So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now? | Hacker News Reader

So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

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372 pointshn_acker295 comments

My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) so they're either moving on to other games or just downloading stock photos of people from the internet and uploading those (which apparently works).

What a total joke. These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids!

I was getting a haircut last week and chatting about our kids with the stylist, who said (basically): "I just started letting my 7 year old on Roblox. I know its full of pedophiles. I told him to come to me or his older brother if anyone tries to talk to him."

If the million reports of Mark Zuckerberg enabling pedophiles and scam artists haven't made it clear, the executives of these tech companies just don't care. They will sell children into sexual slavery if it improves next quarter's numbers.

The drip-feed of mindless brain-rot, micro-payments, and cyber-bullying should be much higher up the list of reasons for not letting a 7 year old use Roblox (and YouTube and FaceBook and…)

There seems to be a big movement (UK specifically) from governments using age gateing as an excuse to increase surveillance and online tracking. I don't know where Roblox is based or it's policies, but it's likely they are just implementing what the government has forced them to do.

We need to push back against governments that try and restrict the freedom of the internet and educate them on better regulations. Why can sites not dictate the content they provide, then let device providers provide optional parental controls.

Governments forcing companies to upload your passport/ID, upload pictures/videos of your face, is dangerous and we are going to see a huge increase of fraud and privacy breaches, all while reducing our freedoms and rights online.

IMO it should not be hard for large services like Roblox and Instagram to get together with device makers to come up with a sensible solution.

When you create a new profile on Netflix you mark it as "kids" and voila. Devices should have kid profiles with lots of sane defaults. The parent profiles have a thorough monitoring and governance features that are dead simple to use.

As always it's not perfect but it will go a long way. Just getting a majority of parents on sane defaults will help unknot the broader coordination problems.

I see lots of claims about governments using age gating to "track" people, but no evidence. Your last point about uploading ID documents to random online services (which i agree is a privacy risk) would be solved with a government digital ID.

That is never going to happen it seems, as -- in the UK at least -- people go crazy whenever it is mentioned. Despite "the government" having the ability to track whatever they wanted already, should they care to.

Age gating discussions always devolve into some fantasy land were people are arguing for children to have access to porn and other inappropriate material, and happily construct some straw man where age gates lead to censorship for everyone.

If your government wanted to censor the internet they can do it without age gates. As a parent I am happy to have society agree on some basic rules around what children can do online, as there are rules on what children can do in the real world.

Yes, I know all the come back arguments about how it is my responsibility as a parent. Don't worry, I will be responsible for what my children do online when they are older. But in the end a society raises children, and society should agree a limit on what children can be exposed to online.

One aspect of this normalization of photo uploading is that, if a platform allows user-generated content that can splash a modal to kids, a bad actor can do things like say “you need to re-verify or you’ll lose all your in-game currency, go here” and then collect photo identification without even needing to compromise identity verification providers!

I truly fear the harm that will be done before legislators realize what they’ve created. One only hopes that this prevents the EU and US from doing something similar.

I’m sorry to say that a number of US states have instituted age verification laws over the past year

Aka, morality laws mostly.

The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y? Is the harm done significant enough to warrant providing parents with a technical solution for giving them control over which sites their X-aged child signs up, and a solution that like actually works? Obviously pinky-swear "over 13?" checkboxes don't work, so this currently does not exist.

You can work through robustness issues like the one you bring up (photo uploading may not be a good method), we can discuss privacy trade-offs like adults without pretending this is the first time we legitimately need to make a privacy-functionality or privacy-societal need trade-off, etc. Heck, you can come up with various methods where not much privacy needs trading off, something pseudonymous and/or cryptographic and/or legislated OS-level device flags checked on signup and login.

But it makes no sense to jump to the minutiae without addressing the fundamental question.

The real solution, IMO, is a second internet. Domain names will be whitelisted, not blacklisted, and you must submit an application to some body or something.

sounds like an app store

I agree. There were attempts to do something like this with porn sites via the .xxx TLD I believe, but that inverts the problem. Don't force the public to go to a dark alley for their guilty pleasures. Instead, the sites that want to target kids need to be allowlisted. That is much more practical and palatable.

Yeah.. the opposition was just a bad take IMO... "but it will create a virtual red light district" which is EXACTLY what you want online, unlike a physical city, you aren't going to accidentally take a wrong turn, and if you're blocking *.xxx then it's even easier to avoid.

Then require all nudity to be on a .edu, .art or .xxx, problem mostly solved.

> Then require all nudity to be on a .edu, .art or .xxx, problem mostly solved.

Who's doing the requiring here? Sounds like yet another path to censorship dystopia.

In the case of cc-tlds the respective government... In the case of other TLDs ICANN.

edit: .edu provides for educational content, .art for artistic expression, .xxx for explicit content.

Who decides where the art erotica boarder is? There is plenty of content that would straddle that border, I have seen art that could legitimately called pornographic and pornography i would describe as art. Who decides? And then you have prudes Florida Texas red states trying to prevent remove any thing from an .edu and would happily ban the .xxx entirely and would find any .art suspect and probably ban it.

I dont see why phones can't come with a browser that does this. Parents could curate a whitelist like people curate playlists, and share it, and the browser would honor that.

Combined with some blacklisted apps (e.g., all other browsers), this would be a passable opt-in solution. I'm sure there's either a subscription or a small incentive for someone to build this that hopefully isn't "Scam children".

It's not like kids are using PCs, and if they use someone else's phone, that's at least a severely limiting factor.

They do, don’t they? Apple devices have had a robust whitelisting/blacklisting feature for at least a couple of years. I use it to block websites and apps to lessen my phone addiction. I’m sure Android offers similar features

Block -> opt out

Allow -> opt in

And a techie customizing it is v. different than turnkey for parents.

But yeah! Same principle, that's why I'm sure it's been done / will be done.

AOL returns!

It's never been about porn. By marking certain part of the internet "adult-only" you imply that the rest is "family-friendly" and parents can feel less bad about themselves leaving their children with iPads rather than actually parenting them, which is exactly what Big Tech wants for obvious reasons. If I had a child I'd rather have it watch porn than Cocomelon, which has been scientifically developed so that it turns your child's brain into seedless raspberry jam. Yet nobody's talking about the dangers of that, because everyone's occupied with <gasp> titties.

> If I had a child I'd rather have it watch porn than Cocomelon

As a parent that regularly fears who my children will encounter in the world, I’m glad there’s an “if” at the beginning of this sentence.

Don't worry, most likely your children will come across the normal sorts of bad people - cheating partners, bullying peers, abusive bosses, rude customers, lying beggars, maybe robbers and thieves. It's fortunately unlikely they'll meet a guy who is outspoken about his opinion that scientifically capturing people's attention to get them addicted to screens is morally much worse than showing them "penis into vagina episode 74786". We don't want their innocent minds to be poisoned with ideas that question the status quo.

Honestly if internet porn were "penis into vagina episode 74786" I'd have no problem with my kids who are old enough to desire it, to watch it. The problem is that all internet porn I've seen demonstrates undesirable behaviours and attitudes towards sex and towards their partners. Hitting, degradation, homosexuality, sex between family members, harmful body modifications, verbal abuse, etc, are on the front page of every porn site I've looked at. I honestly do not understand how this is supposed to be stimulating.

I have no problem with my kids watching a couple progress from kissing to foreplay to passion, if those kids already have the hormonal desires to experience these acts. But contemporary websites teach that violence is an integral part of sex - and I do not want my children learning this.

If your child wants to watch porn, he/she will be able to get it.

> The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y?

This is only an interesting question if we can prevent it. We couldn't prevent minors from smoking, and that was in a world where you had to physically walk into a store to buy cigarettes. The internet is even more anonymous, remote-controlled, and wild-west. What makes us think we can actually effectively age gate the Internet, where even Nobody Knows You're A Dog (1993)[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

> We couldn't prevent minors from smoking,

Smoking rates among minors have plummeted and continue to decline.

That's not really a good example because the war on underage smoking has been a resounding success.

Yeah we didn't stop every single minor everywhere from ever smoking at any time, but the decline was dramatic.

I'd argue that the reduction of underage smoking has much more to do with things like social acceptability and education about the dangers of smoking, and not about physical controls on the distribution of and access to cigarettes. There also appears to be a recent trend of younger people not drinking alcohol to the extent that my generation and Boomers did, which is wonderful, but probably has nothing to do with physical access to beer.

