Over the next five years, you can look forward to a steady trickle of stories in the press about shocked parents finding that somehow their 15 year old passed a one-time over-18 age verification check.
The fact compliance is nigh-impossible to comply with is intentional - the law is designed that way, because the intent is to deliver a porn ban while sidestepping free speech objections.
> 15 year old has a 18 year old friend
Adults can be prosecuted for helping minors circumvent the checks.
> Or the fact that other 15 year old looks older than some 20 year olds
See Australian approach. Site can verify you and both government and site don't know who you are. No need for photo.
> shocked parents finding
No law is a replacement for bad parenting. But good parenting is easier with the right laws.
> a one-time over-18 age verification check
it can happen more than once non intrusively.
If you skip the need for privacy protection and just retain a copy of the photo ID used to verify the account? Then sure.
But if age is validated in a way that preserves privacy? Then there's no evidence linking the adult to the crime.
And once that adult committed a crime anyone involved can report it, including that minor friend. It's blackmail material. Better not fall out!
My boss is a. a jerk. b. a total jerk. c. an absolute total jerk. d. responsible for my paycheck. Correct answer: d.
dated, and very politically incorrect...
https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...
(scroll down past answers to questions and answers)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40298552#40298804
Talking about it or explaining it is like pulling teeth; generally just a thorough misunderstanding of the notion....even though cryptographic certificates make the modern internet possible.
All certificates are cryptographically linked to an identity-anchor certificate, meaning buying a certificate would require the seller reveal the private key tied to the identity-anchor certificate, a tall order I would argue.
In the case of stolen identity certificates, they can be revoked thus making their illegitimate utility limited.
Why would your design prevent that?
We have laws against kids buying alcohol, even though kids can (and do) try to get adults to buy them booze, but I don't think that's a good reason to say we shouldn't have laws against kids drinking.
If it can't, it's no better than a button that says "I'm 18"
Any number of entities can be certificate issuers, as long as they can be deemed sufficiently trustworthy. Schools, places of worship, police, notary, employers...they can all play the role of trust anchor.
how do you handle revocation when people inevitably start certifying false information?
say if an anchor has issued tens of thousands of legitimate ids, and also ten to career fraudsters who gave them a $1000
as you've outsourced the trust you have no idea which are legitimate, and if you revoke the lot you're going to have a lot of refunds to issue
(ultimately this is why countries only allow people who can be banned from their profession to certify documents)
So if say a UPS store is issued a cert and they go rogue, we can just revoke the trust anchor cert that was issued to the store, all certs issued further down are also automatically revoked...the revocation check is done either in the app or in the case of a third-party performing the verification they will recognize that there is a cert on the issuing chain that is revoked and reject the cert.
This is how TLS certs are handled too, if a CA goes rogue, all certs issued by that CA are revoked once the CA's root cert is revoked.
As for refund issues, that's a problem for the cert issuer to deal with.
no, it's your problem, as it's your brand slapped over everything, and now you've got tens of thousands of innocent people angry that you've revoked the IDs they paid for in good faith
this would translate into lawsuits, against you
But outside of this if someone is determined they can issue fake documents at this level of provenance.
Drivers licenses for example you can buy the printing machine and blanks (illegally) so you actually need to check the registrar in that location.
e: I get the same feeling as I do reading about key escrow schemes in the Clipper chip vein, where nobody claimed it was theoretically impossible to have a "spare key" only accessible by warrant, but the resulting complexity and new threat classes [1] just was not worth it
[1] https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8GM8F2W
The hard part is identifying with reasonable accuracy that the person sitting in front of the device is who they say they are, or a certain age.
Offloading everything to crypto primitive moves the problem into a different domain where the check is verifying you have access to some crypto primitive, not that it’s actually you or yours.
Any fully privacy-preserving crypto solution would have the flaw that verifications could be sold online. Someone turns 21 (or other age) and begins selling verifications with their ID because there is no attachment back to them, and therefore no consequences. So people then start imaging extra layers that would protect against this, which start eroding the privacy because you’re returning back to central verification of something.
Hand out certificates to porn, gambling or whatever sites, that allow requesting the age of a person from the ID card, have the user touch their ID card with their phone to sign a challenge with its key (and certificate signed by the government), that's it.
Government doesn't know what porn site you visited, and porn site only gets the age.
No it's not. Unless...
> Doing so in a safe way is literally impossible since I don't want to share that information in the first place.
...well then it is.
But it's not constructive to claim that proving your age to someone is by definition a privacy violation. If someone wants to prove their age to someone, then that's a private communication that they're entitled to choose to make.
It is true that if technology to achieve this becomes commonplace, then those not wishing to do so may find it impractical to maintain their privacy in this respect. But that doesn't give others the right to obstruct people who wish to communicate in this way.
Estonia and South Korea I think also have similar features on their IDs, it's already a solved problem.
AFAIU, the German electronic ID card ("elektronischer Personalausweis") can do this, but it is not widely implemented, and of course geographically limited.
Provide easy to use on-device content filtering tools so parents can easily control what their children can access (there are a few ways to do this through law, like requiring it from OS providers or ISPs or just writing these tools directly).
To make it easy, Discord can provide their services under both adults.discord.com and minors.discord.com so parents can more easily block only the 18+ version of Discord.
Require personal responsibility from parents to decide what is appropriate for their child.
In this day and age, of crypto, and certificates, and sso, and all that gubbins, it's surely only a matter of deciding that this is a problem that needs solving.
(Unless the problem really isn't the age of the user at all, but harvesting information...)