[palata]

Good arguments there, and for once addressing privacy-preserving age verification.

I just don't like that proponents of age verification are systematically (including in this article) dismissed as authoritarians hiding behind "just another “what about the children” excuse to introduce mass surveillance and censorship". Many people genuinely want to find a solution that is better for the children, and telling them "if you are open to age verification you are either a fascist or a moron" is not constructive.

Also I find the way ZKP is criticised a bit manipulative. It kinda implies that "fundamentally, any kind of ZKP system can be switched off remotely and without anyone realising", and that is wrong. It can be implemented in such a way that people have pretty good guarantees about it preserving their privacy, similar to end-to-end encryption. I find it hypocritical to say "E2EE can be reasonably trusted, but privacy-preserving age verification fundamentally cannot", just because tech people like the former and not the latter.

[idiotsecant]

Age verification literally already exists in a way that doesn't require orwellian centralized control. The <meta rating> tag has existed for decades. If you want to restrict access force websites to apply these tags, then use a browser that obeys them. Parents control what their kids access, mostly, like it's been since forever.

Think carefully about why a politician might disregard this extremely simple mechanism and you'll have your answer about the real goals here

[palata]

> Think carefully about why a politician might disregard this extremely simple mechanism and you'll have your answer about the real goals here

You (and many others) frame it as "the government versus the people". I think this is extremely naive.

Many, many, many parents are in favour of preventing social media access to kid, assuming it is done in a reasonable way. For instance, having a police officer follow every kid everywhere they go 24/7 is not a reasonable way, and everybody agrees on that. Now what if there was a reasonable way?

Ask yourself this: do you believe that privacy-preserving age verification is not a reasonable way, or do you know it? In order to know it, you have to understand how the cryptography works at some reasonable level. Do you? Most comments I read online come from people who believe and then repeat arguments they have read that confirm their beliefs.

I was noting that the Mullvad article actually addresses ZKP (which is good and a very rare thing), but that I found it was a bit evasive in a way that feels slightly manipulative to me (probably not on purpose).

[mhurron]

> Many people genuinely want to find a solution that is better for the children

at the expense of everyone and everything else all to not have to be an actual parent.

These arguments are not coming from places of concern, they are coming from laziness and people taking advantage of that laziness to further even worse agendas.

[djaro]

Not all children have active parents. I do not believe those children deserve to be taken advantage of or hurt simply because they happen to have bad parents.

The "laziness" argument doesnt work if the people being lazy (parents) are not the people being hurt (children)

[palata]

> at the expense of

That's the thing: it's not trivial to know what is possible and what is not. If you look at the messages in HN, many (most?) messages about privacy-preserving age verification are (at least partially) wrong. Tech-savvy people clearly do not understand the technology in details, and somehow they assume that normies do understand and are simply fascists or lazy.

It is my opinion that telling a normal person that they are a bad parent (or a fascist) because you disagree with them is probably not the best way to convince them.

I believe in democracy, which means that I don't call everyone disagreeing with me a fascist. In a democracy, if most of the population wants privacy-preserving age verification and I don't, then I am in the minority and must accept it. My role as a tech-savvy person is to help "normies" understand what it implies. Again, not to tell them that they must be fascists if they disagree with me.

[JohnMakin]

There is a solution, it is regulating social media companies to stop abusing their users, and by extension, children. strict laws around adtech and tracking tech. more consumer rights, in other words - that’s why this solution comes off as authoritarian, because there is such a variety of ways to tackle this problem, and this is the most authoritarian one.

[palata]

> there is such a variety of ways to tackle this problem, and this is the most authoritarian one.

If you think that privacy-preserving age verification is the most authoritarian way to tackle this problem, then you really, really don't understand authoritarianism.

Now if you have tons of better and practical solutions to tackle this problem, I would suggest you start writing about them. I haven't read a lot about those solutions (other than "just ask someone who is not me to do it"), what I hear is mostly people yelling that only bad parents and fascists disagree with them.

[JohnMakin]

> I would suggest you start writing about them.

I did. the burden isn’t on me to explain it to you, comrade. maybe you could start by actually addressing what I wrote. Or are you now expecting me to draft up a legislation draft before you’ll address my post? These types are always the same.

[palata]

> I did.

I am confused. Did you? Do you mean this:

> [the solution] is regulating social media companies to stop abusing their users, and by extension, children. strict laws around adtech and tracking tech

Pretty sure it has been tried in some countries, and the solution that those companies were happy to implement was... identity verification. There was a drama about Discord doing this, recently.

