alt Hacker NewsI don't want the market solving this. If we are going to do age checks it should be based on public key cryptography, be open source, and handled by the government. You verify with the government (or don't since they already know your age), you get some form of cryptographic attestation, present said attestation to websites/apps.
I'm not a fan of age verification in the first place, but I am extremely not a fan of random third parties doing the verifying.
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This is scary though too. If the gov managed a key server like this, almost all companies would start requiring it. But this effectively gives the gov a very easy way to lock you out of everything.
If it has to happen, this is exactly how it should. Please feel for those of us in the UK who are currently denied access to some pretty significant services unless we send our passport to a random third party.
You're seriously proposing letting governments decide which of their citizens are allowed unrestricted access to the internet?
Of all the 3rd parties who could be responsible for this, I trust the government the least.
But really the best solution here is no third party. The device owner (e.g. parents) should be responsible for setting the user's age when setting up the device. Anything that tries to take that responsibility away from parents and give it to a third party is necessarily going to be highly authoritarian; putting that third party in the role of parent for everyone, adults included.
That makes the most sense.
And, that public key of yours must be used only on given platforms. You want to participate on Facebook or Reddit, then you use that public key to prove who you are. Which platforms require verification is another issue.
But it should still be legal and allowed to access conventional forums, Usenet , tor accessible discord servers without having to prove who you are.
Otherwise , the right to organize is over and we effectively live in an authoritarian regime .
Why not just let the parents set an age on the device via parental controls? Why do we need a whole cryptographic system and the government in between, for something that is really just a way to say « this device doesn’t want to have adult content »? It’s way simpler to have that at the device level, and would enable even adults who don’t want adult content to block it for themselves
Edit: I just realized that’s exactly what Android is announcing in the article, so that’s pretty neat
I’m from The Government, and I’m here to help.
One not entirely inaccurate definition of government is a loose agglomeration of third parties.
Or, less flatteringly, a stupendously large way too loose agglomeration of way too many third parties welding way too much power way too arbitrarily.
No. It should be none of that. It should be a checkbox either set by the phone store when you buy the phone or set during the first boot process.
In this case will it be a transparent traceability and the mapping to user real identity close to 100%?
I want the market solving this but I don’t want to give any information to anyone who asks. I want Apple to verify me once, and then others to trust Apple that the device accessing their service is owned by someone over 18.
I’ll bet that most people are in the same boat - they trust their device manufacturer with information like their credit card number, but not anyone else.
And I think it’s a pragmatic compromise.
Why do we need to verify age?
You can't tell me that these social media companies don't already know exactly how old someone is just based on the enormous data that is collected.