been in place for years doesn't work anymore.

Back in the pre-Internet days the adult video store or cinema would make sure you were of proper age to patronize those businesses. Sure, you could sift through your Dad's Playboys but essentially, an adult could reasonably be able to figure out how to limit exposure of content to their children.

In the current environment it's basically impossible.

An analogy to the status quo would be if drinking for under 21/18 was illegal but no bars or stores were required to check ID. That makes it effectively legal.

Now, as to your point on whether these rules make sense in the first place? I think we can reasonably assume that most of the voting public isn't in favor of legalizing pornography for minors. It doesn't really have to make sense when compared to other things we allow exposure to.

In other words, the existing laws already roughly reflect our cultural values. Most people in the Western world are literally more okay with showing their child something violent versus something pornographic.

If we all collectively as a culture decide to change that in the future, great, but I doubt a referendum to that effect would have majority agreement.

Essentially, the only concern with this law should be the anonymity of the age verification. All other concerns are addressed by the fact that a minor viewing pornography is already breaking the law.

> it's already illegal for minors to see pornography

Really? What law makes it illegal for minors to see pornography?

https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/citizens-guid...

> It is illegal for an individual to knowingly use interactive computer services to display obscenity in a manner that makes it available to a minor less than 18 years of age (See 47 U.S.C. § 223(d) –Communications Decency Act of 1996, as amended by the PROTECT Act of 2003). It is also illegal to knowingly make a commercial communication via the Internet that includes obscenity and is available to any minor less than 17 years of age (See 47 U.S.C. § 231 –Child Online Protection Act of 1998).

> The standard of what is harmful to minors may differ from the standard applied to adults. Harmful materials for minors include any communication consisting of nudity, sex or excretion that (i) appeals to the prurient interest of minors, (ii) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community with respect to what is suitable material for minors, (iii) and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

The most important part of this quote is that the standard for minors is different than that of adults. Material that is not considered obscenity for adults (e.g., legal pornography) can be and is considered obscenity for minors.

As someone from the UK, which is where this article is on about, it is not illegal in this country for minors to see pornography in and of itself.

Selling it to, etc. obviously are.

That's effectively the same thing in the context of this law.

It's illegal to distribute to minors, but the Internet has made it extremely easy for distributors to turn a blind eye.

Again, if it were a physical store, the shopkeeper would be obligated to kick out anyone under 18.

But on websites, there's just a pinky promise button and that's it.

That makes it illegal to display pornography to minors. It doesn’t make it illegal for minors to see pornography.

The owners of the website are the ones doing the displaying.

Again, the "bar that refuses to card anyone" analogy happens here.

> The obvious question to me is why pornography?

Because there is some kink in the Anglo Saxon psyche that means it's appealing to voters? I don't know, but I can't think of another explanation. The European countries focus their ire on violence and anti social behaviour, which makes far more sense to me.

It pretty clearly isn't because porn is particular harmful. If it was the explosion of porn the internet has made available would have some obvious effects. Yet all we get is the occasional report of some porn addicted individual. Not good, but it's more than offset by the reduction in sex crimes in the same period. And as addictions go porn addiction does seem that bad. Wasting time on porn is still wasted time I guess, but isn't actively harmful like, sugar addiction, nicotine addiction, alcohol addiction or gambling addiction - all of which are tolerated.

You make the mistake of assuming they're doing this in good faith.

I'm in Australia and we're going to have the same problem with our under-16 social media ban.

There's privacy-preserving ways to do it, but they definitely won't use them.

It's definitely possible to do it in a way that's less invasive but still effective. The question is whether that will actually happen.

It may be possible, but I think you've approaching this with the very naive assumption that the authorities actually have any interest in allowing you to preserve your privacy.

> that could enable anonymous age verification for adult websites.

Courtesy of Microsoft ? Or Google ? Norhing is anonymous on today's internet.

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