> Or are you now expecting me to draft up a legislation draft

Not at all. Just give me the name of a viable solution, so that I can search for it. It doesn't take a full day to write something like "privacy-preserving age verification", does it? I can't easily search for "JohnMakin says there are many good solutions, which ones are they?".

[Nasrudith]

If you are naive enough to think it really is 'just the tip' how are you not an involuntary parent already?

[palata]

I would love to be insulted by that, but I genuinely can't tell what point you're fumbling toward. Try again when you've sobered up.

[Avicebron]

Do you believe people should be able to traverse the internet anonymously?

[AuthAuth]

Why should you be able to traverse the internet anonymously? You cannot traverse real life society with the same expectations. Majority of the people traversing anonymously are doing so because they are routine troublemakers and do not want to bare consequences for their malicious actions. The ones fighting for this complete anonymity but not doing crime are naively just sweeping for bad actors.

[Mezzie]

One of the things that I liked about the old, text-based internet was the anonymity it provided. I particularly liked being able to engage in discussions about things that interested me without being sexualized, since nobody needed to know I was a teenage girl. No creepy messages, no looks up and down, no having to figure out ways to turn someone twice my age down without worrying if they'd react dangerously, no having to leave because someone more integral to the group was a creep and nobody would accept it if I spoke up, no worrying about my small statue making me a target for physical intimidation, etc.

(Now I am old, so it's different.)

It was very freeing to be able to talk about my interests (e.g. space, web development, and video game modding) without being subjected to the bullshit that people brought to the table if they saw me.

[watwut]

> You cannot traverse real life society with the same expectations.

I actually can. For real. I can not get job or housing anonymously, but overwhelming majority of my real life interactions are anonymous.

[AuthAuth]

Same goes for the internet though. Privacy controls would be at a government level. All that we need is a way to actually hold someone accountable for their actions on the internet. Websites dont need to see who the actual person is.

[ElProlactin]

You can't. Even if you haven't registered or logged in, companies like Facebook have identified you and track you everywhere you go.

[Xorakios]

Yes. At least to read.

[palata]

Not sure what you mean. I am totally against surveillance capitalism and TooBigTech. I am in favour of end-to-end encryption and privacy-preserving tech.

I shouldn't have to show an ID to buy a newspaper or to load the website of a newspaper. On the other end of the spectrum, I should not be allowed to buy a gun without showing an ID (and all sorts of other constraints).

Somewhere in the middle, I understand that we don't want to expose 8 year old kids to pornography, but I don't think that one has to wait to be 18 or 21 to be allowed to access it. Same for social media. Where and how exactly we set the limit is a societal choice to make.

I also believe that "living in a democracy" doesn't mean that "everybody agrees with me, always". Many times I am in the minority. What matters is that people are informed. Telling them that if they disagree with you they are either bad parents or fascists isn't constructive, IMHO.

[QuadmasterXLII]

Parents need to either control the internet, or control their children’s devices and screentime. The latter sounds like the obvious option, except that Google wants every second grader to have a school-mismanaged chromebook and Google wants to mediate control of the internet, and by pushing parents to the former they win on both fronts.

[benfortuna]

Requiring parents to police their child's every move is not going to end well.

[cdrnsf]

And having the state do it is better?

[palata]

The state mandates laws that say we cannot sell guns to kids. Is that a bad idea? Would you rather let the parents deal with that?

[cdrnsf]

I'd like parents to parent and develop a relationship with their kids. Comparing the internet to guns is a stretch.

[palata]

My point was that having the state regulate stuff is not always a bad idea.

The problem for many parents is that all the other kids have it. It's not always easy to develop a relationship with your kid to convince them that they don't need to conform and have friends.

So I can imagine that many parent would be relieved if access to social media was slightly more complicated, such that maybe it would be more normal to not have access to social media.

[djaro]

Yes, because children deserve to simultaneously not be under constant surveillance by their parents but still be protected from bad actors. Hence we should collectively, as a society, protect them.

[palata]

What about this: go ask parents why they allowed their kid to get a smartphone and access to social media, and only then decide whether they are morons, fascists or just bad parents?

I have a simple example: when all the kids have a smartphone, it is very hard to tell your kid that they cannot have one. When all the kids have a shared culture built around social media, it is very hard to tell yours to not conform. "It's okay my son, you don't need friends. Anyway the parents of all those kids are bad parents".

