What's the point of giving a single point of information about yourself to a single website, when all the websites you visit use the same trackers (from Google for example) only to merge these data points together and sell them as a package.
Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.
I've been trying to figure out how zero-knowledge stuff would work in practice for age verification, where "when issued" (or extremely coarse, like what year), "to whom", and "where it's used" are hidden from everyone except the individual holding the proof (since that's the gold standard, and the only one worth accepting).
I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful.
But if they reveal nothing, isn't it wide open for abuse? Couldn't one over-18-person's proof become everyone's proof, because they can't tell it's the same proof, and the issuer can't tell where or how often the proof is being used? Or are there ways to construct data leaks that are not user-identifying but are abuse-identifying (and what would that even mean)?
Zero-knowledge seems to be a bit of an oversell here. It is more like you break the knowledge up and only share the relevant parts with each party. And the facilitator (Google) arguably has access to the most information out of any of the parties involved.
When not doing privacy oriented cryptocurrency (cough money laundering cough) with ZKP's, if you really want private verification you are in a position where a single actor can authenticate the entire world and no one will know it happened. And to prevent it you assemble the pieces necessary to deanonymize anyone.
Make no mistake. ZKP age verification, as proposed, will just require multiple parties to collude to figure out your identity.
They can't even implement ZKP for remote attestation due to the auth-the-world problem.
This seems great - one question (ideally for Alan stapleberg) why is this not available for everyone? Seems like this is only applicable to the EU? Genuine question - Why would other governments not want this for their people ? I am sure there is a flip side that EU thinks is not worth more than thier people getting this kind of privacy. But what’s has to be true for some govts to think that the flip side is more beneficial than the privacy aspect. Appreciate if someone can break down how incentive structures are different and hence the resultant choices/positions
It is suspicious to me that "age assurance" is trending EXACTLY as AI agents become capable of autonomously operating a personal computer in the same way a human office worker would.
I'm afraid "age assurance" has nothing to do with "the children".
Will they not just argue that you could share the assertion, and hence we need a 'trusted' verfication point to establish it is actually you in posession of the zkp token, right now. So turn on that smartphone camera right now and obediently follow our biometric verfication instructions ...
more like walled off garden where they only, have access to children and what they watch. so now they will feed them the junk and ads curated only for children so they can get them hooked on products early on.
Way to go Google yo uhave succeeded in your goal.
CSIRO and the Australian privacy commissioner suggested this path to the Australian Government a few years ago.
I'm not a fan of technology fixes for social problems but i do think this may be in the sweet spot.
I see a lot of people here don't agree. I think they may not appreciate quite how concerned a lot of the community is about the effects of networked communication on minors. I'm not here to change people's minds, but this isn't a US problem it's a global one, and US constitutional rights views do not predominate worldwide.
Google has more customers outside the US than inside, and has more business with entities subject to non US laws than solely US domiciled entities.
If you need personalized government attestation to visit a site, then the government has the ability to dynamically deny and rescind your individual access to any site that adopts age verification, at any time.
Once adult sites adopt the system, it will creep over to any site wanting to limit their liability. Banks. Business services. Eventually almost everyone.
Liability the government will dramatize and escalate. You won't see the government pass any laws to create age-liability safe harbors.
Wikipedia is already being forced to fight to not implement age verification. Age verification managed by the government = No Wikipedia access without individually tracked, controlled and revokable government permission. [0]
Seldom has a slippery slope been so slippery.
The distance between government controlled per-citizen access to obviously adult sites, and government permissioned/controlled access to any site of substance, does not even involve a technical hurdle. It just becomes a site adoption curve. Every adoption increasing the scope of real-time government surveillance in our minute-to-minute lives, and its real-time at-will ability to deny access to whatever it chooses, whenever it chooses, and for whoever it chooses. In any combination.
Dystopia is here.
In my opinion, this is terrifying.
We need: Third party attestation, providable by anyone/entity meeting basic openly-defined criteria, limited to age attestation only, implemented with Zero Knowledge Proofs, to create a safe anonymous (unsurveiled/no personalized denials) alternative, to take the wind out of the sails of this constant governmental power grab. If it isn't solved by security minded technologists and the marketplace, the freedom destroying version will prevail - and it won't be undone.
Someone else in the thread asked, as others have, but most pithily
> How about not needing to do age verification?
Which I agree with. However, I think that ship is sailing. Those who care about this had better find a provider that they trust and support providers they trust, because the perfect is the enemy of the good, and without the good there'll be no way to rollback to the perfect at all.
