You guys should know better, yet keep falling for the distraction every time. That’s exactly how they win.

Add better parental controls to devices, if Facebook sends my children porn on a phone that's "underage" than they get a big fat fine.

But I guess then there's no sending my ID to the world, think of the poor advertisers.

Legislation must call real experts before making any *technical* decisions.

Obviously, it's not about the children. It was never about the children. If I had my way every one of these people would be taken to a gulag, because they are evil, have evil intentions, and blatantly lie to further their evil goals. I am tired of the intolerant being tolerated, and by allowing this to fester we are headed for a much worse totalitarian dystopia.

How come being that corrupt pays off so well when you're a politician.

Also, the EPRS did not argue that they are a loophole that needs closing.

From the actual paper:

> Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place.

The "some argue" is a link; it turns out that 'some' here is the Children's Commissioner for England, a post with, AIUI, only an advisory role in the UK, and obviously not even that in the EU.

It's just a pity they are destroying the internet while doing that. They should be attacking the companies making money from porn instead.

And by the way porn can damage your mind even after 18 so age verification is not a real solution anyway.

The plan is to replace the 99% with machines. It doesn't matter to the 1% if you survive their glorious, great filter.

The great filter is billionaires. It's a billionaire control problem, not a superintelligence control problem. You're livestock. There's a better ox and cart that just pulled down the gravel road.

Then leave the rest of the world out of domestic failed parenting nonsense. However, policy would still likely fail given the cruelty youthful ignorance often brings, and persistent 1:100 child psychopath occurrence rates. =3

The EU won't stop until it has access to all your data, all your messages, anything you read, save, send will be scrutinized by the the big great EU and it's little minions.

Hey, at least we get the freedom of movement right?

The EU was known to be a privacy rights nightmare for at least 10 years now.

It's not.

It's supported by, AIUI, multiple peer-reviewed studies now.

Just because you don't like the idea doesn't make the science any less valid.

In the past decade one of the favored arguments of ultra-right parties in EU was critisism of EU for lack of freedom. The same parties that are cooperating with and have support from dictatorships of China and Russia.

That will be quite noticeable. And tricky if it's face or fingerprint locked, something I see in all phones around me are. Daddy likes his privacy too.

For the rest: rant on, but it'll only reduce your audience. One thing we can learn from history: calling people fascists doesn't work.

Quoting an older post...

> In a benevolent dictatorship, sure, go for a zero-knowledge proof verification as your solution. In the reality of democracy, where politicians are corporate puppets who cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses, we need to convince people to see through the lie and reject the proposals outright while reassuring them that they can protect the children themselves via parental controls. You will never be able to sufficiently inform 50.1% of the population of any country of what zero-knowledge proof even means, let alone convince them to support age verification laws but strictly conditional on ZKP requirements. That level of nuance is far too much to ask of millions of people who are not technically-informed, and idealism needs to give way to pragmatism if we wish to avoid the worst-case scenario.

Even on HN there is been a surge of users who instead of defending their arguments or positions on certain sensitive topics such as the EU prefer to simply smear the opposition.

I write about the EU a lot because I live there and I am especially interested in what the EU is doing regarding tech.

I am especially critical of policies that target my private life and it irks me to no end that some people will claim loud a and clear that I should simply be grateful for what the EU is doing when the EU's actions in a lot of matters that I care about have either been deceptive and/or completely went against the supposed principles that the EU is supposed to have.

It isn't, it's not enshrined in law, de facto does a lot of work here. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure such a requirement will not hold up in court either. Besides that, the developers of the reference app have stated that national apps do not have to require strong integrity from Google Play Integrity. It seems like they took the standard platform path either because they did not have time the time or knowledge to do anything else.

At any rate, I'm optimistic that it won't require passing strong integrity in my country. Age verification will be added to our national ID app (DigiD), which does not require passing strong integrity, even if it is used for more security-critical applications than age attestation.

If you can curiously converse about politics while avoiding that, you're golden.

Admittedly that's a stretch for a good many.

