If governments want to set up online age gates, they should be responsible for providing an electronic ID system and enable privacy preserving age verification (zero knowledge proofs)
The people do want this crap. If you have kids of a certain age, you know kids that have had near misses with grooming on Roblox, or have seen the comments from men on child Tiktok accounts. It's a stupid amount of exposure that we just didn't have to deal with as kids.
People just don't understand the problems implementing AVS.
I'd be much much happier submitting details or a face scan to a .gov.uk service than all these rando verification services.
Tell me you don't have teenagers without telling me you don't have teenagers. I'd love kids to do what they're told. That would absolutely solve this but as we all know, they don't.
They could, yes. You can buy 5GB of service for £2.50 at many convenience stores. Paid cash.
This is such a weird angle. Like saying shops shouldn't age check for alcohol because the parents would know.
They are also friends with other children who have their own parents, devices and network access. Your child doesn't live in a bubble you have control over.
These are all the same fantasy arguments that completely ignore the pervasiveness of the internet and the tenacity of determined children. 15 years of waiting to see if social networks can fix this themselves has only shown us how much they want to exploit us all. They earned this.
I want it. As someone who’s trying to keep their kids off screens and social media it’s easier to win the battle when it’s illegal. If I have to provide ID I’ll probably stop using it to and that’s good. Shit is garbage. Hopefully this becomes a global thing and we might get classic internet back, when it was actually good, before social media…
Zero knowledge proofs don't accomplish the ID checking that the governments want.
The reason all of these improvised ID check systems require you to do things like submit a video of you moving your face around (which has its own problems) is because they want to get closer to proving that the ID you submit is actually the ID of the person holding the phone, not just some ID (or zero knowledge proof) you copied from the internet.
Classic. So tell me how I can just not deal with the credit bureaus? Or tax filing companies? Or any site that sells my data to adtech, without totally secluding myself from the modern web? Where’s the supposed competition?
What you’re saying is functionally equivalent to “just deal with it,” since ultimately people will choose to have their privacy violated over the lifelong Sisyphean task of trying to avoid all of that. That doesn’t mean people don’t care about privacy, it’s just the current equilibrium in our broken system.
> I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.
> the credit bureaus? >> Do NOT buy on credit. Close your CCs. Use Debit cards, Wise/Revolut or BC wallet. > Or tax filing companies? >> Do self assessment? Go and see actual CPA personally?