Is it still advertising if an "influencer" takes money on the down low to sip a Pepsi not too obviously in the middle of a video?
Is it still advertising if an attractive and young person provides news that happens to be colored in a way that supports the narratives of a particular political faction?
Is it still advertising if you can't prove that a foreign power encouraged a popular yoga enthusiast or makeup artist to post some whispered ideas that weaken citizens' faith in your institutions? Does that foreign power ever care about profit?
Advertising and propaganda love to explore the grey spaces around definitions, so your bans will end up being a whack-a-mole game. Cutting off kids with an ID check is much easier. Implementing age verification the Apple way would even protect privacy by simply registering whether Apple can attest that the user is over or under the age limit, without handing the ID over to third parties.
I’m not playing devil’s advocate, I’m curious what the SOTA is for ad moderation. I’m sure it’s relatively easy to tell a kid’s toy ad from adult ones like alcohol, but how do you differentiate toy ads targeting parents vs toy ads targeting kids?
Much simpler than that, you just ban all targeted ads full stop end of story. The ad-funded internet existed in the 90s before ad targeting was a thing.
You went on a car forum, you'd get ads about car parts. You went on a PC forum, you'd get ads about PC parts. Pretty simple stuff that didn't need to know your age, gender, political affiliation, ovulation status, etc so it's not like the web will go bust without ad targeting.
Targeted ads are exploitative and manipulative, and a crime against humanity, or at least on society.
(Remember how many kids bought car magazines before they even had drivers' licenses? Advertising has never been "oh, ads for things adults will buy will be completely boring to children.")
3 years after the nation of Fiji received its first television broadcasts in 1995, dieting and disordered eating went from unheard of to double digit percentages among teenage girls.
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/world/study-finds-tv-alte...
> Before 1995, Dr. Becker said, there was little talk of dieting in Fiji. ''The idea of calories was very foreign to them.'' But in the 1998 survey, 69 percent said that at some time they had been on a diet. In fact, preliminary data suggest more teen-age girls in Fiji diet than their American counterparts.
It boggles my mind to no end that today’s society collectively accepts literally being manipulated against their free will. See the post https://hackernoon.com/nobody-is-immune-to-ads-7142a4245c2c
If it wasn’t, you would have expected those rates to decline after the introduction of media informing people.
So basically, no ads on underage accounts at all should be the norm.
For example: after 15 minutes of short-form content, show an unskippable timer every third video, displaying today’s, this week’s, and total watch time. The same principle should apply to endless scrolling, make usage visible and interruptible.
Base it on actual screen time. This would protect teenagers and benefit adults.
But with minors it often goes a long way to just make the law. It’s a good instruction to parents who should be able to control this. Laws on bike helmets for minors are followed nearly 100% not because they are enforced by authorities but because the law gives parents guidance.
Anything with zero knowledge is never going to be considered robust enough by a government. Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.
What was that about no government would consider zero knowledge to be robust enough?
So yeah, I'll gladly trust and cheer on the part working in the right direction.
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic...
It says that it wants to be zero knowledge, but it has no zero knowledge implementation and no plan of how it even possibly could be zero knowledge, and it never will precisely because that is incompatible with the revocation requirements set down by the EU.
> Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.
None would be needed, you (sadly) only age in one direction, so valid proof would never become invalid proof.
Somebody can give their proof of age to another person.
In any case, it's a moot point: the correct amount of required identification is zero.
And that is precisely why governments will never implement a privacy-preserving mechanism, which is exactly my point.
Compromised tokens would be trivially google-able within a day otherwise.
It's not about protecting the kids. It's about managing the public's information diet. The latter is not a legitimate function of any state.
Zero knowledge proof and you're good to go.
A key part of ID verification laws is that you're confirming the ID presented also belongs to the user.
They can't just check for "This person currently has an adult ID in their possession" and nothing more, otherwise one kid at school would borrow their older brothers' ID and then use it to register all of their friends' accounts one day.
Why would you invite a technology that by definition makes websites accessible only via phones? These social media age verification laws are inevitably going to hit sites you use, too.
By cross device authentication, such as by scanning a QR code displayed on the computer from your phone. Nearly all these laws or proposed laws only require verification on account creation and maybe an occasional re-verification. They don't require it on every login.
> Why would you invite a technology that by definition makes websites accessible only via phones?
In most or all of the countries proposing age verification phone use is extremely high. In Finland it is nearly 100% for people over 15 and not retired. It is around 96% for retired people.
Social media use is heavily skewed toward people under retirement age, which is were mobile use is highest. Even Facebook which many dismiss as the old folk's social media has about 92% of their users under 65. 98.5% of their users use it from mobile devices (82% use it exclusively from mobile).
This all suggests it will only be a very small fraction of people that use social media from desktops and do not have a mobile phone they could use for the initial verification or re-verification.
I haven't seen any country proposing to make mobile the only way to do age verification. They all are including methods that work without a phone, although a phone can give much better privacy and security assurances. (I don't know if any country has considered this but another good option would be to allow accounts that have existed longer than some threshold to skip verification. That would probably cover most of those elderly users without a smartphone).
