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Comment by satansdeer | Hacker News Reader

Overall "more verification" goes in the direction of "more surveillance".

The author described a narrow path that provides "kid safety in the internet" without sacrificing the general population privacy.

Is it technically possible to implement the way he suggests? Yes. Will it be implemented that way? No.

There are people who can affect the way this verification will be implemented who are genuinely interested in more surveillance, heck, remember chat control that is an ongoing fight in a very similar vein, there is a global desire in politicians to get more control over the communications.

To me the author seems either naive or straight up malicious.

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But it is being implemented that way, and will hopefully remain that way if people who care keep paying attention. The article is pointing to the EU system currently being put together by a number of European countries.

The 'it can't be done' arguments are the worse. By spreading the idea that age verification can only be done by violating privacy means, we will end up with a system that violates privacy controlled by vested interests. Like the one already in place where you upload id. Politicians can easily sell out and will be cheered on as they entrench the system. But if that energy was spent pointing out the alternative, that we can do this in a privacy protecting way, then it can force politicians to legislate the right way. I'm looking forward to the EU system actually being rolled out, hopefully reaching their goal of remaining privacy protecting, so I can point to it and insist to my government that we can do better.

> Is it technically possible to implement the way he suggests? Yes.

I actually don’t think it is. Fundamentally this kind of certificate is going to be revocable. It’s untenable politically to hand out irrevocable attestations that can be handed off to minors. If you allow that, the system has failed to prevent minors from accessing adult materials, and if you don’t then the system has failed to preserve privacy.

> To me the author seems either naive or straight up malicious.

I think just naive.

You could technically implement a system to do it if you increase the number of keys revoked by an action. i.e. The the first X digits of the key are generated in a small enough range that they overlap with other keys. You revoke all keys that match that grouping forcing all those users to renew their keys.

There's obvious other drawbacks to this but it technically preserves privacy while still allowing revocation. The problem then occurs that once the system is in place it's easy to change. A recent and obvious example is that for years in the US undocumented immigrants paid taxes under the understanding that the tax department would not furnish that information to the arm of the government detailed with immigration enforcement, this policy recently changed with no equivalent law change and there is no recourse for those most disadvantaged by that change. Unrelated to the point at hand; going forward undocumented people are now encouraged to not pay taxes and that lawlessness is also encouraged in businesses that want to take advantage of that labour.

The real problem isn’t the revocation list itself. It’s just a list of numbers. If you get a credential that has been revoked it certainly tells you that it’s been revoked, but not much else. Assuming of course that it’s actually a revocation list being fetched and not a “is this particular cred revoked” call, because that would reveal that the cred is being presented to the caller.

The real question is how do you know when to revoke? How does the government know if a cred is being used by a minor or used broadly, indicating it’s been shared? These imply some sort of feedback from the entities accepting the creds and mean that the privacy guarantee is breached.

(I’m also not sure how revocation lists work with zero knowledge but maybe there is some crypto magic for that.)

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