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Could you be more specific as to what you're imagining? I don't personally see a way to verify someone's age which doesn't involve either credit card verification, photo id verification, or some sort of facial recognition. If you know enough about someone to verify their age—even to a relatively low degree of accuracy—you probably know enough to pinpoint who they are in general.

Heck—in most cases, we can't even tell the difference between humans and bots anymore! And it's true that we basically accept that some bots will slip through the cracks—but identifying bots also strikes me as significantly easier than identifying children.

The age verification that doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording is called parental controls and it already exists in most systems. It doesn't require any proof of ID, internet connection, complex distributed systems, and so on. And it has near 100% success rate.

Where are these mythical sweet-spot solutions? Concretely, half the websites I visit from the UK want me to either scan my face or upload ID documents to access their full featureset. Now that users have been conditioned to accept this, nobody seems very interested in figuring out how to collect less PII - only insulating themselves from liability by having the data processed by a third party.

Exactly. The same way that selling alcohol doesn’t require a paper trail of every beer I’ve bought.

What's the point in making this distinction? This is HN, 99% of the users here are aware of what zero knowledge proof is and that it's possible to implement it that way.

The general consensus and what the article is alluding to is that it will be probably implemented in a way that allows individual tracking and identification.

The so-called "social media" companies' core "business model" requires acquiring ad targets. This includes data collection and surveillance. These companies in the past have bragged to advertisers and the public about how much they know about these targets. Statements like, "We know more about you than your friends and family."

Now, is this really true. Probably not. It's exaggeration. It's hype

But these companies have learned that 100% correct is not necessary to make money. For example, if they are correct 80% of the time, then maybe that's good enough

A law that achieves an 80% reduction in youth ad targets might also be "good enough"

The toes getting stepped on belong to the companies

The troubled kids who will access these companies' websites come hell or high water, the 20%, are unlikely to complain

Complaints come from the companies and those who rely on these companies to make money. Like the author of this blog post, they keep calling a handful of Big Tech websites/app endpoints "the internet"

Their toes are going to get crushed

So let's see some of the champions of these systems acknowledge this downside and make the case that they should be built in a way that avoids it and not back down on that when it becomes inconvenient.

They can track you with cookies , now they have age and identity signals .

> there are several reasonable proposals that would be 90%+ successful without stepping on anyone's toes.

I have a feeling my definition of having my toes stepped on differs dramatically from yours.

> i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.

Well there's plenty of idiots in power and I'm sure they have no idea. But there absolutely are evil ones who simply want more power and don't care what happens after they have it.

If this were actually about protecting children, maybe you could get something passed that wasn't just ground work for a panopticon hellscape. But it's not about children at all - the people truly worried about that are just useful idiots - it's about power, and so you can't pass anything without having the surveillance infrastructure forced in.

Yeah, and once you have the non-intrusive system in place you can just switch it out for the tracking one without the user knowing.

Or there's probably some kind of correlation trail possible that will track you even with the anonymous systems.

This isn’t about kids at all. The ID requirement is the WHOLE POINT.

That it is technically possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving way is thus entirely irrelevant.

They want all online activity tied to ID so they can violently, illegally retaliate in the dark of night against protected expression online that they don’t like.

That’s all this is. Privacy-preserving techniques are irrelevant because they do not accomplish this goal.

> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia

But I feel there's not a lot of trust that whatever implementation we could end up with wouldn't be such a dystopia. The real world equivalent would be checkpoints at every intersection verifying the driver's age, the cashier who carded the 20 yo with a beer now does it for everyone, makes a copy of your ID and stores it in a big folder shared with their 427 "business partners".

Imo we should scrap the whole idea of age verification. Kids get a kidPhone with kidOS, whitelist of age-appropriate resources & capabilities. You wouldn't let an 8 yo drive on the highway, yet they can have a supercar to drive unsupervised on the information highway, no biggie. Internet is full of adults doing all sort of stuff while kids need supervision and education: design safe spaces for children, not checkpoints at every corner.

