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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

Luckily it’s already possible to verify your age without actually giving out any data like your birthdate

Not to a service that only accepts such data as proof.

Steam thinks I was born Jan 1, 1970. Not that I needed to lie when I did my age verification back 15 years ago, I just randomly scrolled the year down and selected one.

As the years have marched on, though, that "birthdate" becomes significantly closer to my real birthday.

> As the years have marched on, though, that "birthdate" becomes significantly closer to my real birthday.

I understand there's a clever phrasing here but I didn't get it. English is only my second language.

When you're 10, a year is a long time, when you're 60 it is not. There's an implicit "relatively" here, which is unusual but not unknown in English. Almost poetic, I like it.

Thanks now I understand. I am "only" 26, but I remember being 20 like yesterday. I can't believe I'm on the second half of the way to 50. COVID lockdowns and responsibilities didn't help.

I feel time has gone faster since I got a job, if that makes sense. Every day yearning for it to be 5o clock so I can check out, every week yearning for the weekend, every month yearning for the last day to get paid. Doing this is just asking for time to be over sooner.

When a 10-year-old registers for an adult website, they pretend they're 100 years old. Their age is 90 years different from the stated birthday. Eighty years later, the birth date is just as far off—but the implied age is now only 10 years off.

Thanks this seems like the correct meaning rather than the other comment. But that is beautiful its own way, got me all philosophical.

I liked that interpretation too!

We're keeping the same date here. 80 years later, the site thinks they're 180 years old. So it's still 90 years off, but now it's only 2x off instead of 10x off.

Oh! Thanks

It becomes closer to their real birthday than their real birthday is to the present day.

That doesn't make any sense, your fake age increases every year just like your real age.

But it's closer to their real age in relation to the sum. And it makes up more of their life, ratio wise.

Only when chatting in a large channel at work, did I realise nearly 1/3 of the people there also set theirs as 1/1/1970. Which I presume is the first date that phisers will try to enter to reset people's accounts.

I am fully aware that my standard fake birthday is now used by me in some many places, that I have started to have a fake fake birhday. I should really just randomise and store it in my password manager.

But obviously the context of this OP story ruins all that.

And without having to trust that the government isn't keeping track of every request for age verification?

I'd be curious how that might work as I haven't yet seen a zero-trust age verification system.

The age verification proposal of the EU tries to do that, the government knows you used age verification (and I think the rough number of times you used it), but they don't know when or where you used it.

https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...

The EU passing a law about the internet? What could possibly go wrong?

Please drink verification can to verify that you have verified your cookie preferences

I can't imagine countries with such strict speech laws, for example, would be willing to build a system that is technically incapable of linking the person visiting a sire and the site requesting verification.

This proposal may have been updated since I read it previously, so I could be wrong now, but it didn't read as a true zero-knowledge proof as key steps in the flow still required a level of trusting the government as the central authority to do the right thing and not track requests, both today and in the future.

The EU has more freedom of speech than the US, the US has just a different way of punishment.

It’s much easier in the US to lose your job for what you say as in the EU and in the US the consequences of losing your job are more severe if you don’t have enough money so you can afford to lose it.

US freedom of speech comes with a price tag that puts the censor inside your brain.

And in the eu you go to jail for criticing politicians. I guess it's really all the same, eh?

In which countries?

Germany: https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/03/03/is-it-a-crime-to-mo...

You surely can provide a source.

But even prisoners get healthcare in the EU, so I guess some US citizens would even prefer a EU jail over dying in the US.

Given the recent deaths of two actors and their GoFundMes I can’t imagine the hassle of less fortunate people when they get hit by US medical bills.

The US are one step away from a show like the Running Man shows

This is really an example of "formal rights and material conditions."

You make a case that EU has better social safety nets and employee protection not that the US has weaker free speech laws. While you can't ignore the effect having wealth can insulate you from consequences, it still doesn't support your statement as written.

Is it true that someone who is retired on a pension in US can say more hateful things without government action vs a similar retiree in EU?

Seems like anywhere in the EU, something draconian only needs to be popular for like 5 years for it to get implemented, for better or for worse. They don't have robust constitutions like the US.

Have you heard of the PATRIOT Act?

I wish the US constitution was robust, or at least could be held to such robustness today. As it stands congress has ceded much of their power to the executive branch and the public is barely represented when rules/regulations/laws are passed.

> I can't imagine

That's admirably honest, but the contents of your mind don't necessarily correspond to the world outside it.

How so?

Though not quite the EU anymore, the UK arrests people based only on speech in a social media post. Why should I expect they would be interested in building a truly private, zero knowledge age verification system?

Maybe for a more direct example I could point to the discussions related to the EU wanting direct access to all private messages, pushing Signal to leave the EU if that were to pass?

I think they arrested (or just fined?) someone for calling to burn down a hotel with migrants. For you this is an oppressive dictatorship, but it doesn’t match reality.

It also has no bearing on willingness to implement proof of age without additional disclosure.

But yeah not EU, one country in Europe is unlike another, etc.

I don't know the specific case you're referring to, though that's far from the only fine or arrest in the UK related to social media posts.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...

This is paywalled. What were the posts?

They are arguably over policing because of vague laws and proactive enforcement. Most cases don’t lead to convictions. But all cases I’ve ever seen were for something bad like calling for violence, making fun of someone’s death. For free speech absolutists this is unacceptable, but it’s not arbitrary tyranny.

It's a proposal, so you can check out how it would work.

Anonymous age verification is technically possible, but it is as pointless as any other age verification system, it could easily be circumvented if someone older willing to help.

Probably there is a reason why nobody uses it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

See eg. BBS+[1]. Proofs that preserve anonymity are generated locally and neither the verifier nor issuer can determine the user based on these (in scenarios of non PII signals like age thresholds), while still allowing the verifier to validate it's issuer approved.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231456

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