this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
726 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
82297 readers
6137 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I am actually not fundamentally against the idea of age verification for some things online. We have many things with age restrictions in real life, for various reasons, it kind of makes sense to have it online as well for some things.
but...it has to be done with zero-knowledge proof so we limit the amount of private data exposed to the absolute bare minimum.
Zero-knowledge proofs are a good concept. They've been possible for a long, long time, and allow age check without surveillance.
So why are they not being used? Because age check is just a cover. These people want to do surveillance, not protect kids.
So it's a good counter. Want age check? Do it like this. Oh, you don't want it that way? Why not, pray?
Whether it works (it has, previously) or not (as with the current bullshit from the US), it does bring to the public debate that this is unnecessary surveillance.
There's also precedent you can point to. Germany has implemented a reasonable system of digital identification and (seperable) condition confirmation (age gate).
Maybe in alternate timeline where tech companies have historically acted ethically.
In this timeline where each new company and/or ceo is more slimey than the last, I know that any type of identification will be mismanaged at best or used maliciously at worst
All trust is gone between these companies.
There is already age verification. It's called an internet service provider bill.
I also want zero knowledge personhood/Nationality verification for social media. Maybe with age too. I want to know where the accounts come from and whether they are a bot or not.
It can be optional, as long as I get a filter to remove all non-verified people.
Best our corporate dictatorships can offer is requiring you to surgically implant a microchip into your brainstem. Everyone without the chip will be classified as woke, and cleansed by the AI killbots on judgement day.
All heil skkkynet.
Or — just make it easier for parents to install filters for their kids??
It's already easy as fuck. Most parents just don't bother. The mandates should be on ISPs and cell carriers to provide network-level filtering. I filter adult sites on my home network and there's no getting around that without cracking the password on the service or factory resetting the gateway.
Nym did some work on a zero knowledge verification system:
https://constructiveproof.com/posts/2020-03-24-nym-credentials-overview/
Whenever this comes up, this style of zero-knowledge proof/blind signature thing gets suggested. But the problem is that those only work if people care about keeping their private keys secret. It works to secure eg. "I own $1" but "I'm over 18" is less important to people and it won't be hard for kids to get their hands on a valid anonymous signing key on the web. Because the verification is anonymous and not trackable, many kids can share the same one too, so it only takes one adult key to leak for everyone to use. It's one of the reasons they push biometrics that at least appears to need a real human. Requiring ID has a lot of the same issues on top of being a privacy nightmare.
I'm starting to think that actual age verification is technically impossible.
that is less of a problem when the private key is not too easy to export, and when each private key has ratelimits for how often can they be used
Those things come with a big convenience and implementation trade-off that slows adoption.
If it's hard to export for technical reasons (eg. Needs to be in a tpm) then that adds hardware requirements and complexity and makes it difficult to log in on other devices. If it's a software thing, then it's rippable. Either way "install our government app to watch porn" is not an enticing prospect for people.
Aggressive rate limiting is also frustrating if you want to log into multiple things and it keeps blocking you because you're using your key too fast, but if it's not aggressive then it likely won't be effective unless all the kids sharing a key are trying to use it at once.
If it's a temporary thing where you have to auth with the government to get a fresh signing key that expires, you have the issue of having to sign into the government when you want 18+ content which is super uncomfortable.
I can see it being a browser-based thing set up a bit like video DRM but that would still need to talk to a government server each time for a temp key (like how licence servers work) and you'd need to be logged into their systems. It might still be the best option but it does still leak "X person wants to access 18+ content right now" to the government.
I'm really interested in seeing a technical/cryptographic solution that actually works but so far I haven't really and I'm starting to doubt that it's possible.
Plenty of companies you already deal with already know who you are, thus how old you are. Cell carriers, ISPs, banks, stock brokerages, utility companies, and so on. It would be much more secure, done properly, for a service like this to provide a simple "yes/no" answer to the age question.
That would resemble a zero-knowledge solution yes
Well your fundamentally wrong enjoy your safe little cage bird, perhaps your master will lift the sheet today.
How old are you ? If i may ask.
Old enough
Your point of view: We have so many fascists in reality, why couldn't we tolerate some fascism on the internet?
Do you also think age restrictions in real life is fascism?
Some of them are.
Care to elaborate which you think are fascist?
Regarding age verification I think that things we generally don't allow kids access to in real life could make sense to age restrict online as well. Something like gambling comes to mind, and I wouldn't personally consider it a fascist action to limit access to that.
Edit: again, under the prerequisite of properly implemented zero-knowledge proof so the site only knows if you're old enough but not actual age, name or anything.
The definition of fascism is trivial: only one ideology is permitted (no matter what that ideology is exactly), anything else is forbidden.
So any forced limitations without objectively obvious/proven reasons that are welcome by community is fascism. As simple as that.
Limitations of theft and killings are not fascism because most people are against those activities. Limitations on education access is fascism because most people welcome education.
Those who have different opinions can impose their own private limitations in the non-fascist community. Like age restrictions for this or that activity.