Doesn't _have_ to be except not enough voters can tell the difference which is exactly the goal.

> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking

Personally I don't care how much age sniffing is mandatory in that I think it is inacceptable on any level. Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok? Because I can not buy into that premise. To me the whole assumption is wrong from the get go.

It was never about the children. They are rolling this out, so online comments can be tracked to names and addresses.

It's to suppress free speech and arrest people that post anything against the government's narrative.

Many people have already been arrested in the UK for this. This is the next logical step.

Doesn't 90% successful mean you are stepping on 10% toes???

i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.

Correct. The goal here isn't "to save kids". That's just one of the Horsemen of the Infocalypse [0] used to market taking away our freedom.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Would you mind elaborating on the specific methods you're referencing? To me, the entire problem is framing the issue as "age verification" in the first place - this implies the web company is responsible for knowing and controlling who uses their service. Whether this is a full-on demand for drivers' license / face scan / verification can, or whether there can be a technical process that obscures some details doesn't change this underlying dynamic!

The other problem you're up against is in the low-friction online environment, 90% easily turns into a much lower percentage. Which will actually manifest itself as the initial methods that achieved "90%" being declared insufficient in favor of stronger methods of identity verification.

I say this as a parent staring down having to deal with the dumpster fire that is the modern web in the next short year or two - the only sane way to address this problem is through client-side parental control software that works based on website/app tags supplied by the server / app creator / etc. There is indeed a market failure here, so the sensible regulation is to make websites over a certain size publish labels about the suitability of their content for age brackets, whether a site is social media, contains user generated content, has algorithmic feeds, and so on - affirmative assertions about the content that carry legal weight and liability for them not being true. Device manufacturers over a certain size would need to include parental control software that can be enabled during the setup process.

If parental controls are enabled and a website has not published tags (too small, foreign jurisdiction, misconfiguration, etc), then it simply fails closed and refuses to display the site. This keeps decisions about content suitability in the hands of parents where it belongs, rather than putting it in the hands of corporate attorneys who will often make decisions directly contrary to what parents want! Remember this whole topic is being pushed by big tech to absolve themselves of liability for pushing harmful products!

In tech, 10% unsuccessful today is 100% unsuccessful next week, when everyone learns how to join that 10% who got around it.

The shit is horrible if 100% successful, and yet not worth doing if it isn't.

I am convinced that no one will make any progress on this issue so long as they refuse to understand that their aren't a group of shadowy figures pushing for this but rather a sizeable chunk of the general population, buoyed on by various moral outrage interest groups including a great many HNers who have been happily stoking the narrative that social media is the cause of every negative statistical ill.

Who wants this? God damn everyone. And in so much as Facebook might do something with the data, what they really want is a legal moat of sufficient depth to drown possible competitors.

> age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia of 24/7 fine-grained tracking and recording unless you are somehow hoping to achieve 100% success rate

I believe you are missing the point. "To protect kids" is just a cover, the nightmare dystopia is the real goal. So age verification have to be a nightmare dystopia or it would be useless for those, who push for it.

Even as an adult who doesn't use social media, I find the use of Facebook as a company home page, or using it as a forum for group communication, to be problematic. Especially as Meta makes it more and more difficult to see content without an account.

> How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?

It's not even just about the current people in charge or with access. Who's next? The "trust us" approach doesn't work when trust has already been broken with the people, or in a scenario where the data will change hands to an unknown future administration.

The best way to win my trust is to not even want the data in the first place.

Transparency doesn't matter without consequences. Many of the currently ruling governments have demonstrated that already.

> We need full transparency.