This is the right way to reduce childhood social media use: Make it socially disgusting, and make it widely known to be dangerous.

Have you met a horny teenager? The war on porn will not be a resounding success.

But we can do age verification that's as strict as buying cigarettes and sacrifice next to no privacy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282 That should be good enough for anyone, unless their real motive is to force everyone to upload their IDs.

> The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y?

I suspect if you ask Hacker News commenters if we should put up any obstacles to accessing social media sites for anyone, a lot of people will tell you yes. The details don't matter. Bashing "social media" is popular here and anything that makes it harder for other people to use is viewed as a good thing.

What I've found to be more enlightening is to ask people if they'd be willing to accept the same limitations on Hacker News: Would they submit to ID review to prove they aren't a minor just to comment here? Or upvote? Or even access the algorithmic feed of user-generated content and comments? There's a lot of insistence that Hacker News would get an exception or doesn't count as social media under their ideal law, but in practice a site this large with user-generated content would likely need to adhere to the same laws.

So a better question might be: Would you be willing to submit to ID verification for the sites you participate in, as a fundamentally good thing for protecting minors from bad content on the internet?

This is a good opportunity to link to the recent archive of Hacker News, for when this happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435308

> The details don't matter.

The details very much DO matter.

You can look at all manner of posts here on HN that explain exactly how you should do age verification without uploading IDs or giving central authority to some untrustworthy entity.

The fact that neither the governments proposing these laws nor the social media sites want to implement them those ways tells you that what these entities want isn't "verification" but "control".

And, yes, most of us object to that.

> You can look at all manner of posts here on HN that explain exactly how you should do age verification without uploading IDs or giving central authority to some untrustworthy entity.

That's not how ID verification works. The ID verification requirements are about associating the person logging in with the specific ID.

So kids borrow their parents' ID while they're not looking, complete the registration process that reveals nothing, then they're good forever.

Or in the scenario where nothing at all is revealed about the ID and there is no central authority managing rate limiting, all it takes is for a single ID to be compromised and then everyone can use it to authenticate everywhere forever.

That's why all of the age verification proposals are basically ID verification proposals. All of these anonymous crypto suggestions wouldn't satisfy those requirements.

> Would you be willing to submit to ID verification for the sites you participate in, as a fundamentally good thing for protecting minors from bad content on the internet?

The friction would be sufficient to give up. Arguably no loss to me and certainly none to the internet.

This is what has happened already, I am not giving my id to some shitty online provider. If I lose more sites so be it.

> Would you be willing to submit to ID verification for the sites you participate

I would not. Because there are better options out there if the objective is purely age verification that's as rigorous as the status quo for buying alcohol or cigarettes.

Here's one option: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282 that I proposed. It is by no means the best or only one.

I would rather parenting be the responsibility of parents and I resent the selfish individuals who wilfully burden others with the various costs associated with their demands for safety from their own choices over taking responsibility for themselves. No impact to others is too great for those who insist anything they don’t wish to be exposed to is dealt with at the societal level.

If an at risk child’s parent is unwilling to do what they believe is the right thing by their child then they have failed the child and need to get a grip - confiscate the device or change the wifi password or sleep with the router under your pillow if you have to it’s really not that hard.

Can we actually prevent children under 16 from buying beer?

Is there actually a difference between transactions between humans in meatspace (getting a government ID, then using it at a store) and age estimation algorithms?

EFF explains a few differences between showing your ID in person and verifying your age online [1]. With respect to transmission, storage, and sharing of user data by the verifier/website, the risks of age estimation overlap with those of age verification.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/why-isnt-online-age-ve...

If they are persistent enough, no. But then everyone knows it's not going to stop every child in every situation. It sets a president for what society thinks is a sensible limit though, and society raises children not just individual families or parents.

Do we want kids becoming alcoholics? Do we want them turning up drunk to school and disrupting classes? Do we want to give parents trying to do the right thing some backup? So they know that when their kid is alone they can expect that other adults set a similar example.

Sure, you can't stop a kid determined to consume alcohol. But I think the societal norm is an overall good thing.

The same should be applied to the online space, kids spend more and more time there. Porn, social media, gambling etc. should be just a much of a concern as alcohol.

We can't prevent all children from getting beer, but we can prevent most of them without compromising any adult's privacy. And everyone is ok with that state of affairs and the trade-offs. No one's calling for internet-connected beer cans that make you take a selfie before you can open them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282

> we can prevent most of them without compromising any adult's privacy

But we don't. Even with in person age/ID checks the clerk will often enter some of that data into the store's system and then who knows what happens with it.

> the clerk will often enter some of that data into the store's system

I've only seen them enter the date of birth. No identifying information. If they record the ID itself I'd recommend going to a different store. Or ideally, writing your legislators to have the practice banned.

Depending on the size of the town, date of birth could be used to severely narrow down and target a specific person.

If one suspects a partner of buying alcohol and could convince or coerse the clerk, or even just peek in the book, and see the partner's date of birth written there, then that is good enough proof for many people and many purposes.

We should end carding for alcohol for everyone because domestic abuse exists?

That's a ridiculous conclusion. Identifying a single problem with an implementation is not a reason to abandon the implementation completely.

It seems to be what you're saying. Otherwise I don't know what the point of your previous comment was.

Nice job of sidestepping the "fundamental question" of whether that can be done and what damage it would do. You do not get to answer the question as you posed it in a vacuum.

It's not a "robustness issue". Nobody has proposed anything that works at all.

But to answer your "fundamental question", no. Age gating is dumb. Giving parents total control is also dumb.

> should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y?

Who's 'we'? The parents? The government? Device manufacturers? Answers should differ wildly depending on who is doing the enforcement.

i call this slipstreaming, it can even occur during the signup yeah, once the bouncing around to many domains / uploading photos is psychologically normalized havoc can ensue. this is the greater evil.

I'm optimistic actually. I think "Gen Alpha" is gonna be alright and sufficiently wary of Internet sharing and privacy. Unlike the previous few generations, esp. Milleneals and to a somewhat lesser extent Gen Z and Boomers, who have massively over-shared and are now reaping some of the horrible harvest that comes from that oversharing. Today's teens and tweens seem to finally be getting the message.

I also actually think AI might be a savior here. The ability to fake realistic 18+ year old selfies might help put the nail in the coffin of these idiotic "share a photo with the Internet" verification methods.

I otherwise agree with what you're saying, but I think the ratio of conscientious people has fluctuated over time across all generations. It has more to do with what year it is than how old they are.

> I truly fear the harm that will be done before legislators realize what they’ve created.

Not defending the legislation as I overwhelmingly disagree with it, but if I recall, I don't think any of the age verification legislation specifies a specific implementation of how to verify age.

Requiring photos, or photo ID, or any other number of methods being employed, were all decided on by the various private companies. All the legislators did is tell everyone "you must verify age." The fault here is on Roblox as much as it is on the legislature and they should equally share blame.

How would you suggest they verify age? I am not aware of a good way to do it from a privacy and security perspective.

You can take a look at what Switzerland is about to do:

https://www.homburger.ch/de/insights/swiss-voters-approve-ne...!

Would be very tough to implement in the US, as proposing any sort of "national ID" is pretty much a nonstarter, at least up to this point.

States could do it, and maybe agree on some protocols so that things like privacy-preserving "age verification" could be done.

Maybe the feds could push it like they did with speed limits: make federal funding contingent upon adopting e-ID. Would still get a lot of pushback.

The problem with e-ID is its focused on identity verification, not just age verification and that's where the problem lies.

We still need the ability to be psuedoanonymous online. We should be able to verify age without divulging any identifying information to the service requesting age verification.

An e-ID registry could work on a sort of public/private key system so long as the services requesting informatino from the registry only receives a yes or no of "is this person old enough" and no further information.

If an e-ID can vouch you are citizen number #3223423, it should be able to use the same crypto to vouch that your birth date predates a threshold, without revealing anything else. It's more a question of requirements gathering & UX (and political will).

It's a problem for you and me, but a feature for those pushing for it.

I'm obviously not going to show my id to Zuckerberg's website or any porn sites, casinos because I don't trust those bastards. They're also not the police, so they lack the proper autoritah to request my an id.

