Readit News> Social media platforms have admitted verifying user ages would likely involve surrendering personal IDs, as the Albanese government forges ahead with its under-16 ban.
[1] https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/privacy-a...
After the number of data breaches we've seen, they want to do this, and in the least privacy-preserving way possible.
Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok? Nope, we'll just pick a few sites and force everyone to give them their data, what could go wrong?
And if you actually look at the suicide statistics, there's no epidemic of suicides going on...
https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/populat...
It's just lazy parents who can't be bothered parenting looking for a quick fix. I want to hand my phone to little tommy and turn my brain off.
What's even more galling is that the quick fix with so many obvious negatives won't even fix anything. As a kid I had unlimited time to get around any blocks. It's so dumb.
4chan is perfectly fine, but reddit must be stopped! Just to be clear I don't think either should be blocked.
Make the entire internet 18+ only and put the parents who let kids on the net in jail, I don't care.
As I mentioned in yesterday's thread, an online API still allows the government to track and monitor residents, which is arguably worse. You no longer have plausible deniability when the government asks you to hand over your social media credentials because they now know that you have, or at least attempted to open, an account with that provider.
The better solution would be an offline, cryptographic "wallet" (similar to the EU Digital Identity Wallet) that only exposes the age information and nothing else, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
> Eutelic organisms have a fixed number of somatic cells when they reach maturity, the exact number being relatively constant for any one species. This phenomenon is also referred to as cell constancy. Development proceeds by cell division until maturity; further growth occurs via cell enlargement only.
Umm, no. That is not how a scheme like this would work.
When implemented correctly, yes. I've edited my wording slightly to indicate that.
I just don't have faith in most countries, including Australia, to implement it with protecting the privacy of their residents in mind.
Some worthwhile reading on the topic if you're interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#Zero-Know...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature
It should even possible to construct a protocol where you can prove that you're over 18 without revealing your birthdate.
Zero-Knowledge Range Proofs: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/430
"Zero-knowledge range proofs (ZKRPs) allow a prover to convince a verifier that a secret value lies in a given interval."
That is by no means the only solution. A lot of work is happening in the area of cryptographically verified assertions; for example, a government API could provide the simple assertion "at least 16 years of age" without the social media platform ever seeing your ID, and the government never able to tie you to the service requiring the assertion.
Yes, it could, but we don't have that, do we? They launched the ban without implementing a zero-knowledge proof scheme as you described. In a very short amount of time the providers will have associated millions of people's accounts to their biometric information and/or their government issued IDs.
https://github.com/RealOrangeOne/django-tasks
Is that correct?