It was proposed and pushed forward by member countries represented in other EU inatances. It seems obvious that governments of at least some member countries want this crap and try to get in implemented via EU. When it reached the instance that is more sensitive to public opinion, it was shot down.

This is why I tend to look more favorably on the EU than on any member state government.

The obvious solution is having the EU to be more representative. I dislike how entities like the EU Council and EU Commission are sometimes used to launder some countries' governments authoritarian intentions.

If you could link a piece of legislation that has little support among voters, but was passed due to corporate money, I would be interested.

Unfortunately, now that it comes to the news cycle, it’s easy to get outraged around misleading headlines.

I encourage you to invest time in researching what the EU has done in the past decade around digital identities and their framing around privacy questions on this. I hope you will find, as I do, that it moved the needle in t he right direction.

It can also mean that disabled parents won't have to bring to life disabled children, which is a great relief.

And no, this money couldn't be used to improve the life of families.

Showers will nanny, sleeping with the parent. What next?

But I applaud your only mildly extreme idea, builds on the insanity of these lying tools well.

I'm quite sure that if you asked parents, they would rather have the playground than the surveillance.

So supporting policies, "that somebody should do something" sure, also my generation thinks like this and the older one. But supporting policies that also actually affect themself, different story.

Because there is also the effect of doomerism. If the world is doomed anyway, then I can at least enjoy my vacation while I am still alive.

It isn't a stretch to imagine that a small business owner literally doesn't have enough time in their life to maintain their own health and run their business. There are some pretty grim stories out there, I can tell one based on a friend of mine who was working ... I think 70 hour weeks. Sounded rough. It isn't actually crazy to say they may not have an hour free to figure out what form they need to fill out and where to file it, or that they'd be too sleep deprived to get it right. Assuming that this thing is the only thing they need to disclose and there aren't any other pieces of paperwork that need filing (which we all know there will be).

Sure if they have to they'll probably figure it out in most cases, maybe it is trivial. But the businesses where a straw broke the camel's back don't exist any more to point at as evidence. It is hard to know.

[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation

Registering a phone number with the official company registry is sure to get you a scam call within the hour. People will come up to your house later to sell you power contracts you don't need, phone numbers you never wanted, and they will lie through their teeth to forge your signature if you don't agree. If you're unlucky, you'll be fighting a handful of scam companies in court within the first year, charging you thousands every month, because B2B contracts don't have the kind of protections customers have.

The only way to live a somewhat safe life as a small business owner is to have a dedicated phone number you never answer and a dedicated post office address where nobody lives.

These kinds of requirements made a lot of sense thirty years ago, but nowadays, with billions of people able to abuse every bit of information you publish instantly from anywhere while you're asleep, it makes a lot less sense.

In theory this documentation can be used to prevent scams and crimes, but actual enforcement of people's identities has become a problem, and the criminals have plenty of unsuspecting family members, homeless people, or mentally handicapped adults they can pressure into signing papers.

Basically, you have no privacy if you start a small business under these kinds of rules.

In my view, it lends more authority to that statement over the other citations in that chapter.

I am inclined to take this as a honest editorial mistake: adding a ? at the end would have been the right choice.

I might be a bit lost on what you/we mean by context. For me, it’s the original pdf from the EU, no quotes.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...

That does not, of course, mean that age verification laws are the appropriate solution. You could even argue that it's not a problem that kids have access to all this stuff (though I don't think I would agree with that). But you can't just hand wave it away by saying "we looked at porn on paper when we were kids". The situations are not at all the same.

Encryption is too complex to easily verify it actually protects your data. Still you use it all the time without even knowing it.

Looks like I was wrong and it's not actually ZKP, just regular PKI. What I meant was that no other details are disclosed.

This is the foundational tool for 450 million EU citizens, so I think is very important.

We likely have different interests.

You can debate whether setting up such a system for things like social media is a necessity or desired in the first place, but being able to show someone a QR code that verifies my name and age without exposing all kinds of other details about me is extremely useful.

And then in a completely democratic mannner, Europeans said "that's who we want leading us".

If your argument in favor of that is that watching porn isn't harmful to children, then I don't understand what all that superfluous waffling about china is doing in there.