I think the point of the comment you are answering to is that in Switzerland, they are building a system where you can prove your age without telling who you are to the website, and without telling which website you visit to your government.

The government might not know which website exactly, but the fact that you are looking to verify your age is in itself a datum that you might not want the government to know. "Palata was either looking at porn or buying drugs in January 2026" is probably not something you want the government to know, even if the specifics are obscure.

Unless your e-ID app automatically requests 20 age verification tokens for everybody, whether they use them or not.

How are you going to farm the UUID for each user? Or are the IDs sequential?

> Once issued, the e-ID will be stored in a secure digital wallet application on the user’s smartphone or other compatible device.

That sounds like Apple & Google-blessed Android only, open source gadgets and non-Microsoft desktops not supported. Estonia at least used smart cards where a reader can be plugged into just about anything.

It doesn't have to be exclusively digital. You can be psuedoanonymous using some form of key as verification. To get a key, you have to present your ID in person at, for example, the social security office or local DOL.

All the key does is attest that "this person is over X years old" with no other identifying information associated with it.

I think blending in person & digital together is going to be the best way forward. Like going to the store and buying alcohol. I have little privacy risk from the cashier glancing at my ID for a second to check my birth date.

But that would require the government to set up the system that lets you present your ID and get a key. They haven't done that, so it's not valid to blame businesses for not using it.

> with no other identifying information associated with it

Not possible, the key itself becomes identifying information similar to how an IP address + timestamp is identifying information even though their is no information abut you stored in the IP address or timestamp.

  > I have little privacy risk from the cashier glancing at my ID for a second to check my birth date.

Imagine your abusive ex is looking for you. She could go to a few alcohol vendors in the area and tell them "Respectful cashier, I suspect that my husband is reverting back to being an alcoholic. If you see the birthdate 1971-06-21 then please phone me after he leaves".

To which the vender replies "Why on earth would I check if someone over the age of 50 might be under the age of 18 (or 21 in some parts of the world)".

Well, I did have many more recent exes in my early twenties than I do in my fifties.

But also the mechanics of the check might be important. For instance, I always go to take the baby out of the back seat when I park, even though I have not driven a baby in years. Because I do not want to ever risk leaving a baby unattended in a car. The store policy might be to check every ID, even in seemingly obvious cases.

A digital ID, like someone said below. But people (in the UK at least) go mental about that, despite the government already having all the information anyway. Creating a easy way to securely share that information with a 3rd party for online verification is apparently the work of the devil.

In the real world you turn up in person with a passport, or maybe use snail mail as a way to verify an address which is hard to fake.

Online we have to pretend it is still the internet of the 90s where it's all just chill people having a fun time using their handle...

Making it easier tends to lead to something being required more often so people are right to be wary about that.

Every once in a while, eBay emails me out of the blue and asks me to update my personal details, with a link to a web page.

I always assumed they were phishing scams, but I looked closer at one, and it is a real link too a real page on their site. It's like they're training people to fall for phishing scams. One of them even displayed the name of a variable, instead of my user name.

I have had two banks (Lloyds and Barclays) phone me and ask for personal details to verify me over the phone. Again, training people to fall for scams.

Then there are all the links that go to other sites to track clicks or because they have a separate domain for some reason. Again, training people to fall for phishing.

I think the way Roblox is doing right now separating the users in age groups just makes it easier for predators to find victim.

Governments and corporations are never interested in protecting children - they don't vote, and they don't have money. So making it "easier for predators to find victims" is not a failure of the policy.

People who do care about their children or children in general do vote though. Not that politicians care that much about what their voters want once elected.

My kids also know that as far as the internet is concerned, their date of birth is 1 January 1970.

By an amazing coincidence, that's also my date of birth, as well as my kids'.

I wondered for a while why I got so many ads targeted towards seniors when I made my facebook account as a kid. Then I remembered my birth year was set to 1905. I guess I should let the Guinness World Records know that their listing for oldest man in the world is inaccurate.

Having to manage my kids online accounts have been a nightmare. So many different rules, with arbitrary age limits on things that go completely against my own rules for what my kids can do at different ages, with weird methods for linking or verifying or sharing/transferring purchases. I have gotten so frustrated trying to get accounts set up so we can play together.

My favourite is Youtube.

I can get Youtube Family so my kids don't get ads.

But if your kids are under 13, they can't be added to a family account on YT - so they MUST watch the ads.

Can someone explain the logic here?

> She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!)

it's a video game, it's an aesthetic experience, if uploading a photo of yourself doesn't feel good, it's valid to say, it's a bad game or whatever.

but by some more objective criteria, this photo upload thing that you are saying doesn't really matter. they are uploading photos of themselves to the Internet all the time (what do you think Apple Photos is). of course, with kids, i can understand the challenges of making nuanced guidelines, but by that measure, it's simpler to just say, playing roblox is kind of a waste of time, or suggesting better games to play, rather than making it about some feel-good nonsense i'm-a-savvy-Internet-user rule. it's what this whole article is about, providing real answers, but who under 18 years old is going to read the whole thing?

> they are uploading photos of themselves to the Internet all the time

I worried about this at first, too. But I also check, like a good parent. And to my surprise my kid already learned on her own how to mask/blur faces and even details about the inside of her room when sharing photos. And her friends do, too. They are surprisingly savvy about Internet privacy and risks for their age--certainly more cognizant of the dangers than my generation was growing up with the Wild West Internet.

> These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids!

While I agree with you entirely, it's important to remember that these companies want to mis-educate the masses (and especially children) against their own interest. It's not just unfortunate that they're normalising uploading a photo just to play a videogame: it's an intentional choice to de-normalise privacy and normalise deeper and more in-grained online stalking.

Most of these companies don't even want to add age gates. They get in the way of their normal predatory marketing schemes, the little bits of extra data isn't worth it.

Stupid laws are forcing these companies to implement something. In most countries, there is no privacy-preserving way to verify that you're old enough digitally, so when these companies are forced to get something good enough going, they're going to go with the cheapest offer they can legally get away with.

Governments know this. They want certain websites to disappear entirely, and for certain platforms to just stop existing. Both sides are using weaponised incompetence to blame the other and users end up losing regardless of whose fault it is.

The funniest case I've seen was somebody fooling one of these tools using Gmod by playing with the face sliders of those stock Half-Life characters.

But I also don't want the alternative, that I have to ID myself. Anonymous and pseudonymous access is the best solution.

The EU tries to introduce age verification, simultaneously it currently talks about sharing police data with the US for the Visa waiver program.

If this verification data is collected and normalised, we will constantly have to fight how much data that is required for auth and it can just be legislated.

>If Google can guess your age, you may never even see an age verification screen. Your Google account is typically connected to your YouTube account, so if (like mine) your YouTube account is old enough to vote, you may not need to verify your Google account at all.

This has been proven false a bunch of times, at least if the 1000s of people complaining online about it are to be believed. My google account is definitely old enough to vote, but I get the verification popup all the time on YouTube.

I think the truth is, they just want your face. The financial incentive is to get as much data as possible so they can hand it to 3rd parties. I don't believe for a second that these social networks aren't selling both the data and the meta data.

My Google account is more than 18 years old and I hit an age prompt when I was trying to watch some FPGA video (out of all things). So no, account age is not necessarily a factor.

Field programmable gatorade is an adult-only beverage.

Yeah, they could/*should* infer your age just by the fact you're watching an FPGA video

I would have watched those at 10 if the internet was a thing when I was 10. I think most people here would have. (I may or may not have understood it, but I would have tried)

They probably need to account for parents allowing kids to use their account, so account age can be a factor but not an automatic pass.

One result of a US fine was making it clear that adults letting kids use their accounts is still a legal problem: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/...

Note that this is adults letting kids use their accounts to view kids content, as the issue was parental approval for ad tracking.

Parents allowing kids to use their account is a problem with any current approach.

Can't allow any underage synthesis.

That makes sense. Golf has a minimum age of 35.

Did you hear they are letting kids play pickleball these days! How scandalous.

> I think the truth is, they just want your face.