A couple years ago I would have tended to agree with you, transparency would be a good first step. But then I have recently seen demonstrated that transparency just proves that you do not need to hide corruption as long as a powerful bloc of voters actually agrees with your corrupt position. I think what we really are going to need is consequences defined ahead of time, along with an enforcement mechanism not easily corrupted itself. This is hard. But it is a topic we will hopefully be spending quality time working out over the next few years anyway.

> exempting themselves from monitoring

Wasn’t that in the Chat Control proposal? i.e. politicians and other important individuals are exempt

> If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair.

Not everyone is an exhibitionist. Some people thrive when they are very public about their life. Some prefer a much more private life.

>How do we know that the ruling/governing class is not abusing these monitoring systems and exempting themselves from monitoring?

Ah, so except for THE ENTIRE FUCKING PROBLEM, this is fine.

>And if some people are allowed to harass and stalk others based on some attribute (race, religion, nationality, etc.) because they are in a monitoring position (while others are not) then that would be unfair as well.

Yes, we wouldn't want racial profiling in our Orwellian hellscape. That would truly put it over the edge.

They are 100% abusing until proven otherwise. Naive to think otherwise.

> If we are all subject to the same monitoring and there are no exceptions, that would be fair.

It might be fair, by some definition, but it would still be wrong. The government shouldn't be monitoring us to the extent required to implement age verification on the 'net.

The possibly too subtle point of this article is that the spying is what makes the negative effects so powerful. Social media spies on what you are viewing and then sends you more of that, and send the info to other people so they can send you more of that too

Then ban underage smartphones altogether, that would probably make the single biggest improvement in child safety and mental health. Trying to police content is an utter waste of time.

yay?

Have you been on instagram lately? We're already there.

> The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media.

You have a flair for understatement.

> If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.

Same. I joke that when I retire I'm throwing out every computer in my house. Turns out the gov't may effectively do that for me, because I will not be handing out my ID to web sites. That is a hard line for me.

> The main problem is providing infrastructure for a government that can over use it in future if move to ultra right/left/authoritarian spectrum

The US is an instructive example in real time. Roughly everyone worries about what happens when their opponent gains control of the government and then promptly forgets how much they worried when their side has it.

No let's not.

Let's actually create and maintain a society.

There are still places in the world where you and your family can literally fend for yourself against nature and rival gangs and so on if you're just super attached to the concept though, it's not like this option has been foreclosed.

If the website sees (and possibly stores) the e-mail address, and the government or another party knows who it belongs to, the scheme is anything but privacy-preserving.

How can you tell what one is? Reddit in 2010? Facebook in 2005? IRC in 1999?

Exactly. Fix the addiction machine, not just who gets checked at the door.

I think this is really the only serious alternative.

How about taking some personal responsibility for your life?

This shouldn't even be a consideration concerning adults.

The specific weakness of these systems is that the governments cannot be trusted with this. They have demonstrated this - Snowden leaks for the US and several EU states, and the general monitoring clause in the Data Retention Directive for the EU as a whole.

Even if these governments come up with a zero knowledge system, it's only one click away from being replaced with a full-knowledge system, because the user is already used to it. These governments have already tried spying on everyone (and they almost certainly still do).

This is a manipulation tactic not an argument. Almost nobody wants to prevent spying on kids. Main goal is to prevent harmful content like porn, gore and gambling.

Sorry but this isn't a strong argument at all. Nobody who thinks age verification laws are a good idea will be remotely persuaded by any of this.

Same here. Every time a thread like this comes up it brings out that a surprising number of paranoid helicopter parents browse HN, which is a contradiction in perspective that I can't really emphasize with.

Same, I care little about NSFW. We used to all live in caves together where kids saw adults having sex, in conflict, and cleaning game.

But I also grew with a different internet than we have now. There’s a level of targeted manipulation that’s novel. I’m not sure the cat goes back in the bag no matter what we do.

Seconded. The amount of time and characters spent here trying to coax someone into trying to help these damn layers materialize just tells me the point isn't the kids. It's trying to preserve business model in spite of negative externalities.

