> government passes law that requires companies to age verify users
> said government provides no way to actually verify a human's age
> hilarity ensues
That's exactly what pisses me off about it. The government could have at least devised a technical solution to verify the age of people privately. Data breaches happen all the time, do they just not care about the consequences when millions of peoples' porn watching habits are inevitably leaked?
If I've understood it correctly, Pornhub can't see anything except that you've turned 18 (no names, no date of births, nothing) and your local government can't see that you've signed up for Pornhub using the app.
Yes, this is correct. As I understand it, the server asks the application some questions ("is the user above 18?" "are they a resident of country X?" or whatever), you confirm that you want to share the answer, and the application just gets "yes" or "no" to each question.
This really deserves a digital solution. Let me get a government account and generate tokens that websites can ingest to confirm I'm an adult (and other optional details about me).
Having to use passports or poor solutions like face scanning isn't good enough. I guess the reason they don't do this is because they fear the cost, anything governments price up these days seems to be in the billion range. So the politicians who don't understand how cheap it is to build software assume it's way out of their price range.
When you place all the requirements on a software product like what the government has to, then it’s going to be expensive. Anyone who thinks that the total cost of a privacy protecting, government accredited, widely available, reliable, audited, and domestically produced age verification system isn’t going to be in the hundreds of millions has never actually shipped something comparable.
It is literally illegal to slap a few lines of glue code and say “there’s your age verification, look how cheap it is.” The public would be happy about saving money right up until there’s a massive privacy breach and all the ways you cut corners are exposed.
I don’t know if leaving the standards unspecified is the right thing to do (it’s probably not), but don’t pretend like a government verified solution could ever be cheap when dealing with citizens’ identities.
The US refuses to do this, so we get a mess. Every state has different drivers license, Social Security numbers aren’t secure at this point, most people don’t have passports.
But if there was a true national ID, the government could provide APIs to verify those. Then these kind of things would be easy for the apps/sites.
All of that obviously ignores the problems in privacy from doing any of this in the first place, etc. i’m starting to think I’m on the side of our national ID given how much of a mess everything is with our current patchwork. But I certainly wouldn’t want to be giving it over to random sites.
We have sort of accidentally set up a system in which verifying someone’s age is a really really hard problem. If a credit card number or trying to use a photograph are the best tools we have it’s clear this doesn’t work.
Problem: the millisecond this system is rolled out, personal data will be attached to it, not least because I'm just going to generate unlimited 18+ tokens and sell them for $10 apiece
My understanding has been that any form of national ID (beyond a passport) is a complete non-starter in US political discourse, and it's all handled at the state level. Not so?
My bank has an API endpoint that (basically) returns your name and age (in this use case). It can return more for signing electronic docs etc. and is basically your digital ID.
Need to buy "toys", vape products, alcohol... anything adult online?
There's a 3rd party web app (you rightfully don't trust) as an age check in the shopping cart / user account of any of these adult shops, and this has multiple ways of verifying your age - and one of them is the bank's api, you pick it, your bank's identity sharing page loads, you log in, it shows exactly what information will be shared in a bullet point list, you tap OK, immediately a request like "this app wants to know your age, please verify" pops up in your smart banking app on your phone, you tap ok, fingerprint scan, DONE.
Problem solved. The 3rd party app knows just what it needs to. All of this takes maybe a minute and your personal info is perfectly safe (unless you don't trust your bank at which point you have bigger problems to worry about...)
Actually, they could release a platform quite easily that only delivers age verification, without anything else.
For example, our id's have a qr on it that contains some basic info. Why not provide a platform for age checks with that qr? Anyway, fuck them. Education goes a lot further than trying to force identity verification on private companies when there is no real life threat in play.
Why should the govt provide a way to verify? They should fine companies that violate. Companies will figure how to comply because they don't want to be fined.
cedws|7 months ago
progbits|7 months ago
tim333|7 months ago
In the old days the put the porno mags on the top shelf so kids couldn't read them. That was hackable too but it didn't matter much.
Hamuko|7 months ago
https://ageverification.dev/
If I've understood it correctly, Pornhub can't see anything except that you've turned 18 (no names, no date of births, nothing) and your local government can't see that you've signed up for Pornhub using the app.
stavros|7 months ago
Xelbair|7 months ago
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-europ...
dom96|7 months ago
Having to use passports or poor solutions like face scanning isn't good enough. I guess the reason they don't do this is because they fear the cost, anything governments price up these days seems to be in the billion range. So the politicians who don't understand how cheap it is to build software assume it's way out of their price range.
parsimo2010|7 months ago
It is literally illegal to slap a few lines of glue code and say “there’s your age verification, look how cheap it is.” The public would be happy about saving money right up until there’s a massive privacy breach and all the ways you cut corners are exposed.
I don’t know if leaving the standards unspecified is the right thing to do (it’s probably not), but don’t pretend like a government verified solution could ever be cheap when dealing with citizens’ identities.
MBCook|7 months ago
The US refuses to do this, so we get a mess. Every state has different drivers license, Social Security numbers aren’t secure at this point, most people don’t have passports.
But if there was a true national ID, the government could provide APIs to verify those. Then these kind of things would be easy for the apps/sites.
All of that obviously ignores the problems in privacy from doing any of this in the first place, etc. i’m starting to think I’m on the side of our national ID given how much of a mess everything is with our current patchwork. But I certainly wouldn’t want to be giving it over to random sites.
We have sort of accidentally set up a system in which verifying someone’s age is a really really hard problem. If a credit card number or trying to use a photograph are the best tools we have it’s clear this doesn’t work.
immibis|7 months ago
zahlman|7 months ago
Alifatisk|7 months ago
computerthings|7 months ago
[deleted]
anon7000|7 months ago
brogufaw|7 months ago
Not saying it’s good or bad. Just that it’s intentional.
Culonavirus|7 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID
Need to buy "toys", vape products, alcohol... anything adult online?
There's a 3rd party web app (you rightfully don't trust) as an age check in the shopping cart / user account of any of these adult shops, and this has multiple ways of verifying your age - and one of them is the bank's api, you pick it, your bank's identity sharing page loads, you log in, it shows exactly what information will be shared in a bullet point list, you tap OK, immediately a request like "this app wants to know your age, please verify" pops up in your smart banking app on your phone, you tap ok, fingerprint scan, DONE.
Problem solved. The 3rd party app knows just what it needs to. All of this takes maybe a minute and your personal info is perfectly safe (unless you don't trust your bank at which point you have bigger problems to worry about...)
anon-3988|7 months ago
Everyone that have worked on passwordless authentication is ultimately responsible for this death of internet anonymity.
W3zzy|7 months ago
For example, our id's have a qr on it that contains some basic info. Why not provide a platform for age checks with that qr? Anyway, fuck them. Education goes a lot further than trying to force identity verification on private companies when there is no real life threat in play.
skybrian|7 months ago
Here’s Google’s doc:
https://developers.google.com/wallet/identity/verify/accepti...
Looks like it will support zero knowledge proofs?
MBCook|7 months ago
I, for example, couldn’t add my driver’s license even if I wanted to.
2OEH8eoCRo0|7 months ago
DaSHacka|7 months ago
vidarh|7 months ago