Agreed. They treat people as data points and cash cows. This is also one reason why I think Google needs to be disbanded completely. And the laws need to be returned back to The People; right now Trump is just the ultimate Mr. Corporation guy ever. Lo and behold, ICE reminds us of a certain merc-like group in a world war (and remember what Mussolini said about fascism: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." - of course in italian, but I don't know the italian sentence, only the english translation)

They definitely already have your face though…

From where? Not everyone even puts selfies on the Internet.

Honestly, it's probably already happening, but I would not be surprised if retail stores that check your ID also have cameras snaping your face and selling that to data brokers.

Anything you can image that is bad with privacy, figure what is occurring is far worse.

If you’re 99.9% of people this isn’t even a reasonable question to ask because the answer is so obvious. If you’re the final 0.01%, they still will have it, just from when you last went anywhere with surveillance ever.

The more examples in various situations they can get, the higher their accuracy.

They definitely already have enough accuracy.

I agree they want the face data, but I think it's less clear they want to "hand it" (presumably that's really "sell it"?) to third parties. My sense is Google and Apple and Meta are amassing data for their own uses, but I haven't gotten the impression they're very interested in sharing it?

They’ll do whatever makes money.

Sell it and use it internally.

you are correct. having that data is one of their competitive advantages, it makes no sense to sell it. they will collect as much as possible and monetize it through better ads, but they don't sell it

Sharing it is bad for business; selling insights derived from it for ad placement is the game. Faces definitely contain some useful information for that purpose.

Then you have not been paying attention for the past decade, I'm afraid...

Ed Snowden revealed that these companies share their data with the US government:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

also, even you think about using it "their own uses" - much of that is scrutinizing you to make you better susceptible to ads and other solicitations by their paying clients. I mean, people are not the clients of Google and Meta - they're the raw material.

your links don't disprove OP's main point at all. being forced to share data to the government is different than actively collecting data to sell to other third parties. these companies have tons of incentive to collect user data, but very little to sell it. i think that nuance is important to understand. if you think i'm wrong, try going to facebook or google and asking to buy some user data. you cannot.

I haven't gotten it yet on my account from 2006. Maybe it matters whether it's a brand account? Maybe it matters whether the accounts actually are connected?

well as long as it's you logging in, they know you are minimum 20 years old!

As opposed to a child uploading a selfie of an adult on a new account.

I wrote an April Fool's parody in 2021 that Google is going to get rid of authentication because they're following you around enough to know who you are anyway (modeling it after their No Captcha announcement[1]):

http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2021/04/leaked-google-init...

Edit:

>I think the truth is, they just want your face.

I just realized the parody also predicted that part (emphasis added):

>>In cases where our tracking cookies and other behavioral metrics can't confidently predict who someone is, we will prompt the user for additional information, increasing the number of security checkpoints to confirm who the user really is. For example, you might need to turn on your webcam or upload your operating system's recent logs to give a fuller picture.

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introd...

I just got glasses yesterday and the optician needed to take a pic of my face to "make sure my glasses fit". The first thing I thought of was they are probably selling the data.

just say no thank you, i will manage like everyone else has for decades.

else you and your money go elsewhere.

I think the reality is a lot less nefarious. They don't want your face. But they also don't care enough to not take your face. Why would Google spend lobbying and legal money trying to fight this requirement when it doesn't hurt their bottom line? On the other hand, requirements like storing ID cards does hurt their bottom line because it means:

1. they need additional security measures to avoid leaking government documents (leaking face photos doesn't hurt them as much) 2. not every person has a valid government document 3. additional customer support staff to verify the age on documents rather than just using some fuzzy machine learning model with "good enough" accuracy.

The bottom line is that companies are lazy and will do the easiest thing to comply with regulations that don't hurt them.

This comes across as incredibly paranoid. Most places use 3rd party age verification anyway. They're following the law/playing safe with the law in certain countries, and it's just easier to apply it everywhere.

I believe YouTube got hit with some EU compliance law at some point. My Google account was old enough to vote but I still had to verify it to watch certain YouTube videos. They put a one cent reservation on my credit card IIRC, no need to actually upload ID.

It happened right after ElsaGate, so they probably went overboard to cover for the weird shit happening on their platform. YouTube is full of pedo farms and weird porn if you know where to look for it, so they need something to point at so they can shout "look, we tried!"

I’ve noticed that many people struggle to simply let things go. Take a hypothetical case where HN requires ID verification. I'd just stop using HN, even if that meant giving up checking tech news. Sometimes things end, and that's fine.

I used to watch good soccer matches on public TV. When services like DAZN appeared, only one major match was available each weekend on public TV. Later, none were free to watch unless you subscribed to a private channel. I didn't want to do that, so I stopped watching soccer. Now I only follow big tournaments like the World cup, which still air on public TV (once every 4 years).

Sometimes you just have to let things go

Funny, I'm the opposite. Since information wants to be free, and storage/compute get more affordable every year, then really everything ever posted on the web should be mirrored somewhere, like Neocities.

I grew up in the 80s when office software and desktop publishing were popular. Arguably MS Access, FileMaker and HyperCard were more advanced in some ways than anything today. There was a feeling of self-reliance before the internet that seems to have been lost. To me, there appears to be very little actual logic in most websites, apps and even games. They're all about surveillance capitalism now.

Now that AI is here, I hope that hobbyists begin openly copying websites and apps. All of them. Use them as templates and to automate building integration tests. Whatever ranking algorithm that HN uses, or at least the part(s) they haven't disclosed, should be straightforward to reverse engineer from the data.

That plants a little seed in the back of every oligopoly's psyche that ensh@ttification is no longer an option.

If "information wants to be free," doesn't that cut both ways? It applies equally to the personal data that I don't want to upload to an age gate as it does to the information that people want to keep behind an age gate.

One persons age is a data point.

Everyone’s age is information.

Data doesn’t want to be free.

> I’ve noticed that many people struggle to simply let things go

Because it's not always about their entertainment. I know churches that post info about events only on WhatsApp groups, if you don't use it - you're screwed. I know kindergardens which use Facebook Messenger groups to send announcements to their parents' children - if you don't use it, you will miss important info.

For most people, letting go such things is very impractical. One can try to persuade for a better way to do something - but then you become the problem.

People need to be more comfortable being the problem more often. Even if people actually use these solutions, they're almost always suboptimal anyway. We shouldn't be relying on them the way we do.

Or to flip it on its head, be the solution. If a church or some other activity is requiring Whatsapp, then come up with a better alternative that does more than Whatsapp ever could.

I've tried this. It's hard to get people to switch platforms when they don't perceive any major existing problems with their current platform.

My neighborhood that I'm on the HOA board for has been entirely on a facebook group. When I joined, I made sure that we communicate all necessary communication via email (for others like me not in the group or on FB). I created a website for the neighborhood that does everything the FB group does and more, but people don't see a reason to visit another website when FB has everything they want, so they still only engage on Facebook.

I'm okay with being the problem (green bubbles are a whole nother thing for friends and family), but without sufficient pressure to switch, people generally prefer what they're comfy with.

I guess this means a return to websites.

I have a similar problem, I do swing dancing and all the information for dances in my area are exclusively posted on Facebook by a wide variety of people who are putting on the dances. I can try and go to each individual organizing a dance and try and get them off Facebook, but that's making their job harder when we've already had lots of people stop organizing events post-COVID, and the system they have now seems to really work for getting new people into dancing that haven't done it before with lots of new faces each dance. So I just go along with it.

It's probably a good idea to let church go in 2026 too.

A lot of small towns are like this too - no website, posting only to Facebook. I suppose they figure it's better than nothing, which maybe is true on some level.

Many people don’t struggle to let privacy go.

I get the impression that you purposely misunderstood. Parent suggested to evaluate if you can let go of the anti-privacy service. E.g. stop using YouTube not the way you worded it.

My point is that it’s not about the inability to “simply” let things go in general, as the wording suggests throughout the comment. That’s too simplistic. It matters which things we are talking about, or in other words, which things people care more about.

I’m not advocating letting go of privacy, just addressing the reality of how people make choices.

My main concern is that there isn't a reliable way to know your information is securely stored[0].

> A few years ago, I received a letter in the mail addressed to my then-toddler. It was from a company I had never heard of. Apparently, there had been a breach and some customer information had been stolen. They offered a year of credit monitoring and other services. I had to read through every single word in that barrage of text to find out that this was a subcontractor with the hospital where my kids were born. So my kid's information was stolen before he could talk. Interestingly, they didn't send any letter about his twin brother. I'm pretty sure his name was right there next to his brother's in the database.

