that is interesting, thanks.

Why isn't it necessary to prove that the person at the keyboard is the person in the ID? That seems like the minimum bar for entry to this problem. Otherwise we can automate the ID checks and the bots can identify as humans no problem.

And how come the UK is failing so badly at this?

Germany has this. The card plus PIN technically proves you are in current possession of both, not that you are the person (no biometrics or the like). You can chose to share/request not only certain data fields but also eg if you are below or above a certain age or height without disclosing the actual number.

> UK is in this weird place where there isn't one kind of ID that everyone has - for most people it's the driving licence, but obviously that's not good enough.

As a Brit I personally went through a phase of not really existing — no credit card, no driving licence, expired passport - so I know how annoying this can be.

But it’s worth noting that we have this situation not because of mismanagement or technical illiteracy or incompetence but because of a pretty ingrained (centuries old) political and cultural belief that the police shouldn’t be able to ask you “papers please”. We had ID cards in World War II, everyone found them egregious and they were scrapped. It really will be discussed in those terms each time it is mentioned, and it really does come down to this original aspect of policing by consent.

So the age verification thing is running up against this lack of a pervasive ID, various KYC situations also do, we can get an ID card to satisfy verification for in-person voting if we have no others, but it is not proof of identity anywhere else, etc.

It is frustrating to people who do not have that same cultural touchstone but the “no to ID” attitude is very very normal; generally the UK prefers this idea of contextual, rather than universal ID. It’s a deliberate design choice.

>UK is in this weird place where there isn't one kind of ID that everyone has - for most people it's the driving licence, but obviously that's not good enough

The US also lacks a national ID, but as a non-driver myself, this is handled by things called variously by state a "state ID" or a "non-driver's driving license". These look exactly like driver's licenses and can be used wherever those can for ID (like for flying) except for a line saying "not valid for driving".

I have a wonderful new idea for this problem space based on your username.

How about a chip implant signed by the government hospital that attests for your vitality? Looks like this is where things are headed

"In Europe" is technically true but makes it sound more widely used than I believe it to be... though maybe my knowledge is out of date.

Their website lists 24 supported countries (including some non-EU like UK and Norway, and missing a few of the 27 EU countries) - https://www.itsme-id.com/en-GB/coverage

But does it actually have much use outside of Belgium?

Certainly in the UK I've never come across anyone, government or private business, mentioning it - even since the law passed requiring many sites to verify that visitors are adults. I wouldn't even be familiar with the name if I hadn't learned about its being used in Belgium.

Maybe some other countries are now using it, beyond just Belgium?

One problem with solutions like that is the the website needs to pay for every log in. So you save a few dollars blocking scrapers but now you have to pay thousands of dollars to this company instead.

Im from europe I never heard about it

In Singapore, we have SingPass, which is also an OpenID Connect implementation.

Except that itsme crap is not from the government and doesn't support activation on anything but a Windows / Mac machine. No Linux support at all, while the Belgian government stuff (CSAM) supports Linux just fine.

> your own damn toaster

Silly you, joking around like that. Can you imagine owning a toaster?! Sooo inconvenient and unproductive! Guess, if you change your housing plan, you gonna bring it along like an infectious tick? Hahah — no thank you! :D

You will own nothing and you will be happy!

(Please be reminded, failing behavioral compliance with, and/or voicing disapproval of this important moral precept, jokingly or not, is in violation of your citizenship subscription's general terms and conditions. This incident will be reported. Customer services will assist you within 48 hours. Please, do not leave your base zone until this issue has been resolved to your satisfaction.)

No worries. Stick an unregistered copy of win 11 (ms doesn’t seem to care) and your drivers license in an isolated VM and let the AI RDP into it for you.

Manually browsing the web yourself will probably be trickier moving forward though.

> This is not the future I want, but we can't have nice things.

Actually, we can if we collectively decide that we should have them. Refuse to use sites that require these technologies and demand governments to solve the issue in better ways, e.g. by ensuring there are legal consequences for abusive corporations.

