I’d say it’s impossible. Minors will ALWAYS find a way around it, even if it involves government IDs. The actual trick is finding if a “are you 18?” box is enough or not.

Correct, as a cryptography nerd I can assure you that you MUST at minimum have a trusted verifier which met you in person at some point (such as whatever office you get your physical ID card at) and they have to have your information.

And then you’re trusting both Secure Element hardware and fancy cryptography where both must be flawless in order to protect the end user’s side of it, all while the end user now carries much more personal information with them than before

There are no registration or registry with individuals’ information if guardians use parental controls and adult sites and apps identify themselves as adult for those controls, check what their kids are doing online, and talk with them about dangerous people or content they might see to teach them how to stay safe.

Super easy. Technology has existed for quite some time and was already used in the encrpytion of web traffic.

Basically: you sign up with your “age verification institution” (ideally a service of your government because they have your ID anyway and no profit motive). This involves createing a private key (reaaaaaaaaaaly long password that is saved in a file on your device) and saving the public key with that institution. They also check your ID to ensure your identity and your age.

When you want to visit a 18+ website, the website sends you a nonce (loooooong random number). You take that nonce and send it to the verifier, along with a signature of your private key (and the age they want you verified against). The verifier verifies your signature using your public key. They then sign the nonce with their own private key, thereby verifying, that you, the owner of your private key (whos identity and age they have verified) are above the asked age theshould. You then send the signed nonce back to the 18+ website and they can verifiy the signature to confirm that a trusted age verifier has verified your age.

The site never has access to your identity and the verifier never knows which site you visited, only that you wanted to visit a website that wants to know if you are of a certain age.

(The corresponding technology was used for OCSP Stapling in TLS verification … and has been discontinued last year because nobody was using it …)

It is possible, but the real goal is about removing anonymity altogether

It can. Zero knowledge proofs have been around a while and are ideal for this.

They’ll try not to have that because data gathering is what they’re after, not keeping little Timmy from seeing some tits.

There are tonnes of ways but honestly, the easiest way is to do it at the ISP level. Have an internet connection you don’t want used for adult material? Have an opt in service at the ISP to block XXX rated sites and maybe social media. If you are old enough to pay for your own internet you should not be required to jump through hoops to access what you want, but kids should not be thrown onto the internet without guardrails. Some kids will get around it but it would be an active choice, so most kids would not. And to be clear, this would be done at the ISP level where you already have verification of age built in to billing, so no additional privacy concern. Honestly, the fact that this is not the solution is what tells me all of this filtering is not about protecting kids, it is about centralisation and control along with pork barrelling for age verification companies.

I’m inclined to say no. Reducing the problem down to its most basic parts: Alice is authorized to talk to Bob, but Bob doesn’t know that. How can Alice prove it?

Bob has to assume that anyone asking to talk to him could be Mallory, who isn’t authorized to talk to him but will always answer “yes” if asked whether she is. So the authorization he gets has to be from a trusted third party; it can’t come from Alice.

Grace is a trusted third party. If Alice doesn’t care about privacy, and is okay with Grace knowing that Alice talked to Bob and with Bob knowing Alice’s identity, Alice can just tell Bob, “here’s proof that I’m Alice. Show this to Grace and she’ll confirm that I can be here.” This is SSO, essentially.

If Alice doesn’t want Bob to know who she is, but is ok with Grace knowing that Alice talked to Bob, she can ask Grace to give her a secret code, and give that code to Bob, who can check with Grace to know whether or not that code corresponds to someone who is authorized.

If Alice doesn’t want Grace to know that she’s talking to Bob, though, she runs into a problem. Because there’s no way for Grace to send Bob a message without knowing who Bob is, he can’t ask anonymously, and because there’s no way for Grace to confirm that Alice is authorized without knowing who she is, Grace will always know that Alice has asked for authentication to talk to Bob.

Adding Dave in as a trusted fourth party could solve the problem—Alice asks Dave to check with Grace, and lock his answer in a bag with a unique key that only Dave has. Then Grace could give the bag to Bob, who doesn’t need to know who Grace is to pass the bag to Dave and ask him to unlock it. But Alice would be trusting that Dave won’t keep records on which bag corresponds to which person.

I don’t think that’s a surmountable problem. I’ll have to think about it some more.

We could go by width of feet… You take a foot picture, it goes to another user temporarily while they sign in. If they think that’s an adult then you’re in. Then they take a foot photo and the next random user sees their image and they have to judge if the image is an adult. But the image could also be a fake. If they identify a false positive they have to wait 5 minutes. And so on. If others need to login they could judge the same image already identified as adult. If they think its not an adult then that user’s logins is set to wait 5 minutes while two other users are snown the image. If those two users think its an adult then the user who said it was not an adult get to wait for 15 minutes. If however those two guys agree with it not being adult then that user gets permanently banned.

Nope, you always need a middle man to do the verification. That middle man has too much information.

Also, if you could solve for the middle man, there is no way to know the user belongs to the ID. It can easily be stolen.

In my ideal world, it’s not an issue because parents don’t let kids under a certain age or demonstrated maturity level have computers in their room alone, and even better, they teach their kids how to not have problems with predators, porn, and the deluge of online weirdness and have open, honest talks about how some things are dangerous because they prey on you, some things are dangerous because they get you hooked on certain feelings, and some things are dangerous because they give you false impressions of the world and relationships.

We’re about as close to that world as interstellar exploration, I know. Imagine having parents who you don’t feel afraid to talk to about mature topics and personal matters.

And all that aside, why is it such a big deal that kids not see boobs but they can see violence and gore? Why is it magically okay for Timmy Neckbeard to watch strangle-fetish porn night and day as soon as he turns 18? Why do we scream about how porn is ruining kids minds but we’re not taking down the grifting “masculinity influencers” with as much zeal as we’re going after pornhub and other sites that are mostly just consenting adults doing fun biological acts together? Why do we say porn companies are evil and not do anything to make it less evil like better regulations and resources since we know people are going to find ways to make and view it anyway? (These aren’t questions for Lemmy but I would sure love to see communities start asking these questions to their elected representatives.)

Our species’ obsession with clear lines and labels is making us ignore where the actual problems are, we build fences around the outcomes not the sources. We create solutions to problems we don’t even want to look at directly. It’s like the government handing out umbrellas to combat the issue with the massive water main leak flooding the street.

Yes. Look up “zero knowledge proofs”

Yes, but your government doesn’t want that.

Even if it works, it’s a solution without a problem. If I can afford internet access, I am mature enough to see anything on the internet, and I am mature enough to decide which users can access my internet-connected network and whether they can have access to the whole internet. That’s all the age verification needed ever.

The request for age verification by each website is purely about unnecessary control and censorship.

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.