I think the best thing most parents could do is ban the Internet from their own life. I grew up in the 80s and I have watched the evolution of parenting since then. The world is measurably safer today than it was then. Stranger danger is vanishingly rare. What the hell happened? Fear happened. Things like 24 hour cable news accelerated it, and the Internet turbocharged it. We cannot untangle the horrors we are exposed to on the Internet with what real life dangers face us, we conflate them to the detriment of our children.

Maybe our children will figure it out as they become parents. I hope so.

When the dangers consist of invisible targeted manipulation of thought processes it's a whole different category of risks that kids (and most adults) are not equipped to handle. The effects are playing out around the world as we speak.

I don't know that universal tracking is the answer. I also don't think unrestricted access to children by manipulative predators (companies in this case) is the right answer. But then, I don't think they should have unrestricted access to adults either.

Assume that saying "X is stupid" is pejorative shorthand for "I strongly disagree with the other side's criteria judging whether or not X works".

I dreamt about this. In my dream it was very clear. Like ray dalio says we are in the last inning of the current great debt cycle. The end of the NWO or the great reset or what it is named, brings about great losses to the west. We attemt to save our economies with mass immigration. Along side the downfall of our industries and currencies the middle-class falters and the crime and violent facfions in society becomes stronger. Parallel societies become financed by outer geopolitical entities to escalate the wests downfall. In desperation the western governments try to get in control of their populations before real civil war erupts. One attempt to avoid complete chaos is total surveillance... Just; if ray dalio is right this is not a nightmare but our current trajectory. The leaders know and are preparing...

> If we unified

That's cute. About half my coworkers are socialists and the other half fire breathing MAGA. The only thing we have united on was that we don't talk politics at work. But I assure you, there is not universal agreement at all that authoritarian technology is bad. Some people, including many developers, absolutely support it.

What you propose requires agreeing on the definition of harmful. And immediately it fails.

‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety’ — Benjamin Franklin

This isn’t a simple solution to the problem but it reminds me that it is not a new problem. We should remember that

Your example is in bad faith as your example assumes that the only thing blocking a child of 5 from porn is age verification of some type. There are lots of blockers today for 5 year olds to get access to porn.

> I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented

Nobody on the "we need age verification" side wants a debate. They want to run face first in to dumb legislation giving governments and companies even more power to track every movement and know exactly who you are.

Disclaimer: I do not agree this take was made in bad faith. I think that raising a kid comes with its own set of expectations around caring and curating experiences of said kid. Therefore, I do think that offloading that responsibility to the state (and by extension, businesses that offer age-gating tech to that state...) is not the right way to do it. And even in the absence of that, my experience taught me it is entirely possible to grow up with unsupervised internet access and turn out an OK adult. The internet is not only "depraved porn". It is also a lifeline for that weird kid who has been bullied and effectively barred from social experiences.

Of course, YMMV.

That said, if such a nanny state is inevitable: zero-knowledge-proof-based age verification would not only be possible, it would further protect these kids from a bad state actor. In that spirit, I agree with your last point. The fact that any other alternatives are even being considered makes it on principle a non-starter to me, because it betrays the actual goals of the political actors involved.

Who gave the child access to that?

You can't use the words "reasonable debate" in your post after you've immediately jumped straight to some mythical worst case scenario of a 5 year old being given a device with no supervision and somehow managing to immediately find their way to some sort of super duper snuff porn that will scar them for life.

This comment should not be downvoted. The original article lost me in the first sentence with this:

"The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet"

Sorry, but a firehose of unlimited pornography, violence, racist, misogynist, and divisive content for developing children is bad. You can "well actually..." me all day I don't care at all.

I agree that there's no good solutions here, and I think this is a genuinely complicated and difficult issue for exactly the reasons people often state. But every argument that pretends that it's a one-sided discussion should be dismissed out of hand. There are two sides to this, both thorny.