To login to say your healthcare provider's website, you enter a randomly-generated 4 letter keycode provided by DigID into the website (it's more of an OAuth flow, so you're actually entering it into the DigID website itself). You then get a QR code you scan, DigID shows you the details of who's trying to access your DigID, you then click login and you get redirected to the page.
It takes literally 20 seconds, at most, it's really not that inconvenient and the way DigID works, the website gets nothing but the bare minimum of info about you, such as your DigID ID, >18yo? And that's basically it.
Which you will prove how? With no record of which ID was used and with the person who used it being under 18 by necessity, this means there would be no evidence to even punish anyone old enough to be punished.
> 2. Have a certain limit (like 5) on virtual ids one person can register. Allow to withdraw consent and close virtual ids.
If the ID is only checked in a zero-knowledge way to register accounts, you don’t even need multiple IDs. You just need access to one, which can be used a million times.
All of the schemes to check if it’s being used multiple times start exposing more info or requiring a central party to manage. We start sliding down the slope of having the government manage ID checking centrally, which conveniently gives them a way to check which people are accessing which services.
In this kind of case, the liability should clearly start before 18. Solicitations/attempts should be punishable as well. Punishment should also be "retroactive" - "oh, you are 20, but have been using this account for 10 years? Smack!" with consistency and public publicity/propaganda.
A much greater punishment should be done towards the adult who allowed it.
In a similar way as buying alcohol or drugs for minors.
Our (Google) implementation: https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
An independent implementation by the Internet Security Research Group: https://github.com/abetterinternet/zk-cred-longfellow Still being developed but already interoperable with ours.
European age verification app: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
This comes up in every ID thread on Hacker News, usually with suggestion that we do it via zero-knowledge cryptographic primitives
However, all of those proposals miss the point. These ID verification laws aren't simply designed to confirm that someone has access to an >= 18yo ID. They are identity verification to try to confirm that the person presenting the ID is the same person who is using the site.
This concept is obvious with in-person ID checks: You can't go to the liquor store and show them any random ID, they have to check that it's your ID.
For some reason when we talk about internet ID verification that part is forgotten and we get these proposals to use cryptographic primitives to anonymously check something without linking the person to the ID. It doesn't work, and doesn't satisfy the way these laws are usually written.
I'm also surprised that people of this website even think it might work in the first place. Did everyone forget what it's like to be a kid trying to out-maneuver rules to access something? How long do you think it would take before the first enterprising kid figures out that if they can get access to their mom or older brother's ID, they can charge their friends $5 to use it for this totally anonymous one-time cryptographic ID check for their social media accounts?
This makes no sense. This is exactly like asking someone older to buy you beer. Will there be rule breakers? Sure but they will be in the overwhelming minority.
No, the analogy would be a kid walking into the liquor store to order beer with their mom’s ID and the system allowing you to do it because the store operator isn’t allowed to look at their face or the name on the ID.
> Will there be rule breakers? Sure but they will be in the overwhelming minority.
Some of you have forgotten what it’s like to be a kid around technology.
Every time the topic of web filtering comes up there is a chorus of people declaring it useless because as a kid they easily found ways around it, as kids do.
Now extend that analogy to these wishful thinking cryptographic ID checks, where you only need to circumvent the ID check literally once ever in your childhood and your account is approved for good.
It’s like if you could buy beer with your mom’s ID once and the liquor store owner couldn’t look at the ID or your face and then once you did it a single time you could access all the beer you wanted.
The difference here is meaningless. Mom’s ID in this case is her personal password which is a lot harder to get. I would bet 99.9% of folks don’t know their parent’s email password.
Don't you love having your government name tied to every single word you say online, forever, potentially publicly accessible if someone configured mongodb wrong?
The centralized service see who I am, but not what I'm proving my age for. The social media or other site see that I have signed their token so would have the appropriate age, but not who I am.
What's impossible about this?
Most people will be doing the whole process (site gives token, person gets token signed, person returns token) as quickly as possible which limits the candidates for a match. Worse, if the central service is compromised and wants to make it easier for log matching to identify people they could purposefully introduce delays which would make it easier to distinguish people.
Most people will use the same IP address through the verification process which would really make it easy.
Briefly, someone (probably your goverment) issues a digital copy of your ID cryptographically tied to a key in a hardware security module you provide. There is a protocol that can be used to demonstrate to a site that you have such an ID and that you can perform operations on it using that key, and can be used to disclose anything from the ID that you wish to disclose (e.g., what country you are in, or that your birthday on the ID is at least 18 years in the past) without disclosing any other information from the ID.
This avoids the timestamp problem because the issuer of the ID is not involved in verifying things from the ID. They have no idea when or how often people are using their IDs.
So far people working on these systems are using smart phones as the secure hardware with the keys locked behind biometrics. Google's made on open source library for implementing such systems, the EU has one nearing release after several years of development, and I believe Apple's new ID storage in Wallet supports such a system.
The EU has said that they plan to add support for security devices other than smart phones, such as stand alone security keys or smart cards.
This allows anonymity, security (no timestamps comparison), freedom of speech and expression (to have independent accounts not linked to the main virtual id).
Instead this should be attacked from the profit side, by banning any form of advertising which might target children. If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.