[dom96]

This really deserves a digital solution. Let me get a government account and generate tokens that websites can ingest to confirm I'm an adult (and other optional details about me).

Having to use passports or poor solutions like face scanning isn't good enough. I guess the reason they don't do this is because they fear the cost, anything governments price up these days seems to be in the billion range. So the politicians who don't understand how cheap it is to build software assume it's way out of their price range.

[parsimo2010]

When you place all the requirements on a software product like what the government has to, then it’s going to be expensive. Anyone who thinks that the total cost of a privacy protecting, government accredited, widely available, reliable, audited, and domestically produced age verification system isn’t going to be in the hundreds of millions has never actually shipped something comparable.

It is literally illegal to slap a few lines of glue code and say “there’s your age verification, look how cheap it is.” The public would be happy about saving money right up until there’s a massive privacy breach and all the ways you cut corners are exposed.

I don’t know if leaving the standards unspecified is the right thing to do (it’s probably not), but don’t pretend like a government verified solution could ever be cheap when dealing with citizens’ identities.

[criley2]

I disagree. This is exactly what happened with the initial launch of Healthcare.gov after the Affordable Care Act. The government spent hundreds of millions contracting a large firm that completely botched the site, it couldn't even handle a few hundred users at launch.

Then a small team of highly skilled engineers from Google/Facebook etc were brought in to fix it. They stabilized and relaunched the system in weeks at a fraction of the original cost. It showed that the problem wasn't the complexity or the standards, it was how the project was managed and who was building it.

[zdragnar]

IIRC, it wasn't even that it contracted one firm, it contracted many, and the individual contracts were managed separately. None of the systems were actually required to work with each other in letter, only in spirit.

The major advantage of bringing in the engineers (only one ex-googler, most were oracle and redhat, again IIRC) was that they were all already bigwigs and knew how to take ownership of large systems, and were given the authority to do so.

[kingstnap]

A small group of closely working skilled engineers would produce something more reliable and far less likely to have a privacy breach than the typical government contracting system.

The idea that a small group of people can't produce something that can scale to millions of people is just false.

It also wouldn't just be cheaper; it would be better. The "government" way of doing things would be far more likely to be broken glue code with privacy issues because all those committee meetings and bottom of the barrel contractor selection don't produce better end results

[benhurmarcel]

> A small group of closely working skilled engineers would produce something more reliable and far less likely to have a privacy breach than the typical government contracting system.

Large technological companies are unable to pull this off either, it’s unrealistic to expect it from a government.

[hulitu]

> The idea that a small group of people can't produce something that can scale to millions of people is just false.

No. Regards, Palantir, Microsoft, HP (and other government providers)

[Spivak]

What are you talking about? The government gets to cheat and use the IRL ID verification they do already for licenses.

* You create your account as part of your license renewal and have a normal-ass login. As part of that your account is manually marked as being 18+ (or just your age) by the person behind the counter.

* The government publishes a few public certs which will be used to verify.

* Then you go to your account page and click the button to generate a certificate signed by one of the government's private keys. The cert is valid for say 7 days.

* You upload the cert to the website you want to access and the website validates it.

Done. You make it illegal to provide your tokens to minors like it's illegal to provide booze to minors. Good enough for government work. It's literally just an EV cert.

The problem gets a lot easier when you have a country wide IRL ID system already in place and can write laws.

[dylan604]

> The problem gets a lot easier when you have a country wide IRL ID system already in place and can write laws.

every time a country wide ID comes up, people freak the fuck out about state's rights and it being a power grab. people are already freaking out about RealID. it will take a very authoritarian system to force this through, yet it's the supporters of that leader that are the most vocally against it.

[Terr_]

I don't think we can really trust in all those years of stated preferences, now that the revealed ones are so different. They folks who often say "States' rights" have always been the most willing to violate them if it gets them what they want.

Meanwhile, the rest of us should have new fears of a National ID feature. Republicans in administrator-roles recently started corrupting federal databases, fraudulently marking living people as dead [0] in order to kill their accounts, while firing the people who pointed out it was flagrantly illegal.

It doesn't require any imagination for the same bad administrators to illegally disable National ID logins because you posted something that hurt the cult-leader's feelings. The feature cannot be made safe if the framework is still open to crooks.

[0] https://www.cbpp.org/blog/trump-and-doge-claim-power-to-fals...

[Henchman21]

Hard disagree. The Right Wing Noise Machine freaks out. That is not what people generally think. That’s what they’re TOLD to think, by people who have an agenda to sew discontent.

[thfuran]

When you say "license renewal", you're referring to a driver's license? Not everyone has one of those.

[MBCook]

The solution is easy. A government national ID.

The US refuses to do this, so we get a mess. Every state has different drivers license, Social Security numbers aren’t secure at this point, most people don’t have passports.

But if there was a true national ID, the government could provide APIs to verify those. Then these kind of things would be easy for the apps/sites.

All of that obviously ignores the problems in privacy from doing any of this in the first place, etc. i’m starting to think I’m on the side of our national ID given how much of a mess everything is with our current patchwork. But I certainly wouldn’t want to be giving it over to random sites.

We have sort of accidentally set up a system in which verifying someone’s age is a really really hard problem. If a credit card number or trying to use a photograph are the best tools we have it’s clear this doesn’t work.

[sapphicsnail]

I'd rather have a mess than allow the federal government to have more power over me. I'm trans and I would have to out myself every time I needed to show ID if I had to give up my state driver's license. I like not having to worry about getting harassed whenever I want to go to a bar.

[MBCook]

I hear you. I really do.

I like the idea of a way of verifying who you are (in that you’re a real person) and age (so you could prove ability to do 18/21+ things).

