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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

Want to do something that protects a significant percentage of children? Ban social media for children.

Work out a zero knowledge way to verify age, and implement it. It won't be easy, but it also won't require breaking the rules of mathematics as per most of the governmental requests to 'safely' backdoor encryption.

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> Work out a zero knowledge way to verify age, and implement it

is it feasible? is it likely given government's desire for more surveillance?

personally I think the best approach is to empower parents - require ISP's and ISP supplied routers have means to filter, ensure child friendly filtered SIM cards are easily available etc.

Yes, it is feasible. The EU has been working on it for a while as part of the EU Digital Identity Wallet project. Parts of it, including zero knowledge age verification, are undergoing large field trials in several countries.

Briefly, here's how it works.

• Your government can issue you a digital copy of government identity documents. This copy is cryptographically bound to a key that it stores in a hardware security module that you provide.

In the reference implementation and the implementations undergoing field testing the supported hardware security modules are the security modules in Apple mobile devices and in many Android devices. They plan to support more, such as stand alone smart cards and external security keys like YubiKeys.

• There's a zero knowledge protocol that lets you demonstrate to a website that (1) you have a digital copy of a government ID document that is bound to the hardware security module of your device and that you were able to unlock that hardware security module, and (2) that ID document says your birthday is far enough in the past that you meet the site's age requirement.

It takes 3 minutes to enable parental control software built into every every major OS.

Parents have all the power they need, they just refuse to use it.

You should ask a parent how well they work. I have spoken to a few and as a rule, the restrictions are so poorly implemented that they either block nothing or make the application impossible to use.

> Work out a zero knowledge way to verify age, and implement it. It won't be easy, but it also won't require breaking the rules of mathematics as per most of the governmental requests to 'safely' backdoor encryption.

Have parents actually pay attention to their kids and not give them unfettered access to technology. Boom. Easy.

The parents are the second factor that nobody is willing to discuss because the parents are addicted to the exact same technology.

One of my colleagues (he is in his mid forties now) joked that he was raised by TV, not his parents. I suppose today’s kids are raised by social media. It is super easy to give an iPad to a 10 year old, so they don’t bother you while you’re working. Feels like parenting is a bit outsourced to electronics and the internet

Hasn’t worked based on the evidence, so we’re moving on to something effective. Australia is up first, others will follow, just as we limit access to nicotine and other drugs or harmful products. The data is robust social media is toxic to kids, and Meta even knew about it and doesn’t care.

Social media bans are like GLP-1s: we know that will power is not a thing, so we use an intervention to help the human. Same deal. “Just do better good luck” is not actionable.

“We have seen the enemy and he is Big Tech.”

Reality check is that parents spend a lot more time actively parenting then they used to. The expectations on parenting went up.

These complains about parents not doing enough are from another alternative reality.

Everyone discusses better parenting all the time. But some people forget what it's like being a kid, circumventing blocking systems is trivial if you're motivated, and even if they weren't, a cheap phone costs $80 and kids are very willing to share their old devices.

Kids can also choose to disobey parents and play on train tracks or jump off cliffs or a million other dangerous things. Either you leave it to the parents or you end up spying on every single action they take.

I had a second phone line installed at my parents house so I could have dialup Internet of my own, so I grew up on the Internet through the twilight of the 'golden years'. My parents had no idea what was going on, I was the only one in the household that knew anything much about computers and the Internet.

rotten.com was an interesting education.

I had a good upbringing and generally attentive parents on the whole, though, so I was already a well balanced young human.

Australia has done this. They've put the burden of proof on the tech firms: you already have this invasive data on all your users, use it to ban children.

The German Personalausweis seems to offer something like this (basically returning a bool indicating whether a user is below or above a certain age), but it seems as if the service indicates which data it requests from the ID card. As a user, I would not be able to state that this or that porn site should only see this age verification. Not sure how the requestable data are in turn requested by the service.

And shockingly enough, the EU has been investing in this technology for a while. Check out OIDC4VCI, and the selective disclosure protocols that go with it.

The Swiss citizens just approved a system like this.

"Think of the children!" No, think of the absentee parents rationalizing invading our privacy because of their laziness. All of this ID requirements bullshit is just about invasive, authoritarian control. Hell no!

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