logoalt Hacker News

ForHackernewstoday at 8:42 AM3 repliesview on HN

No they do not. A properly designed government app that uses cryptography to generate a deniable token that can't be cross-correlated but proves your humanity/age to a consuming site is manifestly different than Google adtech hoovering up as much of your activity as possible.


Replies

AnthonyMousetoday at 8:58 AM

> A properly designed government app

Oof, that's not a great premise to take as a requirement right out of the gate. More counterexamples than examples for that one.

> that uses cryptography to generate a deniable token that can't be cross-correlated but proves your humanity/age

If it's actually deniable/anonymous then how would it work for rate limiting? If you can't correlate their activity then you don't know if the million requests are a million people or one bot with a million connections. If you can correlate their activity then it's not anonymous.

Moreover, it's a false dichotomy that we should be doing either of these things. The better alternative to corporate surveillance isn't government IDs, it's no surveillance.

show 1 reply
sterlindtoday at 8:52 AM

I have not seen any government adopt such a standard.

some EU countries claim to provide anonymous age verification services, but those only hide your identity from the relying party. the site you visited is logged to the government's database along with your identity, before you're redirected to the target site with an "anonymous" token.

show 1 reply
SturgeonsLawtoday at 9:21 AM

They could do it like that, but they won't do it like that, because tracking the population is a feature not a bug