I don't have children, but it doesn't sound completely weird that parents may say "we should prevent most kids from accessing social media, so that my kid wouldn't be the weirdo if I don't let them have access".

[QuadmasterXLII]

In many school districts, unless you can afford private school or homeschooling its hard to tell a kid they can't have an iPhone, but impossible to tell them they can't have an iPad- at age six!

[roenxi]

> I just don't like that proponents of age verification are systematically (including in this article) dismissed as authoritarians hiding behind "just another “what about the children” excuse to introduce mass surveillance and censorship".

It is worth recalling that "authoritarian" is a relatively neutral label for a political philosophy (like "liberal", "democrat", "capitalist" or "socialist"). It isn't that people are name calling, it is that authoritarian policies - like this one - consistently cause more harm than good. The label is basically a slur at this point because the disasters that the authoritarians trigger often veer into being massive and appalling spectacles. People tend not to be very evidence-based, so the people who lean authoritarian tend to try and rebrand to avoid being tarred with their philosophy's consistent failures, but it is still authoritarianism.

But the productive path forward isn't to try and be nice to the authoritarians and accommodate them with the rebranding. It is to adopt liberal policies. Like letting people read and comment anonymously on the internet.

[palata]

I appreciate the comment, but I feel like you miss my point in a way that is (not purposely) manipulative, again.

I don't think that we would call "authoritarian" someone who would ask for, say, guns control. Or at least we wouldn't call "authoritarian" someone who is in favour of having more than 0 law, would we?

You are being manipulative by saying "If you want a law that I don't want, then you are an authoritarian. I mean no offence, it is just what you are". But reality is a lot more nuanced than that.

The vast majority of people who are in favour of age verification are not authoritarians. They really just consider "should kids have access to social media? Not until they are old enough". Whether or not it is technically possible is outside their knowledge. And the fact is that for age verification, there are technical solutions that are privacy-preserving (unlike e.g. ChatControl which is fundamentally building surveillance infrastructure).

And even for ChatControl: people who say "I would be in favour of a magic backdoor that would only work for the well-intentioned good guys" wouldn't count as "authoritarians", would they? It just so happens that there is no such thing as a magic backdoor, so they cannot have what they want.

[roenxi]

What political philosophies do you think lay claim to these age verification laws?

There are a couple that aren't against it, but to actually implement age controls in the way they are being bought in you basically need to be an authoritarian. Otherwise, you'd be persuaded by arguments like Mullvad's that the social media companies already know how old their users are and don't need a centralised authority to tell them. There are alternatives here that are less authoritarian. Policy makers and the people supporting them don't want to use those approaches, because they support taking a more authoritarian approach.

These policies, in practice, are literally authoritarian policy. It isn't the most extreme form of it, but it isn't authoritarianism because I don't like it. I don't like it because, objectively, this is authoritarianism and authoritarianism tends not to work. Otherwise all the research I've seen suggests that kids shouldn't be using social media. If this wasn't likely to take out huge chunks of the healthy political dialog on the way it'd probably be tolerable.

If it is manipulation to point out that this is part of a class of strategies that have a history of horrible failures, then you have a very confused understanding of what manipulation is. This is an absolutely classic authoritarian "we can't just let people talk to each other however they like without the authorities being involved" play.

[palata]

> but to actually implement age controls in the way they are being bought in you basically need to be an authoritarian

I don't see how this sentence can make any sense at all in the context of ZKPs. Can you elaborate?

> you'd be persuaded by arguments like Mullvad's that the social media companies already know how old their users are and don't need a centralised authority to tell them

How do the social media companies already know? Because they track everything? But if they ban kids, they don't track them anymore, do they? Or are you saying that social media companies should be able to track everybody everywhere, such that they can profile them and ban them from accessing social media?

> I don't like it because, objectively, this is authoritarianism

You would have to explain that. The government provides a service that allows you to prove that you are old enough without the government learning anything from you and without the service learning anything other than the fact that you are old enough, and you call that "objectively authoritarianism"?

[roenxi]

> I don't see how this sentence can make any sense at all in the context of ZKPs. Can you elaborate?

The reason people are getting called authoritarian is because ZKP proofs are a massive and obvious improvement on what is actually being implemented. Can you point to anywhere that has implemented ZKPs? The linked article suggests that is quite hard to do.

I wouldn't be using an American IP right know if my local age verification laws required ZKPs.

> How do the social media companies already know?

They ask you your age when people sign up. That's good enough for me - I'm not an authoritarian. I'm not out to create a watertight way to stop people communicating if they want to.

