[irchans]

Even after reading the article, I think there are reasonable ways to set up a low cost system that uses zero-knowledge proofs to "prove" your age without disclosing your identity. I do think that you will need trusted entities and the system will only stop most, maybe 80 or 90 percent of children under 18 from seeing porn. But, if you do this, then maybe 99% of kids under the age of 14 will have a lot of difficulty viewing porn which is a good thing. There may be valid a slippery slope argument for not setting up the age validation system even if everything I said above is true.

[crote]

On the other hand: Are you willing to pay hundreds of millions for developing the biggest data leak in human history, killing websites like Wikipedia in the process, while stopping only 10% of underage children from seeing porn?

The current systems being put in place in the UK are privacy-invading and ineffective. In my opinion they are worse than not having anything at all. I might be willing to change my viewpoint if something better comes along, but if a proper solution was so easy, why haven't we seen a peer-reviewed reference design yet? What's stopping the nerds from nerding harder?

[tzs]

> On the other hand: Are you willing to pay hundreds of millions for developing the biggest data leak in human history

The comment you are replying to was talking about ZKP based systems. In those systems you don't show any identity information to the websites that you are trying to prove your age to.

Those systems can be made leak proof by making the party that you have to show identification to be some party that already has your identity information. For example it can be the government agency that issues your driver's license.

[hellojesus]

But these systems then are trivial to bypass by a person that publishes their private key for others to use as impersonation. If the site can't determine if the same id is used for multiple requests, they can't prevent it. And if the gov isn't able to see which site is requesting the data, neither can it.

[tzs]

Systems like the EU's digital identity wallet use hardware-based security. The private keys are generated by the secure element in your smartphone or something equivalent on a smart card, and any operations that need the keys during a verification are done in that secure element.

[dvdkon]

IIRC the new EU spec doesn't actually require using "secure elements" that could limit the user, only says they should be used if present. It shouldn't be hard to find some device where the hardware isn't present or is insecure to extract the keys from.

Or people could just proxy requests to the device, even with a reasonable rate limit in place, one donor could provide access for over a dozen people each day.

[raxxorraxor]

Nobody is using the EU wallet and perhaps trusting it is a mistake.

[irchans]

So, I think that I can avoid a lot of the data leak problems.

There might be a simple way to do this with a crypto-currency. If possession of a credit card is considered proof of age, then possession of cryptocurrency should also be considered proof of age. Maybe the user could play $0.01 to the porn site using crypto currency to prove that he is over 18. If done properly, no one, not even the government, would know who the user was.

Here is another idea.

You have independent stores where the clerks can sell proof-of-age certificates to people. These certificates are essentially just 20 random Base64 characters. By law, the independent stores are not allowed to identify the customer (who pays with cash). The store clerk is only permitted to issue certificates to people who appear to be over the age of 18, no id required. The store keeps a list of every certificate that they have sold along with the month in which the certificate was sold so that the certificates can expire after several months.

Now I claim that it is possible to create open source zero knowledge proof software that runs on a server for each store, a few government certifying authorities, the porn websites, and on the users computer so that as long as the stores don't identify the users, no one will be able to identify the user. The government will not be able to tell which certificate was used to access the porn. The government will not have access to the certificates. It will not be able to tell which store issued the certificate. The porn site will not learn the certificate of the user nor will it know his identity.

Also, the number of lines of code needed for each program of the five needed open source programs will be less than 1000 lines, maybe less than 100 lines.

I think that all of this could be done at a cost of about $50,000 to develop the software plus the cost of running the servers. I feel like I could write all the code for less than that.

The system is not perfect. You have to trust the stores to not identify the customers and to do a decent job of identifying who is over the age of 18. Some kids will get certificates by copying their parent's code or copying the code of an older friend. Some 16 year olds will look like they are 18 and they will be able to buy proof of age certificates. But, over 80% of kids under 17 will not be able to view porn.

Despite the low cost and effectiveness of the idea above, I am not sure that it is a good idea. I don't like the government censoring content.

[Seattle3503]

Yeah, I think even if we only manage to delay the "age of first porn viewing" to something like 14-15, thats probably a win.

[jofla_net]

Maybe, but as a parent, I believe its an embarrassment to expect to radically retrofit a society in such ways as to make up for my own negligent lack of responsibility for my own children, which I do take quite seriously. Not to mention the myriad of resultant unintended consequences which invariably arise when such systems(of which i'm quite familiar) are brought to bear. Though I do speak from such a position of professional neutrality, as I would gain no benefit at all from implementing such a ubiquitously mandated system. Perhaps if things were different, I'd think otherwise.

[doright]

In my opinion "we need mandatory age verification" is an admission that we can't really address the overarching issue of parents that can't/won't parent at a good enough level. Narcissistic parenting without any added access to questionable content on a smartphone is still... narcissistic parenting. The definition of "parent better" differs between people and is often non-negotiable, even way before anything involving CPS occurs. Not to mention, the content being withheld will become available at adulthood anyway, and can still be harmful if the person has not been given the tools to navigate it well.

Admittedly the bar is far higher with ubiquitous social media and smartphones. I'm not sure a parenting license system would ever work out in practice. Yet a lot of issues stemming from upbringing can cause irreversible harm and I don't feel like those root causes are brought up that much in the broader discussion about mental health symptoms.

It pains me to think that some amount of debilitating childhood trauma is unavoidable, but content restriction at least sounds like an actionable problem that doesn't require uprooting the fabric of society to correct.