Everything is a trade off in the world. I think that people who are anti-id ignore this but for me personally it’s harder and harder to accept the trade offs of an internet without id. AI has only accelerated this, I don’t want to live in a world where the average person unknowingly interacts with bots more than other individuals and where black market actors can sway public opinion with armies of bots.
I think most people are aligned here, and that an internet without identification is inevitable whether we like it or not.
>Some observers present privacy-preserving age proofs involving a third party, such as the government, as a solution, but they inherit the same structural flaw: many users who are legally old enough to use a platform do not have government ID.
My main takeaway from this is that politicians seem to have given up on making "social media" less harmful by regulating it, and instead focus on gatekeeping access, with the added perk of supplying security services and ad tyrants with yet another data pump.
We are missing accessible cryptographic infrastructure for human identity verification.
For age verification specifically, the only information that services need proof of is that the users age is above a certain threshold. i.e. that the user is 14 years or older. But in order to make this determination, we see services asking for government ID (which many 14-year-olds do not have), or for invasive face scans. These methods provide far more data than necessary.
What the service needs to "prove" in this case is three things:
1. that the user meets the age predicate
2. that the identity used to meet the age predicate is validated by some authority
3. that the identity is not being reused across many accounts
All the technologies exist for this, we just haven't put them together usefully. Zero knowledge proofs, like Groth16 or STARKs allow for statements about data to be validated externally without revealing the data itself. These are difficult for engineers to use, let alone consumers. Big opportunity for someone to build an authority here.
I wonder how much time we have before being asked to enter the government issued ID in a card reader so websites can read age and biometric data from the chip.
It's kind of weird to me how every article on this topic here has people rushing to comment within a couple minutes with some generic "yes I too support ID checks for internet use!". Has the vibe really shifted so much among tech-literate people?
Most of this debate makes more sense if the actual goal is liability reduction, not child safety. If it were genuinely about protecting kids, you'd regulate infinite scroll and algorithmic engagement optimization, not who can log in.
Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account. If that's criminalized (like alcohol), it will happen too often to prosecute (much more frequently than alcohol, which is rarely prosecuted anyways). I don't see a solution that isn't a fundamental culture shift.
If there's a fundamental culture shift, there's an easy way to prevent children from using the internet:
- Don't give them an unlocked device until they're adults
- "Locked" devices and accounts have a whitelist of data and websites verified by some organization to be age-appropriate (this may include sites that allow uploads and even subdomains, as long as they're checked on upload)
The only legal change necessary is to prevent selling unlocked devices without ID. Parents would take their devices from children and form locked software and whitelisting organizations.
The only needed culture shift is everyone should realize that it's ultimately the parents/teachers' duty to educate the kids.
If parents think it's okay for their kids to use Facebook/X/whatever somehow responsibly, they should not be punished or prosecuted for that. Yes, I do believe it applies to alcohol too.
It's how it works in physical world. We let the parents to decide whether hiking/swimming/football/walking to the school are too dangerous for their kids. We let the parents to decide which books are suitable for their kids. But somehow when it comes to the internet it's the government's job. I can't help but think there is an astroturf movement manufacturing the consent rn.
There are alternatives to ID verification if the goal is protecting children.
You could, for example, make it illegal to target children with targeted advertising campaigns and addictive content. Then throw the executives who authorized such programs in jail. Punish the people causing the harm.
How about instead of protecting the kids we protect everyone and do something to stop these gargantuan companies from driving engagement at any cost in order to rake ad revenue.
I’ve never met a single person who believed Facebook was a force for good. Why allow it to exist in its current form at all.
If these companies are the new town square then make a real online town square run by the government people can use if they so choose and then break up the monopolies that are destroying the fabric of all the societies on the globe.
We never in a million years should have allowed these companies to establish global scale communications platforms without the ability to properly moderate them with human intervention and that’s not even to speak of the actual nefarious intent they possess to drive engagement and the anti democratic techno feudalist sickening shit we see from their CEOs like Thiel et al.
They are a plague on our species that makes sport betting apps look like childs play.
Big tech likes this because there are a lot more face recognition technologies in the wild in real life and being able to connect all real life data to online data is quite valuable. It's also quite possibly the largest training set ever for face recognition if ids are stored and given how ids and images are sold across many companies it seems very high probability that some company will retain the data rather than delete after use.