But I don't get how is goes for spam or scrapping: if I can pass the test "anonymously", then what prevents me from doing it for illegal purposes?

I get it for age verification: it is difficult for a child to get a token that says they are allowed to access porn because adults around them don't want them to access porn (and even though one could sell tokens online, it effectively makes it harder to access porn as a child).

But how does it prevent someone from using their ID to get tokens for their scrapper? If it's anonymous, then there is no risk in doing it, is there?

There isn't a technical solution to this: governments and providers not only want proof of identity matching IDs, they want proof of life, too.

This will always end with live video of the person requesting to log in to provide proof of life at the very least, and if they're lazy/want more data, they'll tie in their ID verification process to their video pipeline.

Such schemes have the fatal flaw that they can be trivially abused. All you need are a couple of stolen/sold identities and bots start proving their humanness and adultness to everyone.

I did think asymmetric cryptography but I assumed the validators would be third parties / individual websites and therefore connections could be made using your public key. But I guess having the government itself provide the authentication service makes more sense.

I wonder if they'd actually honor 1 instead of forcing recipients to be registered, as presumably they'd be interested in tracking user activity.

How would it prevent you from renting your identity out to a bot farm?

I think social media platforms should have the ability to effectively ban abusive users, and I’m pretty sure that’s a mainstream viewpoint shared by most people.

The alternative is that you think people should be able to use social media platforms in ways that violate their rules, and that the platforms should not be able to refuse service to these users. I don’t think that’s a justifiable position to take, but I’m open to hearing an argument for it. Simply calling it “hellish” isn’t an argument.

And can you clarify if your position accounts for spammers? Because as far as I can see, your position is very clearly “spammers should be allowed to spam”.

The alternative would have far less support from the public.

And if they are as successful as they are threatening to be, they will have destroyed so many jobs that I am sure they will find a few thousand people across the world who will accept a stipend to loan their essence to the machine.

It depends on your precise requirements and assumptions.

Does your definition of 'privacy-preserving' distrust Google, Apple, Xiaomi, HTC, Honor, Samsung and suchlike?

Do you also distrust third-party clowns like experian and equifax (whose current systems have gaping security holes) and distrust large government IT projects (which are outsourced to clowns like Fujutsu who don't know what they're doing) ??

Do you require it to work on all devices, including outdated phones and tablets; PCs; Linux-only devices; other networked devices like smart lightbulbs; and so on? Does it have to work in places phones aren't allowed, or mobile data/bluetooth isn't available? Does the identity card have to be as thin, flexible, durable and cheap as a credit card, precluding any built-in fingerprint sensors and suchlike?

Does the age validation have to protect against an 18-year-old passing the age check on their 16-year-old friend's account? While also being privacy-preserving enough nobody can tell the two accounts were approved with the same ID card?

Does the system also have to work on websites without user accounts, because who the hell creates a pornhub account anyway?

Does the system need to work without the government approving individual websites' access to the system? Does it also need to be support proving things like name, nationality, and right to work in the country so people can apply for bank accounts and jobs online? And yet does it need to prevent sites from requiring names just for ad targeting purposes?

Do all approvals have to be provable, so every company can prove to the government that the checks were properly carried out at the right time? Does it have to be possible to revoke cards in a timely manner, but without maintaining a huge list of revoked cards, and without every visit to a porn site triggering a call to a government server for a revocation check?

If you want to accomplish all of these goals - you're going to have a tough time.

I am not implying anything and mean only what I directly said.

More specifically, I do not know if a privacy preserving method exists. This is different from thinking that it doesn't exist.

While the question of "is it actually possible to do this in a privacy preserving way?" is certainly interesting, was there ever a _single_ occasion where a government had the option of doing something in a privacy preserving way, when a non-privacy preserving way was also possible? Politicians would absolutely kill for the idea of unmasking dissenters on internet forums. Even if the option is a possibility, they are deliberately not going to implement it.

They... stole it from me?