Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.

Once adult sites adopt the system, it will creep over to any site wanting to limit their liability. Banks. Business services. Eventually almost everyone.

Liability the government will dramatize and escalate. You won't see the government pass any laws to create age-liability safe harbors.

Wikipedia is already being forced to fight to not implement age verification. Age verification managed by the government = No Wikipedia access without individually tracked, controlled and revokable government permission. [0]

Seldom has a slippery slope been so slippery.

The distance between government controlled per-citizen access to obviously adult sites, and government permissioned/controlled access to any site of substance, does not even involve a technical hurdle. It just becomes a site adoption curve. Every adoption increasing the scope of real-time government surveillance in our minute-to-minute lives, and its real-time at-will ability to deny access to whatever it chooses, whenever it chooses, and for whoever it chooses. In any combination.

Dystopia is here.

In my opinion, this is terrifying.

We need: Third party attestation, providable by anyone/entity meeting basic openly-defined criteria, limited to age attestation only, implemented with Zero Knowledge Proofs, to create a safe anonymous (unsurveiled/no personalized denials) alternative, to take the wind out of the sails of this constant governmental power grab. If it isn't solved by security minded technologists and the marketplace, the freedom destroying version will prevail - and it won't be undone.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/we-support-wikimedia-f...

I'm not into this topic, so maybe someone else can answer this: How "zero-knowledge" is this actually?

As far as I understand, there are three parties here: 1. Me, the user; 2. The site I want to access; 3. The attestor (google? my government?). What do they know about each other?

Does the site know who I am?

Does the site know who my attestor is (and therefore, for example, that it doesn't like Winnie-the-Poo memes)?

Does the attestor know what site or kind of content I want to visit (and therefore e.g. if he agrees with it)?

Does the attestor know who I am?

Do I always know who the site and attestor are, and when this proof happens?

I'm afraid "age assurance" has nothing to do with "the children".

That might seem to be the issue, but it is a red herring.

Powerful people are ramming age verification through in a way that will surveil you and give government the ability to not just attest for your age, but surveil what sites you use, and revert their attestation, for anyone, on any site, for whatever reason.

Not just porn sites but any site they convince to use their age verification scheme.

Even Wikipedia is having to fight this with the help of the EFF to not force all its users to submit to this.

Wake up. We all need to wake up.

The purpose of an anonymizing open source alternative is to head off dystopia. Nuanced opinions about parenting are not a defense strategy. Not against a closed internet permissioning system run by governments. Implemented by people who are using parenting as a cover.

Your parenting opinions won’t help you log onto increasing numbers of sites that block you without a government supplied key.

Wake up.

We must not let governments use this issue to lock down the internet. But that is now the default outcome.

The problem is insidious.

But not "...without sharing anything else even when setting up your token."

Can I prove that some cryptographic token A) doesn't contain any PII and B) that the token itself can't be used as an ID tied to my identity in a Google or government database?

No and no. So, I do not support schemes like this.

It works for contract signing and payments, because there is a built in incentive there, but not for age attestation.

As always with tracking, the value is in the metadata.

The knowledge if you are or are not above a certain age is already privacy invasive but not that relevant for tracking or ads.

But with ZKP at least you won't need to send your creditcard, copy of ID and address to the 3rd party to verify.

I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful.

But if they reveal nothing, isn't it wide open for abuse? Couldn't one over-18-person's proof become everyone's proof, because they can't tell it's the same proof, and the issuer can't tell where or how often the proof is being used? Or are there ways to construct data leaks that are not user-identifying but are abuse-identifying (and what would that even mean)?

I'm not a fan of technology fixes for social problems but i do think this may be in the sweet spot.

I see a lot of people here don't agree. I think they may not appreciate quite how concerned a lot of the community is about the effects of networked communication on minors. I'm not here to change people's minds, but this isn't a US problem it's a global one, and US constitutional rights views do not predominate worldwide.

Google has more customers outside the US than inside, and has more business with entities subject to non US laws than solely US domiciled entities.

I wonder who or what will abuse this infrustructure when they fail.

When not doing privacy oriented cryptocurrency (cough money laundering cough) with ZKP's, if you really want private verification you are in a position where a single actor can authenticate the entire world and no one will know it happened. And to prevent it you assemble the pieces necessary to deanonymize anyone.

Make no mistake. ZKP age verification, as proposed, will just require multiple parties to collude to figure out your identity.

They can't even implement ZKP for remote attestation due to the auth-the-world problem.

I just posted a general solution anyone can implement without needing Google as the trusted dealer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760492

> How about not needing to do age verification?

Which I agree with. However, I think that ship is sailing. Those who care about this had better find a provider that they trust and support providers they trust, because the perfect is the enemy of the good, and without the good there'll be no way to rollback to the perfect at all.

It's moving the goal post from one entity to another.

You can also fake it by letting someone else solve it for you.