Age verification as mass surveillance infrastructure (tboteproject.com)

Don't confuse the passport ID check with the "are you over 18?" checkbox. Both types of laws exist.

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what do governments get out of this? Like I get it from ad/commercial perspective, but I don't see how this is highly unpopular from governments and still being implemented

So to avoid it all I have to do is stop using social media? LGTM

> Every copy of the Persona SDK contains a hardcoded AES-256-GCM encryption key in TrackingEventUtilsKt.java line 22

Seems like a pretty big fuck up, if so. I wonder why did they not use asymmetric encryption.

There have been pushes to implement similar instances of this for a while now. If this turns out to not be successful, expect futher efforts in a similar guise

the internet is not the same as it was 20 years ago. the average person is now online, but they werent before. they dont understand where they are and need protection. there is still space on the internet, or whatever the next place will be, for the enthusiasts and other minorities. if we lose internet, something new will pop up. also, 20 years ago i didnt care so much about privacy on the internet, i just needed a cultural filter for the community im engaging with. privacy has always been a game of cat and mouse. 0 chance things stay the same for long

I wonder if not private age verification could not be solved with the right cryptographic protocol.

You would have to register using a digital ID with a government agency, to get a age certificate. Most European countries already have digital IDs, used for all sorts of things: such as taxes, online banking etc.

Then that certificate could be used in some sort of challenge-response protocol with web sites to verify your age, creating a new user ID in each session but without divulging anything that identifies that particular certificate.

I'm afraid that the alternative would be that social media would instead require login with the digital ID directly.

I wish people would stop sharing this website, their research is massively written by LLMs and looks good at a glance, but it goes in every direction at the same time and lacks logical connections. And the claims don't really match their sources.

Their initial publication was backed by a Git repository with hundreds of pages of documents written in just three days (https://web.archive.org/web/20260314224623/https://tboteproj...). It also contained nonsense like an "anomaly report" with recommendations from the LLM agent to itself, which covers an analysis of contributors to Linux's BPF, Android's Gerrit, and parser errors in using legislative databases. https://web.archive.org/web/20260314103202/https://tboteproj... . The repository was rewritten since, though.

This post follows their usual pattern. The second source they link to has been a dead link for 11 months (https://web.archive.org/web/20250501000000*/https://www.pala...). There's a lot about Persona's design, MCPs, vulnerabilities, data leaks, but nothing proving they use it for mass surveillance. The entire case for it being mass surveillance rests on two points: that they interact with AI companies and they offer MCP endpoints (section titled "Persona's Surveillance Architecture")

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It’s good that for non SFW stuff you do the need the internet anymore, just 72GB VRAM for all modalities. Public internet only for news/payments. Everything else can be offline, no more npm or React garbage needed either for frontend.

There is a very simple alternative to age verification

WHO IS PROVIDING INTERNET TO A CHILD

they are liable

there's no such thing as free open access internet without someone paying the bill

unless it can be demonstrated the child stole internet somehow, hacking, etc.

then the person providing the internet is liable for the child's activity

Same if you aren't going to supervise your child and they come home for hours after school and watch porn on the TV

They don't age verify to get cable TV

If you have a credit card, you are an adult

Someone is paying the bill, they are the adult, they are responsible

LLM feedback loops are scary because they self-reinforce by training over their own data drift and vulnerable people interface with the noise and follow the downward spiral.

To ban 16 and younger from social media will require every user to be identified.

The social media also cant just do it themselves with a box, "are you over 16, yes no" they will require to identify against the government.

Essentially this makes it so that every user's actual ID is being tracked. Fully intended to control speech online.

More slop. To think this site used to be extremely high signal to noise

It's easy-ish to verify someone is human and of-age without needing any intrusive agent. One big problem is that the folk pushing for surveillance via verification hate that model and have capital to crush the idea. Another is adoption of some system that works; where the perfect blocks what's good which results in no progress.

This makes a lot more sense than merely assuming that Meta pushes for it. There are several actors here and none of them have the good of the people in mind. This is why Age Sniffing, labeled "Age Verification", must be abolished. It's an entry door of evil actors here. It has nothing to do with age "verification" yet alone "protecting the chilren" - that's just a lie. I am noticing this more and more, e. g. if you claim to want to protect children, but then you have underage people on youtube create content? So how does that make sense if you want to restrict them on the one hand (or, everyone else, in addition to that) but then let the de-facto censorship here be "loose"? In fact - why are any children viewable on youtube to begin with? That contradicts those age sniffing entities.

Share an attribute, not an identifier, https://yivi.app/en/for_developers/

Thanks for sharing

Really seems to be a government issue. I have an app on my phone where I can generate a QR code which proves my age. Nothing else is transmitted - no birthdate or name. And it's based on an open standard. You can read any verify everything yourself. You just can't fake it as you can't sign it without the private key.