Technology

For starters you did not answer my main question: How exactly does any of this stop the authorities from just making the app close source and changing it to do whatever the fuck they want?

Yeah good concerns, same for the chat control thing.

Further: Who gives you the “white card without any private data”? How do you for sure it doesn’t have some kind of ID and it’s not in some database right linked with your personal info?

I mean if its open source we can check it ourselves lol

Sources for ZKP: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/docs/annexes/annex-B/annex-B-zkp/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithm
Vulnerabilities: https://www.encryptionconsulting.com/education-center/what-is-ecdsa/
[Api2025] Rutchathon Chairattana-Apirom, Franklin Harding, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Stefano Tessaro, "Server-Aided Anonymous Credentials," available at https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/513, 2025

Next “recognized child safety organizations” just moves the problem of “who choses what gets blocked” around. Who “recognizes” an organisation as genuinelly for child safety? Who authorizes them to add photo-hashes to the blockchain? What is the official process for all of that? Where is the Judicial oversight? Where is the fucking Judicial oversight? You know, the way by which for example an artist can get their tasteful drawing which is not adult but “had too much skin” for some moralistic type in one of those organisations taken of the blockchain.

Yeah true ... But Bitcoin and Estonia also uses blockchain to ensure the identity of people, because it's transparant and it's immutable, and you have a digital identity without one central database, governments don't know how to regulate this. So at least for immutable and transparency we have the option blockchain but then the organizations themselves, I mean what about existing organizations? How do we know they are not corrupt

Further, you can hardly reconstruct the picture for validation from the hashes in blockchain, so it’s not really public, now is it?! The hashes are public but the content represented by them is not, so de facto the list of what’s being blocked is not public, so how would the public know that it’s actually correct and not, say, some moralist blocking sex-education images?

The list wont be made public anyway cause then people can avoid it and bypass it etc, almost all servers from google and microsoft are already doing this actually, scanning on hashes etc

I mean a very common trick by politicians in areas prone to Corruption, such as public contracts or public-private initiatives is to set some shit up with potential to abuse and then a toothless or captured “independent” overseer - it provides the appearence of honesty whilst in practice being the very opposite.

You're so right tho fr. Didn't China's social credit system start the same way as this European age verification app started?

Further, your answer is again superficial. “Child safety organisations”? Meaningless without a detailed definition of what’s considered child safety

Jup exactly thats why I said with clear criteria but if does are not in place then its meaningless like almost everything i say lmao xd thanks for replying anyway, I didn't know about that ISP thing for example

it’s a process problem and a regulatory problem - if this is not done properly whatever technical appearence of anynomity you have can be defeated by the process side of things

You're totally right and I totally agree, maybe in that case blockchain is a good technical process which can't be abused, now the human system behind it, in Estonia only government recognized organizations get access to add to the blockchain, so if your country has a stable democracy, cemented in law, with laws preventing it from ever becoming non-democratic, but you can never guarantee that a country will remain a stable democracy in the future. So then this human, and thus blockchain, system, and thus age verification, can't be fault-proof indeed

ISP's with parental control modes and teaching parents and kids which you suggested is a way better approach I fully agree and thanks for explaining also 🙏🙏