To be clear, I’m not advocating for online age verification. I’m very much against it in any form. I’m just curious from a technical standpoint if it’s possible somehow to construct an accurate age verification system that doesn’t compromise a user’s privacy? i.e., it doesn’t expose the person’s identity to anyone nor leaves behind a paper trail that can be traced to that person?

  • Nighed@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    The government knows who you are. They know your age, your address and know you exist (probably).

    You go to a site that requires ages verification. You say:please verify me with the government portal. You go to that portal to get a temporary id code to give to the site. The website says to the gov portal give me the name and age of the user with this temp ID. You approve that access. Portal sends age (or an is over 16/18/21 etc flag) to the site.

    • Gov portal doesn’t need to know who the site is.
    • You don’t provide a unique ID to the website, just a temporary one.
    • as if codes are temporary, you must have access to the id/login now, not just at some point
    • Site only gets the data you approve/it requested,.not everything.

    The process can do with some streamlining, but should work in practice?

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    The problem is not the system or the idea of age verification

    The problem is that no one on earth can be trusted with that level of monitoring, control and power.

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        Like I implied, the problem isn’t the HOW to do it.

        The problem is in giving any one person, government, corporation or company this amount of power and control.

        And because it’s so powerful, no one who had it would want to give up control by making it anonymous or in objectively protecting privacy for the user.

  • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
    0·
    5 months ago

    In principle it should be possible to do a zero-knowledge proof.

    This means that the website asking for age verification asks a yes/no question like “Is this user 18+?” and the age verification service (like a digital ID provided by the government or whatever) answers “yes” or “no” accordingly, but without telling anything else about the user. Also, the verification service should ideally not know who asked for the age verification.

    So the site you want to visit only knows the thing they need to know: Whether you are 18+ or not. Nothing else. And the age verification service only knows somebody asked for age verification and provided the answer, but do not know which site you visited.

    This is all possible, but I don’t have high hopes this is the intended implementation of any government seeking age verification, so don’t get your hopes up.