> Here was a company that I had no interaction with, that I had never done business with, that somehow managed to lose our private information to criminals. That's the problem with online identity. If I upload my ID online for verification, it has to go through the wires. Once it reaches someone else's server, I can never get it back, and I have no control over what they do with it.

All those parties are copying and transferring your information, and it's only a matter of time before it leaks.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/your-id-online-and-offline

Honestly that main concern should be two main concerns.

You/your kid/your wife goes to hàckernews.com and is prompted for age verification again, evidently the other information has expired based on the message. So they submit their details. Oops, that was typosquatting and now who the hell knows has your information. Good luck.

Exactly. Everything "private" that you post online will become public eventually.

Everyone says "we only store the data temporarily and it's deleted right after" including everyone who didn't do that and got hacked.

But I think we're far too late into this issue by now.

It's 2026 and we still don't have a way to know if our passwords are being stored in a secure way in their databases. What hope do we have to know about how our photos are being handled?

I'm surprised that the EFF does not highlight the best option, here: use a VPN to a jurisdiction that doesn't have such ridiculous laws.

It might be bad for an activist group to advocate just ignoring the problem into a different jurisdiction.

They could sell it as "if your IP geolocation is inaccurate, or if the statute does not apply to you."

But FWIW VPNs can get flagged for suspicious behavior. YMMV

In many cases, using a VPN is a great way to get your account flagged as suspicious.

Care to share more details about this? Which account? What do you mean by “suspicious”? What specific effects does this have?

I use a VPN 24/7 on one machine. Zero issues even with banking, although sometimes I have to answer CAPTCHAs.

Your VPN provider shares their IP lists publicly. For a lot of website owners, blocking those is a simple way of getting rid of 80% of spam.

And yet I don’t get blocked. Curious.

Some sites block or offer a degraded experience for VPN traffic. This happens occasionally when I use Mullvad.

Some examples: Imgur loads but does not display any content. USPS's website does not load.

Now that I think about it USPS is the one place I get blocked. Still, it seems like people facing an age gate should be able to circumvent it without much hassle on a regular basis.

What VPN?! Proton literally doesn’t work on anything

Then more people need to use a VPN!

Next step: the same government that is demanding the age verification will ban VPNs.

Everyone seems to forget that using VPNs to violate your local laws gives lots of good ammo to the authoritarians that want to ban VPNs. The answer isn't to use a VPN to get around it (and thus give fodder to your enemies) but to change the law.

While I agree with this in spirit, here in the UK both major parties along with the public at large generally support these types of laws.

Two of the major parties support it, but it's not entirely obvious how much public support there is; it's not most people's top issue, and it's easy to make polls say what you want depending on the question you ask.

You'd get different answers if, for instance, you ask "do you want to have to show ID or submit a picture of your face in order to access many sites on the Internet".

The entire concept of public support breaks down when the majority of the public doesn't actually know what a VPN is.

I'm not sure there'd be much of a difference because the British people are broadly speaking a rather paternalistic society.

I would guess the vast majority of parents support these laws. They are disgusted with the social media platforms who shrug and pretend they are just dumb pipes when it comes to filth, predators, and harmful content, while at the same time keeping users engaged with addictive algorithms and tracking everything every user does and knowing everything about them.

I sincerely doubt that the average UK (or US, or French, or German) citizen even knows what a VPN is beyond "that thing you sign in to for porn," let alone knows enough about it to have an informed opinion on the laws surrounding them.

Neither does the average politician, so where exactly is the impetus for changing the law going to come from?

But it's easier to ask a relative few ISPs to block VPNs than it is to police the behavior of millions of individuals.

Not especially feasible if you want to support businesses. More likely is trying to demand that VPNs also enforce age verification, which business-targeted VPNs might do, and then ban the ones that don't.

I doubt this would be workable.

They could, sadly, however, make it a crime to bypass things like The Online Safety Bill. Downloading or using Tor, for example.

At that point, the only sane option is to become a criminal.

Yep.

> For example, in 2025, Wisconsin lawmakers escalated their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN. Another proposed Michigan bill requires “An internet service provider providing internet service in this state [to] actively monitor and block known circumvention tools.” Circumvention tools being: VPNs.

https://www.eff.org/pages/vpns-are-not-solution-age-gating-m...

The days are numbered on this technique working. After enough countries enact their own age verification laws tech companies will just make that the global default policy, and I'm sure the opportunity to harvest user data will not be left to waste. Many sites already block and throttle VPNs.

When that day comes I'll stop casually using the internet or search for the underground alternative.

I think EFF does not recommend for or against VPN in general because it's not always a clear win, depending on the VPN and the use case.

https://ssd.eff.org/module/choosing-vpn-thats-right-you

"Give up" is not the best option. Certainly not from the EFF's perspective.

I mean, the best option is to fight this legislation, and AIUI they're doing that too. But this article is not about that, it's about how to minimize the harm if you encounter it.

VPNs are increasingly useless, with Cloudflare in front of 80% of the public net. I always wonder if people giving this advice try it themselves, most major sites are unusable with a common VPN provider.

I have never clicked "accept" on a cookie banner, as a matter of principle; I zap them away with uBlock Origin. Should the plague of age verification reach my jurisdiction, I'm sure I will handle it in like fashion.

The difference is that the cookie banner is not a gate. uBlock Origin is unlikely to be able to satisfy a website about your age without submitting the info that the site expects. (Assuming the age check has any teeth at all.) You're unlikely to be able to continue as usual if these kinds of measures become ubiquitous.

Zapping only works if the site lets you continue/pull content without verification.

I expect I'll need to employ some other technical means of circumvention, but the principle of refusing to engage with the thing on its own terms will remain the same.

These things are integrated into the authentication systems of these services. They aren't implemented client side. Refusing to engage with them means you cannot use the service.

Then it wasn't meant to be. Let it go.

Fun and games until your government makes getting access to the internet at all work that way.

The problem there is when it's inescapable, on every site.

ignoring the banner is the same as agreeing to all the opt-out "legitimate interest" shit

This makes me wonder if there's a business case for a privacy-preserving identity service which does age verification. Say you have a strong identity provider that you have proven your age to. Just as the 3rd party site could use SSO login from your identity provider, perhaps the identity provider could provide signed evidence to the 3rd party site that asserts "I have verified that this person is age X" but not divulge their identity. Sidestep the privacy issue and just give the 3rd party site what they need to shield them from liability.

The question is: why would services like Google and others want to use such privacy-preserving identity solutions? They wouldn't gain anything from a non-invasive, user-friendly system, so I don't think they'd use it. They want more data, so they are going for it.

I was thinking someone like Auth0 might want to offer it. They are not in the business of invasive user tracking but are in the business of trust.

Considering that Google is releasing open source software they developed to facilitate such systems [1], apparently they are OK with the idea.

It could simply be that they realize that online age verification becoming required for some online activities is inevitable for the same reasons age checks are required for some non-online activities, and when that comes to pass they want to be able to do in a way that doesn't expose them to too much risk.

Yes, Google loves data but that doesn't mean they don't care about risk. The data they would from some of the age verification methods probably wouldn't improve their ability to advertise much but would cause a lot of problems if leaked.

Another possibility might be that have no choice. My understanding is that in the EU member states that enact online age verification laws will have to require that verification can be done using the privacy-preserving system that the EU Digital Identity Wallet will support. Sites will be able to use other methods too (as long as the don't violate GDPR) so they could support something that gives them more information for advertising, but they will still have to support the privacy-preserving option.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390

> The question is: why would services like Google and others want to use such privacy-preserving identity solutions? They wouldn't gain anything from a non-invasive, user-friendly system, so I don't think they'd use it. They want more data, so they are going for it.

Consumer pressure and/or laws

The article does go into this and gives lip service to the idea that a secure third party could expose age without exposing identity. Ultimately, there's still the problem that even if point of verification can be done in a zero trust way, you are still entrusting very sensitive information to a third party which is subject to data breach.

If you do it right the only sensitive information exposed to the age gated site is that your age is above their threshold.

The party that actually has to at some point verify who you really are of course has your sensitive information, and there is no obvious way to work around that. However, there is a way to make it so that it doesn't matter.