I see no reason why random companies/etc would need to know gender identity, name, etc.

None of that is relevant to buying alcohol. If they need something, e.g. name on a mortgage, then maybe it’s optionally provided, under my control. I don’t know.

I’m not seriously suggesting we do this. They were clear downsides before the last 10 years made all of them ridiculously clear.

It’s more I hate the current mess and wish something nicer existed. I think it’s fixable in the abstract. But even if we had a good idea for a better system I don’t know how we’d get there. Between sovereign citizen nuts one side who don’t think there should ever be any way to prove they ever existed, to people like you with very clear and good reasons for fearing changes it just seems impossible.

[brendoelfrendo]

I mean, honestly, there's a good question to be had: why do we even need gender on a modern ID? Assuming a reasonably up-to-date photo, there isn't even a whole lot of purpose in listing descriptive information about the person. And that's before we talk about other stuff that you could list instead or encode as data into a smart ID if you really want some descriptive data.

Unfortunately, I agree with you that while fixable in the abstract, we're not getting anywhere in the modern USA. Can you imagine what would happen if a politician suggested removing gender from IDs?

[MBCook]

I hadn’t even considered that question. Guess that shows how used to it we all are.

You’re right too. Even suggesting that would be political suicide.

[brendoelfrendo]

This is one of my biggest issues with pretty much any ID verification legislation. If the Gov wants to enforce ID verification, it is incumbent on the Gov to bend over backwards to ensure that everyone impacted is given a free, secure ID. I refuse to accept any situation where someone is excluded from public participation because they can't afford or are otherwise unable to acquire an ID.

[MBCook]

I agree. It’s a problem we already have.

Drivers licenses are the de facto one today. You can also get an id card for those who can’t drive.

But it’s fully incumbent on you to do it. You have to arrange transportation to get it, have the free time, necessary documents, live close enough, etc.

That already causes problems for people, and is getting worse as voter ID laws get passed.

“Everyone gets an ID once you’ve figured out these riddles three and gone on a quest” is a stupid system.

[brendoelfrendo]

A quest indeed. In my state, it is not uncommon for there to be a months-long wait for appointments at the DMV. So, you can either wait the necessary months (how are you driving?), or try to slip in as a walk-in by showing up when they open and waiting the entire day for a chance to be seen. My local office will have 3 or 4 agents staffing the front and a line dozens long waiting outside the door before they even open. I get it, no one likes the DMV, bastion of inefficiency, blah blah... but for such a critical service, they're clearly not staffed for the demand that they're facing.

[Iulioh]

If you are trying to find someone who did it, in Italy we have "IO" (bad name for SEO purposes but hey....) and that's basically it.

It mostly works.

[matthewdgreen]

We already nearly have a national ID. That’s what RealID is clearly building towards. It helps to build a standardized and federated database of state ID cards that meet Federal guidelines. There’s an de-duplication system called SPEXS as well as a standard called Nlets that can be used to search the state databases. There’s a multi-state query (MSQ) that allows law enforcement to query all of the state databases and obtain a lot of the functionality that we get from a national ID. What’s missing from this is citizenship data, but ICE has a system called IAQ/IAR that can help with that. The recent “BBB” bill also tosses a lot of IT funding at DHS and ICE, which might lead to further expansions.

There’s also a system called mDL that allows you to obtain a digitally signed mobile driver’s license that can be used in your smartphone. This is only supported by a few states for now but it’s not hard to imagine this expanding to many more states in the near future, especially now that both Apple and Google are starting to support it. TL;DR we may not have a national ID, but it sure seems like pretty soon we’ll have an effective “national ID” that does most of the same stuff.

[immibis]

Problem: the millisecond this system is rolled out, personal data will be attached to it, not least because I'm just going to generate unlimited 18+ tokens and sell them for $10 apiece

[Larrikin]

You don't need to identify the user, just be able to show that two tokens are the same user and invalidate, log out both users, and make them generate a new token. You can sell your license to kids today, but it doesn't scale and is a terrible idea to give a kid an ID to a place you frequent.

[immibis]

So basically how it is today with phone verification. There are websites where you can pay $5 to borrow a phone number to verify a particular service. Except you only get one at a time.

Your idea also amounts to preventing ban evasion by linking a government ID to each account, which is on of the criticisms of linking accounts to government ID. And preventing multiple accounts even when not used to ban-evade..

And are you going to give the government N^2 queries every day?

[zahlman]

My understanding has been that any form of national ID (beyond a passport) is a complete non-starter in US political discourse, and it's all handled at the state level. Not so?

[Alifatisk]

Tim Berners lee thought about this solidproject.org

[anon7000]

Oh no, then the government will know how old I am!! (/s)

[wood_spirit]

They will also know your habits and kinks etc.

[tzs]

It can be done in a way that prevents that.

Briefly, the government can give you a digital copy of your driver's license or passport or whatever that can be bound to a hardware security key you have. Most modern smartphones have a suitable security key built.

To verify your age for a site a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) can be constructed for the site to prove that you have that document, it says your age is above the threshold needed for the site, and that you have the hardware key it is bound to, and you were able to unlock that hardware key. Nothing else is revealed to the site.

Note that once the government issues that digital ID bound to your security key they are out of the picture. They have no idea what you use that ID for or when you use it.

Google has released an open source library to help with this kind of system, discussed here [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390

[beeflet]

>Most modern smartphones have a suitable security key built.

Breaking any security key weakens the whole system

[pixl97]

> They have no idea what you use that ID for or when you use it.

Eh, at least until they require all sites to ensure all posts and pictures are signed by a valid digital ID. You know, to prevent terrorism.

[Henchman21]

What makes you think they don’t already?

[beeflet]

not with zero-knowledge proofs!