Those who are disfavored by authoritarian governments may lose access not just to pornography, but to social media and all of these other services.

Nothing anyone can say will ever convince me that this is not the true purpose behind these laws

Oh no! A contractor cut corners and 90 year olds dismt get the government policy right?! Quelle suprise!

Hm. Fair enough. I’ll confess to being one of those “just use zero knowledge proofs and move on” folks. But those are pretty good points.

Maybe in a future world where the verifier system can, itself, be verified without compromising any data…?

I'm not very convinced by this article. A lot of the "realities" are not, they're policy choices. Just as an example, the notion of the non-driving elderly adult having to be taken by their child to some office to get an ID is just a consequence of the US choosing not to have compulsory and free or nominal charge ID for all residents. Most of the other objections are equally dependent on specific policy choices, which may apply in some places and not others.

It's absolutely possible to have privacy-preserving age verification, but it requires government to trust someone else than themselves, which they'll never do.

Go to gas station. Hand cashier your ID, like you do to buy liquor. Cashier gives you a one time use token/password to the age verification system website. You go there and upload a public key you generate before the OTP expires. Voila: now the site could easily verify that you control the private key and (trusting) that consequently you are of age, without having to know literally anything about you.

It only breaks if you treat everyone as a criminal until proven innocent (e.g. "you might have stolen that key", etc), which is exactly what every government implementing this is doing, which is why it's not really about protecting kids from porn at all but about removing privacy.

In other news, virginity-preserving sex falls apart on contact with reality.

My question is that, because I don't believe it will stop, what should be our next steps? What software should we get now that can circumvent or make as much of this a nonissue as possible?

Of course. It's impossible to implement a discrimination system without knowing who you're discriminating against

this is a paper for the w3c explaining why, not an actual corporate platform that disintegrated upon launch

I don't get it. Zero knowledge proofs do work.

So the problem is that we need to fix the regulations first.

Great article! Thanks! Couldn’t agree more that the age verification moves (Zero-knowledge or not) are bad news for everyone’s privacy. It is certainly a tool for constructing infrastructure to control the internet beyond “protecting children”.