Lots of bias in this thread. But maybe we can have a technical discussion?
I'm not into this topic, so maybe someone else can answer this: How "zero-knowledge" is this actually?
As far as I understand, there are three parties here: 1. Me, the user; 2. The site I want to access; 3. The attestor (google? my government?). What do they know about each other?
Does the site know who I am?
Does the site know who my attestor is (and therefore, for example, that it doesn't like Winnie-the-Poo memes)?
Does the attestor know what site or kind of content I want to visit (and therefore e.g. if he agrees with it)?
Does the attestor know who I am?
Do I always know who the site and attestor are, and when this proof happens?
35 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 75.4 ms ] threadParents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.
I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful.
But if they reveal nothing, isn't it wide open for abuse? Couldn't one over-18-person's proof become everyone's proof, because they can't tell it's the same proof, and the issuer can't tell where or how often the proof is being used? Or are there ways to construct data leaks that are not user-identifying but are abuse-identifying (and what would that even mean)?
When not doing privacy oriented cryptocurrency (cough money laundering cough) with ZKP's, if you really want private verification you are in a position where a single actor can authenticate the entire world and no one will know it happened. And to prevent it you assemble the pieces necessary to deanonymize anyone.
Make no mistake. ZKP age verification, as proposed, will just require multiple parties to collude to figure out your identity.
They can't even implement ZKP for remote attestation due to the auth-the-world problem.
And does it make sense that at least some people do want your identity before interacting with you?
It's moving the goal post from one entity to another.
You can also fake it by letting someone else solve it for you.
I'm afraid "age assurance" has nothing to do with "the children".
I'm not a fan of technology fixes for social problems but i do think this may be in the sweet spot.
I see a lot of people here don't agree. I think they may not appreciate quite how concerned a lot of the community is about the effects of networked communication on minors. I'm not here to change people's minds, but this isn't a US problem it's a global one, and US constitutional rights views do not predominate worldwide.
Google has more customers outside the US than inside, and has more business with entities subject to non US laws than solely US domiciled entities.
Once adult sites adopt the system, it will creep over to any site wanting to limit their liability. Banks. Business services. Eventually almost everyone.
Liability the government will dramatize and escalate. You won't see the government pass any laws to create age-liability safe harbors.
Wikipedia is already being forced to fight to not implement age verification. Age verification managed by the government = No Wikipedia access without individually tracked, controlled and revokable government permission. [0]
Seldom has a slippery slope been so slippery.
The distance between government controlled per-citizen access to obviously adult sites, and government permissioned/controlled access to any site of substance, does not even involve a technical hurdle. It just becomes a site adoption curve. Every adoption increasing the scope of real-time government surveillance in our minute-to-minute lives, and its real-time at-will ability to deny access to whatever it chooses, whenever it chooses, and for whoever it chooses. In any combination.
Dystopia is here.
In my opinion, this is terrifying.
We need: Third party attestation, providable by anyone/entity meeting basic openly-defined criteria, limited to age attestation only, implemented with Zero Knowledge Proofs, to create a safe anonymous (unsurveiled/no personalized denials) alternative, to take the wind out of the sails of this constant governmental power grab. If it isn't solved by security minded technologists and the marketplace, the freedom destroying version will prevail - and it won't be undone.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/we-support-wikimedia-f...
I wonder who or what will abuse this infrustructure when they fail.
As always with tracking, the value is in the metadata.
The knowledge if you are or are not above a certain age is already privacy invasive but not that relevant for tracking or ads.
But with ZKP at least you won't need to send your creditcard, copy of ID and address to the 3rd party to verify.
> How about not needing to do age verification?
Which I agree with. However, I think that ship is sailing. Those who care about this had better find a provider that they trust and support providers they trust, because the perfect is the enemy of the good, and without the good there'll be no way to rollback to the perfect at all.
I'm not into this topic, so maybe someone else can answer this: How "zero-knowledge" is this actually?
As far as I understand, there are three parties here: 1. Me, the user; 2. The site I want to access; 3. The attestor (google? my government?). What do they know about each other?
Does the site know who I am?
Does the site know who my attestor is (and therefore, for example, that it doesn't like Winnie-the-Poo memes)?
Does the attestor know what site or kind of content I want to visit (and therefore e.g. if he agrees with it)?
Does the attestor know who I am?
Do I always know who the site and attestor are, and when this proof happens?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOGdb1CTu5c
This video is very beautifully explains it
I just posted a general solution anyone can implement without needing Google as the trusted dealer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760492