Technology

I've been thinking of possible ways that you could prove you're of legal age to access a site through a government service without the government being able to know who the user is, and I can't really come up with a clean solution.

The best idea that came to my mind was that you could e.g. have a challenge system where the government service challenges the user to return an encrypted randomly generated value. Each user has e.g. an AES key assigned to them that corresponds to the year they were born in, e.g. everyone born in the year 2000 has the same encryption key in ther ID card, and they just use that to return an answer to the challenge. The government website can know all of the secret keys and just check if it can unencrypt the result with the correct one. This means that the government service won't know anything about the user other than their year of birth, but can confirm their age.

Now two main problems are that, as everyone with the same year of birth has the same key, it could be possible to somehow leak one key and make it so that anyone can pretend to be born at that age, but considering this is for kids, exploiting that sort of problem is probably enough of a barrier to use. Another problem is that this would require you to scan your ID card with every use. Maybe you could accomplish this with a mobile app but idk if that's possible to do in the same way.

Keep internet free. Like libraries.

That's a funny way to say they shouldn't be allowed to be on the net by themselves until they are 18.

Going back to the Napster days there was an analogy that the internet is like a street. If you leave a photo or an mp3 available on the street, then I can take it as I pass by.

Well similarly, if you allow your kid on the street and the internet is basically like the pink zone in Amsterdam, your kid will see things. Also they will be susceptible to abusers and advertisers.

For that reason, we should always opt for local software for them to use, no social media and no presence on the net. Also anyone doing business on the net should be barred from doing business with a kid on the net.

Of course they do, since small spaces like lemmy and each of it's instances would have to implement some form of age verification too, making them either close down, or ban EU IPs like misskey does.

I don’t want age verification for social media — I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it — but if they do force this, it should be part of the operating system. Sort of like Apple Pay and Google Pay where sites and apps can essentially put some boilerplate code in that’s easy to implement and all the sites/apps get back is a yes/no answer. Users only have to go through the process once. It protects privacy way more than giving your info to every “social media” site that comes along.

It’s not ideal but it’d be way more workable than having to provide ID to every site that has social media functions. I mean, you could classify any random forum or site with a comment section as “social media” if the definition is too broad. Things like Fediverse instances wouldn’t have to each write their own implementation. (Eventually, there would be trusted, mature libraries, obviously, but that could take awhile and presumably would need to be part of every browser/app language but also at least some code for every back-end language to store the data.)

As the age verification technology would forcibly deanonymise all EU users, opening a huge new vein of behavioural surveillance data to the zuckerbots.

Of course they would. Not only would they get their hands on data users fully voluntarily give them by using their platform, but they'd get their hands on verified IDs and quite reliable family tie information. The potential loss of users is definately worth it for them (from their perspective).

Fuck this

And multiplayer games, please, add multiplayer games....