Hacker News Reader

Comment by nirava | Hacker News Reader

Private companies now can link all your online activities to you. Not an advertisement ID, but directly to you and your loans and your health data and whatever they're selling in the black market. Every data breach is a 100 times. It was already almost possible to directly know about you by buying data, now it's easier.

The point of this is not to verify age really. It is to verify identity. There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.

Also, it's not just porn, facebook, online gambling etc. It is the OS based on some bills. So ALL your activities.

View on HN

> There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.

Sure there is.

Verifiable Credentials and other similar standards allow this to be delegated in such a way that there is no need to present ID or even let the site know who you are. The site can issue a request to a third party that simply provides back "Yep, we attest that this request was approved by someone over 18".

Depending on the exact scheme, the request may forward you to a broker, who will then forward the request (and your web session) on to the trusted third party of your choice which has already performed ID verficiation (usually a bank). The bank sends a signed response back to the broker, the broker sends a signed response back to the requesting site.

Is it perfect? Maybe not 100%, the broker knows there was a request from a restricted site forwarded to a given bank. The bank knows you have approved a request. There is likely to be an identifier of some sort sent from the site all the way through to the back-end so you know you're not being MITM'd. But in theory nobody should have the full picture.

No practical way I should say. Realistically, it's pretty clear that lawmakers really just want to shove it through in the simplest way possible. Which is probably private third parties.

And private third parties are very shady. They have effective monopolies and no significant public face to care about. I think we have seen this pattern play out in healthcare, compliance and other industries already.

Also idk about banks being the effective gatekeepers to the internet and eventually all technology. Just feels like its not their place to do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com