That is by making them be a party that already has that information. Probably the simplest would be to make it be the same government agency that issues your physical identity documents like passports or drivers licenses. If we don't want it to be a government agency or we want to have competition banks would be a possibility.

I’ve been noodling on this idea for a while but I think getting commercial acceptance would be hard. People have tried it with crypto albeit with lukewarm results. I think to have the network effects required to be successful in such an endeavor, it would have to come from a vendor like apple or google unfortunately.

You kind of want an mTLS for the masses with a chain of trust that makes sense.

mTLS is no good because the target service could then uniquely identify you. I think you explicitly want a three-party scheme where the target service just accepts the idp's assertion about your age in a cryptographically secure way.

I feel like mTLS could still work in third-party signing.

This is how Swiss e-ID was proposed to work: https://www.eid.admin.ch/en

Yes. In fact the 3rd party doesn't even need to know who you are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282

That's quite an elaborate system. It goes through a lot of gyrations (not the least of which is inventing a whole new type of crime and passing laws about it) and doesn't sound even as strong as the age verification "required" to buy cigarettes in the US. I'd think "welcome to pornhub. Either log in or do Privacy-enhanced Age Verification by Auth0 (TM)" would be a lot easier to get off the ground.

> not the least of which is inventing a whole new type of crime and passing laws about it

They're already writing laws about age verification. Tacking this onto a bill in progress would be the way to do it.

As for the other "gyrations", selling age-restricted products IRL is already done. Gift cards and the infrastructure for them is well-established. Most importantly, this is something a regular person on the street can understand. This is vital for capturing the "save the children" vote.

Or simply the connectivity provider, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46627433>.

I'm more interested in a business that reliably provides fraudulent IDs to services that unnecessarily want IDs that I cannot avoid for some reason.

You've almost got it right. You just need to modify this part:

> Just as the 3rd party site could use SSO login from your identity provider, perhaps the identity provider could provide signed evidence to the 3rd party site that asserts "I have verified that this person is age X" but not divulge their identity

The way you compared it so SSO login makes it sounds like there would be interaction between the 3rd party site and the identity provider. That's bad because if someone got a hold of the records from both the site and the identity provider they might be able to match access time logs and figure out who you are.

A fix is to make it so you get your signed document from the identity provider ahead of time, and that document is not tied to doing age verification with any particular site(s). You get it once and then use it with as many sites as you want.

When you use it with a site to demonstrate age we need to do that in such a way that neither of you have to communicate with the identity provider. If the site needs to verify a signature of the identity provider on something you present they use the provider's previously published public key.

We need to make it so that when you use the signed document from the identity provider to show your age to a site they don't see enough from the document to identify you, even if they have been compromised and are collaborating with the identity provider to try to identify you.

Finally, the signed document should be bound to you in some way so that you can't just make copies and give them to others or sell them on the black market to people who want to evade age checks.

BTW, since under this approach the identity provide isn't actively involved after their issue your signed document what probably makes the most sense is to have your government be the identity provider. In particular, the same agency that issues your driver's license or passport or nation ID (if your country has those).

Such a system can in fact be built. The EU is including one in their EU Digital Identity Wallet project, which has been in development for several years and is not undergoing large scale field testing in several countries. It is supposed to be deployed to the public this year or next.

The first version handles the binding of the document to you by tying it to your smart phone's hardware security element. They plan to later support other types of hardware security elements. 90+% of adults in the EU have smart phones (95-98% for adults under 54), and it is going up, so the first version will already cover most cases.

Google has published some libraries for implementing a similar system. Both the Google libraries and the EU system are open source.

> That's bad because if someone got a hold of the records from both the site and the identity provider they might be able to match access time logs and figure out who you are

I see your point, but this doesn't sound like an actual risk to me. The idp will have security as one of their critical features and should be considered trustworthy in this regard. And having *both* the target site logs *and* the idp logs compromised is even more far-fetched. We aren't sitting around worrying about people correlating ISP logs to pornhub logs, and I don't trust my ISP any farther than I can throw them.

The beauty of using an SSO-style scheme is that one could actually see it easily slotting in as a subset of existing protocols. The site could get a SAML doc and the only claims it has in it are "user is over 18", for example. Use the infrastructure for exactly what it's designed for: identifying some selection of attributes that describe a person. It's very elegant and leverages existing well-understood (and well-integrated) tech plumbing.

This also takes all the sensitive data handling out of the hands of social media mongers and pornographers. Let them do what they're good at and let the competent security folks handle the sensitive bits.

What's ... boggled me about this issue since forever is that:

1. Most people access online content through either a personal or business broadband service (residential, mobile, or place-of-work).

2. Those services ... bill directly. Which means that it should be possible to specify an age preference for the service account as a whole, and/or subsets of it. The service can specify whether or not age-bounded online services are acceptable or not, as well as specific classes of age-bounded services. E.g., a workplace service would generally allow for >18 access, but might restrict usage of gaming, gambling, pr0n, or related sites. A household might request no age gating at all (all >18 or whatever minimum age is mandated) or several classes of service, say, if adults and children are present.

3. Where it's necessary to specify multiple preferences, multiple network segments could provide this logically (e.g., an IPv6 block with unrestricted and age-gated ranges), with distinct devices being allocated appropriate gateway addresses.

4. Effectively, the connectivity provider then attests for age, without requiring any finer-grained identity disclosure.

Why ...

A. Would this not work?

B. Is it not being generally proposed?

To be blunt, because it sounds insane and simultaneously solving the problem at the wrong abstraction level, and based on criteria that have nothing to do with age. Age-based IP ranges? This sounds like a recipe for reinventing the entire internet in a non-backwards-compatible way. Networks are not people. Why would we treat the network as your identity?

What strikes you as unreasonable?

What I'm suggesting for different service levels is simply to map a specified access / age-verification level to a specific network access point. This is better suited to IPv6 which has a much larger address space than IPv4, and often allocates a range of addresses rather than a single IP, though NAT or IP shenanigans might be possible for the latter as well.

The point is to put the heavy lifting of age validation at a level at which who is getting the service has already been vouched through service account provisioning.

It's less that there is something unreasonable sounding about it and more that there's almost nothing that sounds reasonable about it. It's like you suggested that instead of setting speed limits, we directly tie the maximum speed of a car to how far the driver's seat is from the steering wheel.

First, I believe that age verification is coming, whether we want it or not. It is completely accepted to ask for an ID before entering a night club or buying alcohol, there is no way "people" will be convinced that it is unreasonable to do that for social media and porn. It is coming, period.

So the question is really: what is the best way to implement it?

* I find the "buying a gift card at a store" idea interesting: the seller checks your ID and gives you a gift card.

* I find the digital idea with privacy preservation interesting, too: the government already knows about me. If they can give me a token that only reveals my age, and I can use that token without revealing to the government where I used the token, then it works.

I think the EFF's stance on this is: "but some people will have issues using that technology". I would like to know how many people that is, and why we couldn't imagine a way to help them?

I thought the article was about finding a job when you reach a certain age, which is my problem.

Yeah, I didn't notice where the article was located at first, and I thought that's what it was going to be about also.

Isn't age guesstimation by appearance, even with advanced machine learning techniques, even if attempted by real person with honest effort, just total snake oil? This ongoing age verification push with weird emphasis on generating name-face pairs is beyond fishy.

If we truly need age gates on the internet, then I think the best method is to have non-internet based age verification. I envisage going to a local shop and buying something like a gift-card that the shops only sell to adults (c.f. tobacco sales in the UK). That way, the gift-card code would be the only information required to upload to websites to prove that you're an adult and existing legislation could cover the shops requirements to not sell them to minors.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282 I had the same idea

I don't see why they'd need to expire after a time, but I think the purchaser should be able to revoke the code if they lose it if they particularly care. A least with it being a simple age verification system, there shouldn't be any worry about someone stealing your code as it shouldn't be linked to any accounts.

It prevents resale. Also additional friction for a minor who manages to illicitly obtain a code.

I don't see too much of an issue with resales - it's like if an adult buys booze for someone underage which can't really be prevented.

My issue with having them expire is that people would have around 70 years of proving their age whilst minors only need to be prevented from accessing websites for up to 18 years (more likely just 10 years or so).

Ok sure. I don't have a strong opinion on that either way.