Surely someone claiming it's arguable should be willing to make that argument.

For me it's not that it's reproduction. Film that shows sex is not an issue as I see it and I don't know anyone that has developed serious addictions to sex in Hollywood film. However I know several people, family members included, that have absolutely obliterated their childhoods and early adult years by becoming addicted to porn. They were groomed by adults online from a young age and, although their parents tried to stop it, kids are sneakier and they got around it, exposing themselves to some truly dark things. It is not easy for families to recover from having dealt with a child with serious addiction issues.

I think it's pretty silly to argue that systemic protections are ineffective and overreach whereas the efforts of one or two parents should be enough and are the correct level of enforcement for the protection of children. The parents of the people I know went to extremes to protect their children and they were mostly unsuccessful.

Upd: are they able to use VPN when the Internet is in so-called "white-list mode" where only certain websites are available?

Also, yea, no anonymity is the problem. Why would you want your government to be able to track every single website you've ever visited -- especially considering we're talking about an autocratic regime?

I'm astonished at the naivety on display on a community called "Hacker news."

If only being associated with pedophilia and nazis was still something that had to be avoided because it would be career ending otherwise.

If this actually works then it should work in both directions, right?

Example: Many websites are malicious or adversarial, therefore anything enabling a service to discern whether the user is a vulnerable child is a boon to website-operating pedos and needs to be eliminated. The law should inhibit predatory services from being able to discern the user's age, to protect the children.

No matter what you (as population) say it will get implemented. If you don't, then they will put sanctions on Poland, withdraw financial partnerships, etc. Like with migrants, they are going to be sent there, even if Polish people vote against.

No matter if you are in favor or against, raising the topic will just make you socially be isolated or even legally punished in some places.

Sad for democracy and free speech.

EDIT: clarified about migrant policy and the decision of countries to choose or not

To the EU regulators: we don't need another Stasi, we already have Google and Meta to worry about, thank you.

Also, to regulate in my native language is just a nice way to say the f word, if this conversation is about porn.

It was still the job of the parents to set the bed times etc, but at least this was something the parents could actually control.

And for pay-per-view stations with actual heavily violent or pornographic content: Yes, they were absolutely age-gated, usually via a PIN.

You sure about that? )))

> Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet.

Are they above the age of 16? Because then you're either Amish or out of touch.

There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already.

Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that.

Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse.

1. Context is “EU digital identity”. For a decade EU asked researcher how to have a way to verify age only, without extra data leaking. They have a working solution, and it’s the one rolling out to EU citizens.

2. This document talks about VPNs because they have been bought up recently as “how to skip age verification tools”. It is a legitimate concern. Every EU citizen has/will-have a privacy safe wallet to prove age, users from other nations will not, EU minors can just VPN to nation X, and skip age verification.

3. The org producing this doc outlines that yeah, the above is true. It’s actually a balanced doc. Each of us would have written a different one, sure. I likely would have liked “yours” better, since I think we feel we share common values. I’m just saying i don’t thing it is misrepresenting reality. The doc targets eu legislators, likely not tech savvy.

This is not about restricting access to VPNs, this is about outlining that they exists, that they have an impact on solutions proposed for age-verification. Did it not exists, it would reinforce that eu votes on shot without having any grasp on what is at stake.

I actually agree with you: I see civic liberties under attack way too often (and try to contribute as much as possible to upholding them).

But by large, the EU has done a good job at upholding those freedoms. Repeated attacks on those freedoms have been rejected when it was time to vote (in the EU parliament!!!). This makes me confident in the process.

Yes, of course, we can always have “better”, but at some point calling out as fascists some legislators trying to understand what’s the relationship between VPNs and age verification seems to me as the opposite of wanting them to be better educated.

To precisely answer the “restrict access to VPNs”, no of course that’s not “good”. But I like the fact that EU legislator get to read that document, instead/on-top of some partisan mumbo jumbo from whatever news outlet.

Maybe some want more control, but most certainly not everybody.

> so that pervasive monitoring

If you haven't gotten the memo, pervasive monitoring already exists. To sell ads.

