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Comment by notTooFarGone | Hacker News Reader

>Some observers present privacy-preserving age proofs involving a third party, such as the government, as a solution, but they inherit the same structural flaw: many users who are legally old enough to use a platform do not have government ID.

So there is absolutely no way to change that and give out IDs from the age of 14? You can already get an ID for children in Germany https://www.germany.info/us-de/service/reisepass-und-persona...

This is a problem that has to be solved by the government and not by private tech companies.

This is a lazy cop out to say "we have tried nothing and we are all out of ideas"

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I'm not convinced age restrictions like this are a good idea. But yeah, the non-availability of IDs in the US is a self-inflicted problem.

Another example where this plays a role are voter registration and ID requirements for voting in the US. It is entirely bizarre to me how these discussions just accept it as a law of nature that it's expensive and a lot of effort to get an ID. This is something that could be changed.

You may underestimate the levels of classism and racism in the US. Go on and bring up a conversation about it and you'll eventually get someone talking about how that would be socialism and we can't do that.

When one of the only two political parties does not want everyone to vote (cause they’d lose every election) you get what we got…

The problem is not that we aren’t doing age verification, it’s that a group of authoritarians are trying to force mandatory implementation of age verification (and concomitant removal of anonymity). That’s the problem.

Anonymity is a myth. I am sure by now an LLM can figure out who you are and where you live by your HN posts alone.

Do it then

I nave never, and will never, use AI on my own accord.

Hey, iamnothere, look at this!

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800

"We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. "

It seems like the solution is to provide an age verification mechanism with robust privacy protections. That way when we offer a solution that works for all of their states concerns, if they disagree with the privacy preserving approach we force them to say outright "I want to keep a record of every website you visit."

Unfortunately not. They will use even the most privacy preserving protocol to push remote attestation of end devices. Which in itself is a stepping stone making their next steps much easier.

Why would they say that is necessary?

They actually already do in the EUDI wallet reference implementation. There, as this is part of a more general ID system, they probably want to avoid that people duplicate or export IDs. In case of a privacy preserving age check, the fear could be that a copied private key could be enough to generate unlimited age proofs, indistinguishable from the original app instance. In another thread someone gave an even lazier argument: the eudi wallet requires hw backed keys by law regardless, and the laziest implementation would be device attestation...

Hrm that does seem suboptimal. There have got to be better approaches available to us through cryptography.

I don't understand how such a thing could be possible. Privacy is inherently gone, even if the third party doesn't learn your real name.

> This is a problem [..]

(This is a genuine question) please could you describe the underlying problem that age verification is attempting to solve?

I don't think that's what the original comment was discussing at all...

If governments want to require private companies to verify ages, those same governments need to provide accessible ways for their citizens to get verification documents, starting from the same age that is required.

Not my point in the comment but my personal opinion:

To regulate access to addicting material. This is done in the physical world - why should digital be lawless when it applies to the same human behaviors?

I've been addicted to a lot of digital media parts in harmful ways and I had the luck and support to grow out of most of it. A lot of people are not that lucky.

What problem? I don't think internet websites and apps actually need to know the face, age, or name of their users if their users don't want to provide that information. With exceptions for things like gambling websites.

Why should gambling be the exception? One could argue other app-based vices are just as bad, if not worse.

Crippling debt from unwise impulsive gambling by a teenager is probably worse than whatever occurs from a teenager scrolling Twitter all day.

The latter may not be great, but eating potato chips all day also probably isn't, and I don't think the government should outlaw minors eating potato chips. Plus it's variable: some get positive, educational, pro-social, productive outcomes from social media and some don't. Gambling is always bad in the limit.

A simple rule could probably be that if a website can make you lose over $200 of real money, it should probably require age verification. I don't see why other things should.

> Crippling debt from unwise impulsive gambling by a teenager is probably worse than whatever occurs from a teenager scrolling Twitter all day.

The cynic in me says that's not why governments want identity confirmation for gambling websites. It's so you can't dodge the taxman

That's true. It's probably at least 50% the latter. And I don't really blame them.

I strongly oppose any form of "age verification" involving uploading your ID. That's just asking for a data breach.

There are options that don't involve any ID uploads whatsoever.

That's not what this user was talking about.

For example, with a German ID you can provide proof that you are older than 18 without giving up any identifying information. I mean, nobody uses this system at the moment, but it does exist and it works.

Does the German ID system know what you are trying to access? Based on the requestor.

It costs money. Getting an ID here costs about 5% of minimum wage if you order it online + travel (you still have to travel there for the photos and pickup). It costs even more if you apply in person.

You could buy 19 gallons of milk for that money (80 liters).

So do you buy an ID every month or can we depreciate that over 15 years?

Not unless you are offering to front everyone that money for no interest.

Providing every citizen an ID every X years at no cost does seem like good policy.

You have to get a new one every 5 years.

Really more so than money is the amount of time. Sitting at the DMV for half a day, and that is with an appointment, really sucks.

German immigrants can’t get an ID, sometimes for years

Exactly right. Also, better to be overly restrictive here given the well documented harms of social media on young minds. If the law stipulates that you must be 15 to obtain social media access, and most people don't get their IDs until 18, then most people will stay off social media for another three years: no big deal.

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