> You would have to explain that. The government provides a service that allows you to prove that you are old enough without the government learning anything from you and without the service learning anything other than the fact that you are old enough, and you call that "objectively authoritarianism"?

I haven't seen anyone complaining about that. Sounds like a non-issue. Why would anyone over the age of around 18 care? You should consider reading the linked article if you don't understand what the complaints people are making are. The reason you don't see any authoritarianism is you haven't actually looked at how the schemes are being implemented.

Mullvad isn't writing this blog post because of the huge numbers of 12-16 year olds shelling out cash to them. It is because the authoritarians are making a play to destroy a sizeable chunk of the open web with a likely follow up of cracking down on free speech.

[palata]

> Can you point to anywhere that has implemented ZKPs?

The EU initiative explicitly mentions ZKP: https://ageverification.dev/.

> The linked article suggests that is quite hard to do.

It's technical, just like getting E2EE right. Doesn't mean it's hard to use, as proven by the fact that billions of people use E2EE in WhatsApp and Signal without even realising it.

> I'm not an authoritarian. I'm not out to create a watertight way to stop people communicating if they want to.

You seem to have a Manichaean view of the world. There is room for nuance between "let kids lie by clicking 'yes'" and identity verification.

> You should consider reading the linked article

Did you read it? There is a whole section that is titled "The Zero-Knowledge Proof alternative and the EU".

> The reason you don't see any authoritarianism is you haven't actually looked at how the schemes are being implemented.

I actually have. Have you? Seems like you haven't read the article. Mullvad is complaining about the fact that the app seems to support both ZKP and identity verification, and they criticise the infrastructure enabling identity verification. And then some more "slippery slope" arguments that are worth what they are worth (with the same kind of reasoning, we shouldn't have gun control, because the next step is to control everything, right?).

> Mullvad isn't writing this blog post because

Mullvad sells some kind of privacy (as much as a VPN can offer), and here they share their opinion about age verification. With which I mostly agree: the only viable age verification implementation is through ZKP. I tend to disagree with the slippery slope argument, and that "the government abuses everything they can". If you think like that, doesn't that make you an anarchist?

[userbinator]

Many people genuinely want to find a solution that is better for the children, and telling them "if you are open to age verification you are either a fascist or a moron" is not constructive.

We know they'll take a mile if you give them an inch. Ditto with "trusted" computing and the rest of that wormcan. That's why the opposition has to be absolute.

[benfortuna]

Who is this "they" you speak of?

We have age verification for all kinds of things that can harm minors. Most of them have adequate penalties for breach such that operators of said harms ensure they comply (checks for ID when selling alcohol, entry to over-18s pubs/clubs, etc.)

There's nothing sinister going on here, just attempts to prevent social/mental harm to minors.

[esseph]

> There's nothing sinister going on here

There absolutely is you're just not aware of it.

This whole thing is meta financially backing right wing conservative groups that want age verification because meta wants to avoid liability for the harms their platforms cause.

In addition, this is the beginning of the end of any sort of anonymity on the internet, which has disastrous consequences for politically minded individuals, minority populations, or targets of stalking. This is a privacy nightmare bring pushed through in the guise of "muh children".

[chadgpt3]

Meta already requires your ID to sign up so hasn't anonymity already ended?

[esseph]

How many people do you know signing up for meta accounts?

[chadgpt3]

We are talking about social media here aren't we? And accessing it anonomously?

[palata]

> There absolutely is you're just not aware of it.

Can you show here that you understand how privacy-preserving age verification works?

I mean the rest of your message really, really sounds like you don't. Don't get me wrong: I do agree that identity verification is bad. But it is not okay to say "I know of a system that is bad, and I don't know the nuances of how it could be implemented in a better way, so I will just assume that there is no better way".

[esseph]

I trust client side verification to not leak data as much as I trust copilot to not leak data.

Ripe for abuse.

[homeonthemtn]

Sure but that absolute opposition hasn't, as far I can tell at least, achieved an iota of success. So it's largely a self indulgent merit badge than an actual strategy.

[palata]

I strongly disagree.

Democracy is not "they" vs "us". Democracy is not "opposition has to be absolute". What you describe here is extremism. If you believe that anyone disagreeing with you is an extremist and that the only viable way to react is to be an extremist yourself, well... you are the extremist. Whether you are fighting extremists or not (this "they" you conveniently do not define) is unclear, though.

[Hizonner]

Don't be an extremist. Let's compromise. We'll only eat one of your children. We'll even let you pick!