alt Hacker NewsOnline age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
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>An FTC spokesperson told CNBC that companies must limit how collected information is used. [...] The agency pointed to existing rules requiring firms to retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary and to safeguard its confidentiality and integrity.
the very same rules that have allowed literally every single piece of my data to be leaked several separate times, and now i have free credit monitoring instead of privacy? and all of those companies still operate normally, as if nothing ever happened? very neat.
>Discord said it is using the additional time this year to add more verification options, including credit cards, more transparency on vendors and technical detail of how age verification will work
and why didnt we start with credit cards? instead of facial recognition with peter thiel? (this is a rhetorical question)
The fact that these tools are 'active' centric, i.e : You must perform an action to validate you're NOT a child, these will never protect children. A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people.
I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have dropped. So I can only assume that this was the purpose the whole time.
Age verification inherently requires identity verification.
The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.
The entire point is to de-anonymise adults. Especially in countries that are escalating the policing of online speech.
If it was actually about kids, we'd have done it a long time ago. With more focus on things like porn and gambling (including 'loot box' gambling in games) rather than social media.
I'm just whipping the dead horse again. Surely the poor thing is beyond micronized dust at this point.
This could have been avoided [1] if the real goal was to protect small children. No need for third parties or sharing sensitive data that will eventually be "ooopsie leaked totally by mistake" or outright sold/shared. No perfect, nothing is.
The EU is rolling out the EUDI system this year where citizens can verify their age (>16, >18, >21) without revealing any personal information. This is a solved problem over there.
It seems a very one-sided discussion. HN seems to defend freedom to contact children without restrictions. It is a very extremists unrealistic position that causes more harm that good.
To let antagonistic governments send propaganda to children is harmful. To let unknown adults contact children in private messages is harmful. To let children access pornography 24/7 is harmful.
I would expect a more balanced discussion. How to keep children safe is a priority, and there are technical ways to do so in a safe way that does not require to share personal identifications with social media.
If you want a better proposal bring technical expertise to the discussion instead of ideology fundamentalism.
Don't give them an inch. The US defense budget is $1T. They can't spend it all on surveillance, but let's say the tech companies and the government spends that much every year combined. Our victory condition is to increase the cost of surveillance and deanonymization to >$10K per person per year, which is very doable. Every little habit and precaution you take against online tracking will raise the cost, probably a lot more than you think. Spreading the word multiplies that. Every open-source program and protocol spec that aims to decentralize and anonymize is like an incinerator for the surveillance dollars. And if you're more competent than that, you may consider following in the footsteps of Daniel Bernstein or Edward Snowden and make some trillion-dollar dents.
Anonymous and uncensored information exchange can prevent the vast majority of violent conflicts and shorten the necessary ones. Most violence in human history could have been prevented if every human being had 1) the ability to telepathically communicate with anyone else in the world without being eavesdropped, and 2) the ability to broadcast information anonymously to all of humanity in real-time. I will leave the details of why for you to deduce. These things are within reach right now for the first time in history. So we can and should build the decentralized web, and democratize the entire computing supply chain all the way down to chip fabbing and electricity generation. It is the greatest unrealized potential of the Internet, and we mustn't cede ground to ensure the path to that future remains open.
The uncomfortable part is that both sides are right: there are real harms to kids online, but tying real-world identity to routine internet access fundamentally changes what the internet has been for decades
My default reaction to the introduction of any age-verification for any service is the closing account. Goodbye Discord, account closed out of protest.
The second option is ignoring the verification request. Goodbye online-gaming-with-strangers on Xbox. (I see this as a positive). Same goes for Ubisoft who aggressively wanted my secret papers to verify my identity.
I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents. I've not even needed to use a VPN for anything. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but when it does, option #1 or #2 is going to cover everything.
Which circles back to the main point here - if I ignore it, then effectively I get identified as a non-adult. How does this protect anybody?
(UK-based, might not be the same everywhere)
It's by design. Pedonazis have been used as the justification for the surveillance apparatus for decades now.