Why is no one talking about using zero knowledge proofs for solving this? Instead of every platform verifying all its users itself (and storing PII on its own servers), a small number of providers could expose an API which provides proof of verification. I'm not sure if some kind of machine vision algorithm could be used in combination with zero-knowledge technology to prevent even that party from storing original documents, but I don't see why not. The companies implementing these measures really seem to be just phoning it in from a privacy perspective.
This is my problem with the Discord situation too:
Big tech don't have wait for an outright government ban when they can just say that we are a teen-only site by default and everyone have to verify if they are over 18 or not. This age verification will affect everyone no matter what.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 91.6 ms ] threadhttps://streamable.com/3tgc14
and if you have internet access without paying, that means someone else is legally responsible for your access
"problem solved" ?
I think most people are aligned here, and that an internet without identification is inevitable whether we like it or not.
So there is absolutely no way to change that and give out IDs from the age of 14? You can already get an ID for children in Germany https://www.germany.info/us-de/service/reisepass-und-persona...
This is a problem that has to be solved by the government and not by private tech companies.
This is a lazy cop out to say "we have tried nothing and we are all out of ideas"
For age verification specifically, the only information that services need proof of is that the users age is above a certain threshold. i.e. that the user is 14 years or older. But in order to make this determination, we see services asking for government ID (which many 14-year-olds do not have), or for invasive face scans. These methods provide far more data than necessary.
What the service needs to "prove" in this case is three things:
1. that the user meets the age predicate
2. that the identity used to meet the age predicate is validated by some authority
3. that the identity is not being reused across many accounts
All the technologies exist for this, we just haven't put them together usefully. Zero knowledge proofs, like Groth16 or STARKs allow for statements about data to be validated externally without revealing the data itself. These are difficult for engineers to use, let alone consumers. Big opportunity for someone to build an authority here.
If there's a fundamental culture shift, there's an easy way to prevent children from using the internet:
- Don't give them an unlocked device until they're adults
- "Locked" devices and accounts have a whitelist of data and websites verified by some organization to be age-appropriate (this may include sites that allow uploads and even subdomains, as long as they're checked on upload)
The only legal change necessary is to prevent selling unlocked devices without ID. Parents would take their devices from children and form locked software and whitelisting organizations.
What shift?
- I always give my children unlocked devices, because I know what they are doing
- Internet is not a safe space, and there will always be means of circumventing protections. Age verifications do not protect anybody
- Parents do not want to 'rise children' they give phones to kids and expects youtube to show kids only good stuff. They expect this from platform
If parents think it's okay for their kids to use Facebook/X/whatever somehow responsibly, they should not be punished or prosecuted for that. Yes, I do believe it applies to alcohol too.
It's how it works in physical world. We let the parents to decide whether hiking/swimming/football/walking to the school are too dangerous for their kids. We let the parents to decide which books are suitable for their kids. But somehow when it comes to the internet it's the government's job. I can't help but think there is an astroturf movement manufacturing the consent rn.
Oh, remember those good old times when alcohol was kids' stuff.......
You could, for example, make it illegal to target children with targeted advertising campaigns and addictive content. Then throw the executives who authorized such programs in jail. Punish the people causing the harm.
I’ve never met a single person who believed Facebook was a force for good. Why allow it to exist in its current form at all.
If these companies are the new town square then make a real online town square run by the government people can use if they so choose and then break up the monopolies that are destroying the fabric of all the societies on the globe.
We never in a million years should have allowed these companies to establish global scale communications platforms without the ability to properly moderate them with human intervention and that’s not even to speak of the actual nefarious intent they possess to drive engagement and the anti democratic techno feudalist sickening shit we see from their CEOs like Thiel et al.
They are a plague on our species that makes sport betting apps look like childs play.
Governments recycle "Think of the children" mantra and they are again after terrorists and bad guys.
Big tech don't have wait for an outright government ban when they can just say that we are a teen-only site by default and everyone have to verify if they are over 18 or not. This age verification will affect everyone no matter what.
Instead of requiring IDs, we should let parents manage what their children do online.