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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

The EU is working on a actual privacy-preserving initiative [0] that allows owners of ID wallets to verify their age, without their actual age or personal data being transmitted. The standard and reference implementations are open source on GitHub. Yet everybody screams uploading IDs and total government surveillance.

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...

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Dear littlecranky67, as overseer for your digital wallet, I am happy to inform you that the owner of the discord server kinkydwarfporn doesn't know who you are and your privacy is protected.

Signed your friendly EU official.

As long as someone in the chain is able to physically connect the dots it is game over for privacy.

Your comment assumes there is an "overseer". There is not. Guys, read the technical documents. It is all standardized and open-source. I can code my own wallet.

>Тhe EUDI Wallet notifies the user of a pending request to prove their age, including: the name and identity of the requesting party.

>She consents to share the requested info and her wallet uses verifiable credentials issued by a trusted authority (e.g., national civil registry) to generate a cryptographic proof that she meets the age requirement.

I am fairly sure that here is enough info to be deanonimized by the authorities issuing the EUDI and the wallet app developers.

You first quote reads: "You, the end user, get a notification that a party (probably the porn website you visited) wants to request your age and you, the USER, get the identity of the website (not vice versa).

As for the second quote: Yes sure, you credentials need to be signed by a trusted authority, someone has to establish you are an adult. But it is a cryptographic signature. Same as https certificate needs to be signed by a third party vs. self-signed certificates.

And the ID app developer logs that the porn site has requested my ID. So there is no privacy from the government. Which is much more important privacy.

The same EU that is trying to backdoor every messaging app to "protect the children" TM? I 'll use their ID system on my dead body.

Yes, that EU. It's very big. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

This is just pointless whataboutism. There are smart devs and crypto experts designing a sound, privacy-friendly system that is open source. It does what is supposed to do and how everybody would want it to be implemented. Yet people reject it on irrational grounds for whatever negative aspect they associate the EU with.

No matter how open source something is, as long as you can only run it on a non-rooted Google or Apple device, and it’s hardcoded with remote attestation features exclusive to these two platforms, it suddenly isn’t much better than a bro asking you to trust him.

Btw the other guy has a point, by definition you can’t support both privacy and something that obliterates it.

It's funny how pointing a fact is called whataboutism.

You trust the EU's pinky promise a keep their word that your ID will be safe and secure and never tied to what you say, the content of your messages or who you send them to. If that is so, then go ahead and use it. That's your business.

> whatever negative aspect

The EU literally wants to read your personal messages because it doesn't trust that you are not some criminal in disguise. Instead of the state having to prove that you are criminal breaking the law, it wants to read everything you send and store the data permanently in case you break the law one day. If you think that is acceptable and that is an entity that can be trusted, then I don't know what to tell you.

If I understand correctly how this works, it doesn't require trust or knowledge. The service gets exactly 1 bit of information (over/under the required age), the government system gets nothing.

"Don't trust, verify". It is an open protocol based on cryptography for everyone to verify that simply does not allow to submit identity information when you perform the age verificaiton check. There is no opinion here, no "you have to trust X not to do that later" - it is the property of the used technology to just submit the verified age. You can't derive identity information now or in the future just if you age-verified yourself. You are being paranoid and talking about a fantasy, non-existing system that is not the one I linked to.

On a side note, whataboutism is not about "stating a fact". It is when the stated fact has nothing to do or does not interfere with the original point being made. As in "Why would I trust the EUDI act when the EU does shenanigans like come up with stupid norms of the shape of bananas" - Stated is a fact, but it has nothing to do with the actualy EUDI act.

> It's funny how pointing a fact is called whataboutism.

What do you think whataboutism is?

At this point, it's just something stupid people say. It used to mean that when you pointed out that my people were desperate for the freedom of living under capitalism, I would point out that you lived in an apartheid state.

Somehow, here, "whataboutism" means that if after you point out that the EU is coming up with an age verification system that they claim preserves personal privacy, I point out that the EU is also very much, openly, against any sort of personal privacy. Somehow that's some form of communist propaganda. Or Russian propaganda. Terrorist? Whatever. The important part is that I'm someone who should be watched or arrested if I continue to question your motives on behalf of our enemies.

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