- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly expresses that minors have rights to freedom of expression and access to information online, as well as the right to privacy.
These rights would be steamrolled by age verification requirements.
yes, however the government should NEVER have access to what social messaging apps ANYONE uses without a warrant.
Isn’t that a matter of implementation whether they even receive this information or not during validation?
the fact that they received a validation request is informative that they probably shouldn’t be able to access, however regardless of implementation, assuming causality and the speed of light remain, this will be information the government will recieve. Some entity (probably the government) would* also need to know who to send the response to, technically they could just broadcast this over some low frequency transmission broadcast to everyone, but realistically the government would need some kind of address (IP, fax number, po box, etc.).
Technically this is an implementation detail, however the only ways to implement this type of thing that wouldn’t be comprimizing would involve citizen prompted government broadcasts and trust that the government won’t have records of who requested the broadcast and what number was sent (which would make it trivial for adults to just sell the age identifier) and would still worsen the average citizen’s security because it still takes effort to generate a unique identifier for every site.
If my gov creates a digital cert of age and signs it then I should be able to use that and the service provider can verify against gov public key, no? No information of visit exchanged.
As an alternative I also expect it to be possible via zero knowledge proof https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
that still uniquely identifies you to the company and would make having multiple accounts that are fully separate harder. in addition there would be no way of knowing whether or not the government has or hasn’t hidden another layer of data (like your name) in the certificate.
This would also be trivial for children to bypass as it would need to be usable an unlimited number of times (or else individuals couldn’t have multiple accounts) therefore it would only take one adult sharing their cert and signature publicly for any child to have a valid certificate.