I'm 32 and submitted a photo of myself for age verification on Instagram and Threads. Was promptly banned, with no resource.

I do look a little younger than 32, due to a healthy lifestyle and religious use of sunscreen but I have a beard and moustache. It's a little insane that I was instantly banned with no way to move forward.

OpenAI uses AI to scan your ChatGPT conversations to determine your age. And even though I've been using ChatGPT for mostly work-related stuff, it has identified me, a man in my 40s, as under 18 and demanded government ID to prove my age. No thank you.

If my options are upload a picture of myself for Google to monetize through ads or not use Google / Youtube then I will be moving on regardless of the inconvenience to myself.

There were some amusing headlines a while back about Discord's verification being fooled with game screenshots. Does anyone know if that's still the case?

saw a recent screenshot of someone doing it yesterday, so I think it still is a thing.

Is there a throwaway identity that people are using? A dead person unchecked in Mississippi somewhere? Like every teen in America using the same identity like everyone's extended family does with their uncle's Netflix account?

I don't want to google it because I don't want to be put on a list but I also feel somewhat confident that this is being done. Apparently, HN feels safe to ask questions like that for me.

That’s an interesting question.

Actually, a follow up. PII leaks are so common, I guess there must be millions of identities out there up for grabs. This makes me wonder: we’ve got various jurisdictions where sites are legally required to verify the age of users. And everybody (including the people running these sites) knows that tons of identities are out there on the internet waiting to be used.

How does a site do due diligence in this context? I guess just asking for a scan of somebody’s easily fabricated ID shouldn’t be sufficient legal cover…

These ID laws typically require a solution to be "commercially practical" or similar. The standard is not "impenetrable and impossible to circumvent"

That's why some of them don't even ask for ID but just guess the age based on appearance. That's good enough per the law, usually.

It would probably flag that multiple people are using the same photo or same persons name/ id, but I expect you could get away with doing using someone known to you. iirc the reason people are using game screenshots is because it's not going to match any image that the recogniser has seen before. Use tor for the things you don't want to google and have associated with you.

Last time I tried I could find a photo ID just with a basic image search. It is an unavoidable consequence of teaching people that scanning an ID is not utterly insane.

Ironically there was no way to report the image anonymously to the service hosting it.

Netflix has been checking accounts against public IP addresses and local networks for ages, at least in The Netherlands. if I use my Dad's account, I get flagged as being "not on the same home network" immediately. I think that using a VPN and Netflix detecting that would only make matters worse, like termination of service.

I gave up on netflix years ago for unrelated reasons but never had any sort of issue both VPNing between various countries and traveling between them. My wife would pretty regularly want to watch netflix as if she was in Japan or the UK and so we'd turn a VPN on for the TV network and their own TV app never complained at all that it was suddenly on a different continent.

> I don't want to google it because I don't want to be put on a list

Of all the controversial things out there we've become afraid to even google in order to learn more about the world around us, this one strikes me as not all that controversial.

But you're not wrong, just making a comment about how sad the world has become.

>I don't want to google it because I don't want to be put on a list

You might think about using something like the Tor Browser for anonymous web surfing:

https://www.torproject.org/download/

...If you are worried about getting on a list by downloading the Tor browser, then take a trip to the next-town-over public library and download it from there. I guess your ISP could still guess that you were using Tor, and you might end up on a list of people using Tor. Also: If everyone is on the list, then no one is on the list.

Either the platform is trying to age-gate anonymously, in which case it is likely you (or your child) can just circumvent that with fake details; or it's some corporation with ongoing access to large government databases, and probably the government can tap the data it collects in some ways, and you (or your child) should probably be worried about being there in the first place.

If this is about porn or other content deemed age-sensitive, the moment it becomes difficult to source through "official," mainstream platforms, the content will move underground (P2P networks), making it even more difficult to analyze and regulate. So this is a very shortsighted move.

To be fair, this is sort of pitting two policy objectives against each other, preventing children from accessing pornography meant for adults on one hand and preventing the distribution of pornography illegal in all cases (e.g. revenge porn, CSAM) on the other. Reasonable people can disagree on which is more important and which should take priority (though I would agree that the latter should take priority)

It's hard to read this article when nearly 50% of my screen is a subscription to their newsletter. Plus, at my screen size, I can't even view all the related issues/tags underneath it without scrolling to the bottom of the article.

>should I continue to use this service if I have to verify my age?

Simple answer, never accept this If everyone selected "cancel" you can be sure these sites will stop age banning, they wan $ more than anything else.

If a site asks me one question about me, I stop using if.

States need to stop sniffing for age really. This is age discrimination.

Basically every government on the planet has laws that apply specifically to children. The term "age discrimination" typically refers to disadvantaging someone for being of old age.

It is very easy to lie about age through age gates. I have yet to find one that is actually able to get strong proof of age, fake IDs are easy to upload.

How well does the selfie test detect AI-generated photos? That seems easy to bypass, especially if you copy the metadata over from a real photo.

The ones I have used do not accept photos, they require real-time video with the front-facing camera and they prompt you to move your head to face different directions on command. Not impossible to attack, I'm certain, but it's tougher than simply uploading a photo.

on desktops you can have virtual camera, if you can generate video fast enough wen AI you can ask to edit it according to instructions. Definitely tougher but I'm sure someone will offer services or software like that.

Face scan: download and install Gary's mod.

> Even though there’s no way to implement mandated age gates in a way that fully protects speech and privacy rights

I think the EFF would have more success spreading their message if they didn't outright lie in their blog posts. While cryptographic digital ID schemes have their problems (which they address below), they do fully protect privacy rights. So do extremely simple systems like selling age-verification scratchcards in grocery stores, with the same age restrictions as cigarettes or alcohol.

> So do extremely simple systems like selling age-verification scratchcards in grocery stores

Which stores sell age-verification scratchcards? How do you make sure they can't be traced back to the person who paid for them or where they were purchased from? How would a website know the person using the card is the same person who paid for them? It may be a simple system, but it still sounds ineffective, dangerous, and unnecessary.

> Which stores sell age-verification scratchcards?

Stores that sell other age-restricted products.

> How do you make sure they can't be traced back to the person who paid for them

How would they be traced? Pay cash. I've never had my ID scanned or recorded when I buy alcohol. And now I look old enough that I don't even have to show ID.

If someone can trace the store they're bought from and you're that paranoid, rotate between stores. Buy them from a third-party. Drive to another state and buy them there. So many options.

> How would a website know the person using the card is the same person who paid for them?

They don't. How does Philip Morris know the person who bought the cigarettes is the same person lighting up? It's clearly not that important when selling actual poisons so why would it matter for accessing a website? The system works well enough to keep most kids from smoking.

Rate-limit sales in a store (one per visit) and outlaw selling or transferring them to a minor (same penalties as giving alcohol or tobacco to a child). Require websites to implement one code per account policies with a code TTL of 6 months or a year, and identify and disallow account sharing. It's Good Enough verification with nearly perfect anonymity.

> Stores that sell other age-restricted products.

So far, I've never seen an age verification scratch card sold anywhere

> How would they be traced?

Your ID is collected at retail and its barcode scanned along with a barcode on the card, your personal data and card ID get uploaded to a server operated by the entity that created the cards and/or the state. ID barcode scan can be replaced or used alongside facial recognition, data collected (directly or passively) from your cell phone, your credit card info, etc. Even just being able to link a used card back to the time/place it was purchased could be enough to ID someone and put them at risk.

> It's clearly not important when selling actual poisons so why would it matter for social media?

The main difference is that I can't upload 1 million cigarettes to the internet for anyone of any age to anonymously download and smoke, but I could upload a spreadsheet of 1 million unredeemed scratch off codes to the internet for anyone to use. It seems highly likely that codes would get sold, shared online, generated, or leaked which means cards would be ineffective at keeping children from using them.

Why should we be okay with jumping through a bunch of hoops that don't even do what they're supposed to in the first place while costing us money and opening ourselves up to new risks in the process? I reject the premise that proving my identity to a website is necessary let alone being worth the costs/risks. Scratch cards seem likely to fail at being private or effective. Of course, "Think of the children" is really only the excuse. Surveillance and control is the real motivation and any system that doesn't meet that goal is doomed to be replaced by one that does.

> I've never seen an age verification scratch card sold anywhere

It isn't something that exists today.

> Your ID is collected at retail...