[0] "Cypherpunks Uncut." https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3hpb
The real problem with age verification isn't the method (facial recognition vs credit cards) — it's that deterministic verification requires high-value PII and creates honeypots. Credit cards are just identity by proxy with slightly different attack surface.
Probabilistic verification using behavioral signals and metadata (device age, account age, interaction patterns) doesn't perfectly verify age but massively reduces the privacy trade-off. Most platforms optimize for regulatory compliance, not actual safety.
The uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.
Of course they are. That is their purpose.
I always wonder if this will fix the bot and ad/click fraud issues rampant on the Internet.
It's curious why there are no reverse systems where, when accessing an adult resource, you have to prove that you are a child?
This is probably fantastic news for the VPN providers. Lots of people who otherwise wouldn't have bothered are now likely incorporating VPN connectivity into their daily routine. This very obviously includes kids.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people only dimly aware of the idea of a VPN who are now sitting up and taking note.
Never provide such information. Forge it if you must
And you could relatively well determine the age of a person, by looking at the age of his social graph. No kids knows more then 5 adults, except over family groups.. thuse age identification should be viable via social login even without beeing bound to a passport.
> causing major headaches for social media companies attempting to strike a balance for users between legal compliance and privacy.
I can see how the problem is real. (Not sarcasm.)
In technical terms, "balance" is trivial. Put an air/security gap between information collected for age verification and the dossiers they have on users.
In business terms, conflict. They have relentless incentives and pressures to collect, collate and leverage every bit of information that can increase their return on users. Legal gray and black behaviors are rampant and tolerated where protectable. The number of paths to a creative interpretation of "balance" is unbounded. Right up to the c-suite.
It is sad, but self-aware, if they feel awkward trusting themselves with a mandated database full of tasty information they are not supposed to taste.
> Social media company Discord announced plans in February to roll out mandatory age verification globally,
Discord’s age verification is optional and only required to disable the image content filter, join adult servers, and a couple other features. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but I am getting tired of the repeated claim that it’s mandatory to go do age verification to use the service.
This lazy reporting is hurting the messaging because readers will believe that mandatory age verification was implemented and everything is fine, so new laws will not change anything for the worse. It needs to be clear that age verification laws would change the situation considerably, not be a nothingburger.
I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord. It’s not mandatory.
I don’t recommend anyone rush to do the Discord age verification unless you really need to for some reason. Don’t believe all of the lazy articles saying it’s mandatory.
Well, that's shocking news...said no one ever.
no shit, this was obviously the point. the people who said so all along were correct, the people who insisted it wasn't were not speaking in good faith.
we, as a society, need to stop taking companies at their word when they say that the obvious harms that are right around the corner are overblown.
You don't say.
It would be refreshing to see someone try to use "but think of the children" to actually help children, instead of just screwing over adults.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody.
>put people into mandatory age verification
>most people will not verify their age
>can't be sure they're an adult so treat everyone like children just in case
>wait what? the trojan horse allows them to monitor and surveil them?
I'm shocked. Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
ZK proofs are the solution to this problem. Its a pity this tech is not taken more seriously. I recently used a product that required proof of country (or rather proof of not from certain countries). It was a very painless experience with https://zkpassport.id/
is this the great innovation that the GDPR is stifling in Europe? (sorry for the snark)
Forgive the profanity, but no shit.
Water is wet.
All for making sites to send a header with restrictions as they apply in law (age rating per location for example -- so a site could send "US:16 US-TX:18 IE:14 GB:18 DE:16" etc), and even categorise as not required in law (category=gambling or category=healthcare)
That gives the browser/app/accessing device the power to display or not display
The second part of this is to empower parents -- let them choose the age rating which can only be changed with a parental code etc. Make this the law on all consumer commercial devices -- i.e phones, macbooks, windows.
This is trivial and worthwhile.
Yes some 15 year old will build something in python in a user session to work around it as they have a general purpose computer, that's a tiny amount of the problem. Solve the 90% problem first.
Shocked! Shocked I tell you! Could not have seen that coming, nope not even for one second.
Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?
You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.
Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything, and it's not some third world backhole that was suffering already anyway, but you yourself that are the worst victims of all their laws and wars.