New U.S laws designed to protect minors are pulling millions of adult Americans into mandatory age-verification gates to access online content, leading to backlash from users and criticism from privacy advocates that a free and open internet is at stake. Roughly half of U.S. states have enacted or are advancing laws requiring platforms — including adult content sites, online gaming services, and social media apps — to block underage users, forcing companies to screen everyone who approaches these digital gates.
A state issuing a cert file has to be able to verify that it goes to the intended person. The state would have to know the ID of the person they’re issuing it to, otherwise it wouldn’t function as intended. Similar to blockchain wallets - they are anonymous all the way up to the point of fiat exchange, where most state actors can still end up ID’ing wallet owners.
Even if you try obscuring that information via encryption, it still gets signed by a ‘trusted’ authority at the end of the chain.
Even in theory this is a shit idea.
Yes you need to prove yourself to the issuer, but that’s no different to proving yourself to the dmv to get a driver’s license. But this is the START of the process, not the end.
Once that process is done, like with a drivers license, the issuer gets no further information on what you do with it.
A SECONDARY cert that contains no PII is what Meta get sent.
Even if Meta sent that cert to the state, the ONLY information they could get from it is that it was state issued, and that it was issued to someone over 16.
The point isn’t to obscure the information, it’s to not send it in the first place.
There is no relation to the blockchain. There is no “chain” here to trace back. This is just an extension on regular old school cryptography. The only provable link is that the parent cert was generated by an authority. There is no way to tell if a 3rd cert was generated with your parent cert or mine
I dont see how the second cert that goes to the site is useful if it isnt still associated with the first, but I also wouldnt trust the state to abide by an untraceable standard to begin with because identifying individuals by their accounts is in their interest.
I get where the enthusiasm for cryptography is coming from, but I think it’s misplaced.
Oh 100% I do not trust the current govt. to do this properly! Like I’ve said elsewhere today, I just want people to know that it IS possible, and the idea that you HAVE to give up privacy to keep kids safe online is a false dilemma.
As for the second certs usefulness, it’s got enough information in it to prove that the parent cert was issued by a trusted issuer. It’s like a stamp of approval. A really bad analogy is if I take an official birth certificate, and cut it up in such a way that the official seal and the year are still connected by a thread of paper. You can tell that it was an official document issued to someone born in 1990 for example, but nothing else. Again, that’s a really bad analogy because it’s not a new cert, and contains the birth year, so it’s not the same.
This is all based on something called Zero Knowledge Proofs, that I don’t even pretend to completely understand, but it’s a whole field of study, meant to solve exactly this kind of problem. Currently watching this myself