You know perfectly well I already addressed that whole argument in my original comment. I know you're philosophically opposed to age verification (a perfectly valid opinion), but that's no reason to tear down strawmen.

If you care at all, here's the proposal in full: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282

> Even just being able to link a used card back to the time/place it was purchased could be enough to ID someone

Even when close to every adult is buying them every year? Doubt. But in any case also addressed with alternatives in my original comment.

> I could upload a spreadsheet of 1 million unredeemed scratch off codes to the internet

You can't, for the same reason you can't just get unsold gift card codes on the internet.

> I reject the premise that proving my identity to a website is necessary

Again, a valid and reasonable position. But how long will the internet continue to operate like that?

> Of course, "Think of the children" is really only the excuse. Surveillance and control is the real motivation

Also mostly correct. Now I don't think children should be on social media. Whether or not there's a government ban, I'll do my best to keep my kids off it. The spooks are taking advantage of "save the children" voters to advance their own agenda. If it's possible to satisfy the "save the children" crowd, without violating anyone's privacy, then the spooks lose their support.

The alternative is to sit around as age gates get thrown up and you have to upload your passport to do anything.

> So far, I've never seen an age verification scratch card sold anywhere

Because it was an idea. Something that is not implemented yet, but could be interesting.

Buying alcohol is nothing like getting an anonymous token that grants the right to a Google account.

This is equivalent to saying you either need to be over 16 or have a parents permission which will not work for any number reasons that someone else can enumerate.

It's a nice idea. Won't work.

Why won't it work?

So a parent gets some joy knowing their kid is running around in the sun and not being the object of some Internet predator. If some kids have Internet suddenly your kid is bugging you 16 hours a day to unlock their access. You don't want to police your kid, what you want is that ability taken out of your hands so your kid will stop annoying you.

I think the analogy is to compulsory education.

In this analogy an anonymous token from a liquor store saying "I am an adult" would be equivalent to any adult being able to buy any kid a "get out of school" card. Maybe it would work but somehow I don't think it would - and to the degree it would work it would be because of parents making sure their kids were in school - which let's be honest is what compulsory bans are trying to avoid (i.e. create less work for parents by having the ban be universal).

Go to thispersondoesnotexist and upload your favorite face to continue.

Switch VPN region or upload a random picture generated by AI, problem solved.

I'm honestly a bit mixed on this... I don't think that (especially young) children should have access to explicit, graphic sexual content, especially kink. If you as a parent want your kids to have access, so be it... but then the onus should be on the parent.

On similar lines, I think that something between an unrestricted smart phone and the classic dumb phone is a market segment that is needed.

Phone’s have these settings already. I don’t know if people know how or bother to use them.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121

Does that include a whitelist of allowed for children websites?

Why can't the EFF tell people to lie? Because if you can get away with it, lying is almost always your best option. Unless there are actual real world consequences to lying like you may anger the police.

And maybe consider using a VPN.

For real. This should be an article about circumvention, not compliance.

That's not EFFs job, just ask your kids how they circumvent age gates for that :)

I'd imagine it is because several of the obvious options for "lying" here may violate criminal law. And also because the EFF is an civil liberties advocacy group, they want to change the law, not circumvent it.

Estonia basically got this completely right in 2002 with their e-ID. I'm kinda shocked nobody else has figured it out yet. Age verification could be simple, secure, robust, and require only the disclosure of your age, nothing more.

Instead, the rest of us have systems that are both far more vulnerable to privacy beaches, and far easier to circumvent anyway.

> At some point, you may have been faced with the decision yourself: should I continue to use this service if I have to verify my age?

An excellent question, which I didn't see the article really get into.

> If you’re given the option of selecting a verification method and are deciding which to use, we recommend considering the following questions for each process allowed by each vendor:

Their criteria implies a lot of understanding on the part of the user -- regarding how modern Web systems work, widespread industry practices and motivations, how 'privacy policies' are often exceeded and assurances are often not satisfied, how much "audits" should be trusted, etc.

I'd like to see advice that starts by communicating that the information will almost certainly be leaked and abused, in n different ways, and goes from there.

> But unless your threat model includes being specifically targeted by a state actor or Private ID, that’s unlikely to be something you need to worry about.

For the US, this was better advice pre-2025, before the guy who did salutes from the capitol was also an AI bro who then went around hoovering up data from all over government. Followed by a new veritable army and camps being created for domestic action. Paired with a posture from the top that's calling harmless ordinary citizens "terrorists", and taking quite a lot of liberties with power.

We'll see how that plays out, but giving the old threat model advice, without qualification, might be doing a disservice.

I don't know why I find myself to be the lone voice with this opinion, but the pushback here should for the governments themselves to implement age-verification, just like how it's their job to implement issuance of IDs.

They can implement a transparently auditable system, where you scan your id-card (nfc or camera) in the government's portal, and using oauth federation, it will confirm your age, and nothing more than that to sites requesting it.

Site that wish to prevent the fact that you visited them a secret from the government can use various temporary domains, ips, Tor,etc... so long as the government's verification service can reach it.

The government already has your ID information, and they already know at least your home IP (yes, this is actively shared with them in the US). The only privacy concern is them knowing what sites you're visiting.

I get resisting and fighting this, but it's been years now and people are having to endure this mess. It isn't going away either. I was complaining about KYC laws earlier, they started out the same, it was about "terrorists" then.

You can fight two fights in parallel. One to prevent the whole thing, another to require the government to implement a service themselves, do it transparently and preserve privacy while doing so.

Yet another proposal I have is for sites that offer oauth federated login (google,microsoft,github,etc..) to vouch for your id verification, either by them doing it directly or via the government portal i proposed earlier. You'll then just login to sites with the right google account or whatever and that's all the site will ask from you.

I would also be fine with buying a 'card' of some sort at stores that do id verification already, like where you'd buy a cigarette or alcohol. You also buy some scratchable card with a verification code on it. They can't argue it's not good enough, because it's good enough for cigs and alcohol. they can't say "what if a minor gets a hold of the card later" because what if a minor gets a hold of cigs or alcohol later as well?

run through and then xor right

No. Fuck them. I'm not using whatever app. Use a VPN or pirate it.

What a piss poor article.

"We disagree with age gates but our recommendation is to comply". Fuck this.

I think that age verification is important. While its not perfect, it is one tool to help protect kids.

Against what? How much struggle and pain are we actually seeing in the world because children have unrestricted internet access?

Call your ISP and ban any NSFW/NSFL access by DNS, both in your children's phones and your home connection. Problem solved.

This does not work, browsers like Firefox don't even always use the system DNS by default.

Ah, blocking porn from your devices does not work. But age gating porn in your country somehow fixes the fucking global internet....

Please explain that too me.

I'm sorry for getting a little steamed here, but I have to wonder if you've put any thought into what you're asking for in the name of kids safety. And worse, if you think it will work globally what are you going to do when Saudi Arabia wants anything they don't like banned in the US, for example.

So block IPs to which blocked domains resolve at the router. It should not be that difficult to implement.

Then they scrape together their pocket money and walk into a pawn shop and hand over the cash for a second hand smartphone. Plenty of free WiFi around.

Think back to when you were a child. Did age verification ever stop you from doing anything? The automated, technologically-implemented age-verification is even less interested in properly verifying anything than the ID-checking bouncers at a bar. None of these things protect kids, they just annoy them and teach them that authority is stupid and lying is a convenient way to deal with stupid people.

I would say that normalizing giving random websites photos of yourself is harmful to children.

In an ideal world, parents would be good parents, know what their kids are up to, install parental controls on their digital devices (software solutions out there range from free/bundled to not expensive), have conversations with kids about what's on the internet and what to avoid.

Government overreach is not the answer, it's a plaster (and an excuse for more surveillance which is arguably the primary factor) over bad parenting. In the UK at least, all major ISPs and mobile providers have a basic parental/adult-content control package that is set-up by default (opt-out by the bill payer). Albeit trivial to get around with a VPN/proxy or changing DNS servers etc.

Kids will be kids as well. They'll get around restrictions, they're clever, they talk with their mates in the playground about this sort of thing. Especially teens.

You roll out the ‘bad parents’ trope then immediately admit bypassing parental controls is trivial.

Did I not mention 'seeing what your kids are up to'? I think that covers that.

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