> or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized

For age verification, it's possible to do it in a privacy-preserving manner. Now people spend their time complaining about the idea and claiming that all who disagree are extremists, so it doesn't help. But we could instead try to push for privacy-preserving age verification.

Is this an alien concept to you?

The rise of authoritarianism? Inequality? Revival of geopolitical "realism"? Decrease in empathy and holistic thinking? Increasing willingness of the general population to engage in political adventurism? Accelerating resource consumption (and decelerating resource stocks).

And if you consider none of those "real" problems, I know some people seem to have forgotten about it, but what about climate change? Given the half-life of CO2 and methane, that's a problem as "real" as they get.

I care about far more than privacy. These matters are about societal stability, the panopticon, societal robustness in cases of downturns or wars, the ability to counter the mass control capabilities of artificial intelligence - and much more.

> Android being locked down is the worst case scenario: private companies makes rules, an update is pushed, no platform for discourse.

Personally I'm blaming the lock-down on Android just as much on governments as I do Google, because I believe that they have failed greatly at finding ways to interact with modern technology. Instead of heaping ever more complicated requirements on the platform providers and issuing arbitrary fines, they could likely achieve much more by doing less - e.g. by saying "anyone must be allowed to run the software they want on the device that they own" and "when a person pays for a device they own the device" (I believe there are many other answers to this question that would scale far better than current approaches). Fundamentally, a big part of the problem is the many responsibilities and goals of the government where some of them run counter to allowing such freedoms.

> I like this! It's not "perfect", but i prefer this 1000 times over "let Google verify my age".

Personally I think this should be solved to a satisfactory degree by simply requiring anyone that wants to provide access to content that by law is age restricted to simply advertise this with headers similar to CORS that browsers must respect, such that the configuration of the browser blocks access to those not of age. It is then the responsibility of the parents to configure the devices of their children such that they cannot access age restricted content. It makes perfect sense to have a "child mode" for browsers and operating systems, where the person configuring the setup makes this determination without involving centrally approved systems. To the degree that such a solution would have workarounds I'm absolutely not convinced that the detriments of this is worth the additional costs on restricting the freedom of citizens.

> Now to tech details. Locking down network is impossible as long as decentralization is possible.

This is a plain incorrect view at scale. If the EU decides to either ban E2EE/require client-side scanning/require backdoors, then all major chat applications will have to adhere to this, and it will no longer be practical or possible to have an application like Signal installed on your phone. This means that when being investigated by the police, or e.g. when traveling and being searched, you will be breaking the law by having such an application and will by default be a criminal. The magical part of digital fascism is exactly that it is very effectively enforceable at scale. If you require all computers to only run software that is approved by the government, and you outlaw software that allow unsurveilled communication, then digital fascism allows you to enforce this to a previously unseen degree, exactly because you can prevent any computer from being allowed to run it.

These are quantum differences - not differences of better vs worse. They are also differences of societal and technological lock-in - as once you give up the ability to communicate freely you may never get it back. Right now; Tor, VPNs, Signal, are all legal to use within the EU. However, if you make them illegal and you enforce computers, operating systems, and networks to disallow them, then it becomes far more difficult for anyone to work outside the allowed bounds, both due to technical difficulty as well as criminal liability. This is digital fascism.

They’d just get an older sibling, or stranger to buy it. Or they’d have a fake ID. Or they’d just steal it from a family member.

But you know which kids did this the least? It was the ones where their parents / guardians took their responsibilities as a guardian properly.

What "national security" implications are there with VPNs?

No.

:/

https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...

>Almost seven in ten (69%) support age verification checks on platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography.

Sometimes the majority is going to make a decision that you do not like, oh well, that is the cost of living in a democracy. People in "terminally online" spaces like HN vastly underestimate the popularity of these laws.

I completely disagree with you, but at least we clearly know why.

"Being a hacker" does not mean "being stuck in the 80s", IMO. If TooBigTech cryptographically controls everything, it becomes harder to hack. Are you aware that the biggest restriction against jailbreaking stuff is that it was made super illegal... because it helps corporations?

Do you understand now? Or will you only understand when you get fired from your job and they won't tell you the reason?

I totally agree. That can be used as an argument in favour of age verification, though.

To clarify my point: I'm not saying that eating disorders don't harm one's body, but that's a mental health condition.

Well it exists in Privacy Pass, which is deployed in production. And there are countries that are currently actively looking into privacy-preserving age verification. I don't think that "I keep saying that age verification fundamentally leaks your ID, which is wrong, but it's still valid because nobody will notice" is a good argument.

> The only privacy-preserving (effective) age verification is asking user if they are over 18 and requiring that they answer truthfully under penalty of perjury.

I disagree, I think that there could be a sane debate around ZK age verification, if we could elevate it to that.

Our kids have access to social media, but we also know what they have access to because we check their phones periodically.

This is a far better approach than an “all or nothing” approach because we are giving the kids the freedom to learn how to use these tools maturely. But without removing any safety nets for if/when our kids (or any other kids in their social circles) fail to use such tools responsibly.

That’s called “parenting”.

Censoring access to tools, either via government regulations or over zealous parenting, doesn’t teach children anything. Whereas allowing kids to learn to use the tools but being around to support and help them grow when mistakes are made, is precisely what responsible parents should be doing.

And that’s the same approach you should take with learning anything as a child. You give them guidance and allow them to make mistakes but be there to support them. Kids don’t learn to ride a bike from telling them “bikes are dangerous” then suddenly when they’re 16 handing them a bike and telling them to ride it to colleague. So why are you treating social media like that?

No, I'm talking about cryptography. That is, maths.

When I say that it is possible to encrypt a message in a way that only the receiver can read it, and the server relaying it cannot, it is not an opinion. I am stating a fact. Zero knowledge proofs are maths, too.

> What do you mean by "it is possible"?

I mean that there are maths that do exist that enable it. There is code that is already written that does it every day. It does exist.

But nobody can be arsed to spend a few minutes getting informed before complaining. It's not just cryptography: people who are very vocal against 5G usually believe that "it boils your blood" or some variant of it, people who are very vocal against vaccination usually have absolutely no idea how it works, that's just how it is. It is frustrating, I guess I just have to accept it.

Saying "it's not possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner" is like saying "it's not possible to deploy 5G in a way that doesn't burn people": it is at best uninformed, possibly just manipulative. Sure, it's possible to burn someone with a strong enough radio signal. But the fact remains that it is possible to deploy 5G in a way that does not burn people, and 5G is nothing special in that regard (it's just "electromagnetic waves", which is a well-known physics concept).

There would be a sane debate to have around 5G (e.g. ultra-consumerism or whatever), but I have never, EVER heard it. The 5G debate is "uninformed people claiming it boils your blood" versus people who find it useful and rightly don't believe the bullshit claims of the first group.

The age verification debate is "uninformed people claiming that it is impossible" versus people who find it useful, and can rightly dismiss the claims of the first group, because really, it is possible.

Nobody says "we ban it for children and then expect them to use it responsibly". Just like for cigarettes. It's never responsible to smoke, it's just that we as a society choose to let adults stink and ruin their health if they want to. But for kids, we a society believe that they are vulnerable and may smoke without realising how stupid and unhealthy it is, so we want to protect them until they reach an age where it becomes harder to justify preventing people from taking those stupid decisions.

For social media it's exactly the same: the goal is to protect the children while they are vulnerable, until they reach an age where it becomes harder to justify. Not that many (most?) adults are wasting a big part of their life swiping utterly stupid stuff on their smartphone, but banning social media for adults is a completely different discussion.

The thing is, if a kid is the only one in their class to not have a smartphone or to not have access to social media, they are in an uncomfortable situation and that puts pressure on the parents to give them access to those, so that they can conform. A big part of being a kid is to conform: being an outlier is a risk. One reason for age verification is to prevent enough kids to access social media, such that "the norm" is suddenly not to have access to social media anymore.

You can disagree with that, but at least you could acknowledge the argument instead of going around it and talking like if there was absolutely no way a sane person could imagine that banning social media for kids could ever be constructive.