I feel like the EFF has stretched a bit far on this one. They need to be advocating for good solutions, not portraying age verification as fundamentally about surveillance and censorship.

As many are pointing out zero knowledge proofs exist and resolve most of the issues they are referring to. And it doesn't have to be complex. A government (or bank, or anybody that has an actual reason to know your identity) provided service that mints a verifiable one time code the user can plug into a web site is very simple and probably sufficient. Pretty standard PKI can do it.

The real battle to be lost here is that uploading actual identity to random web sites becomes normalised. Or worse, governments have to know what web sites you are going to. That's what needs to be fought against.

> They need to be advocating for good solutions, not

No, fighting back against horrible proposals does not require suggesting an alternative proposal to the alleged problem. That only serves to benefit the malicious actors proposing the bad thing in the first place, the hope that we'll settle on something Not As Bad.

Thank god for the EFF and their everlasting fight to stop these nonsense internet laws. I'm glad they don't waste their time on "well how about this" solutions. The middle ground will never be enough for the proponents of surveillance, and will always be an incremental loss for the victims.

There are overwhelming dichotomous portrayals in this debate which gives me pause because there are entities who benefit from both sides of this debate, but neither would benefit with a sensible privacy-preserving solution.

So instead of advocating for those sensible and workable solutions, the discussions are always centred on either blocking any attempt at reform while hyperventilating about vague authoritarianism or a similarly vague need to protect the innocent.

Meanwhile in the world of smartphone data providers, social media networks, and the meta/googles of the world: they all know your personal information and identity up to the wazoo - and have far more information on every one of you than what is possessed by your own governments (well except for the governments that are also buying up that data.)

So let me be clear, the gate is open, the horse has bolted - recapturing your privacy is where attention should be focused in this debate... even if it's bad for shareholders.

What good solutions are there that prevent the age verification service and the website from comparing notes (because Big Brother told them to) and figuring out who you are and what you're doing?

Age verification is about government overreach surveillance and censorship. That’s it.

The reality is that even countries that have digital IDs like Belgium which would be 1 of the many requirements of implementing such a zero-knowledge system are pushing for surveillance heavy legislation right now.

Once a system is in place that infringes on rights nobody will modify it to give citizens more rights.

Yep this is the first time I've disagreed with the EFF on anything civil liberties related.

My view is that there's no reason why we can't come together and come up with a rating system for websites (through HTTP headers, there are already a couple proposals, the RTA header and another W3C proposal).

Once a website just sends a header saying this is adult only content, what YOU as a user do with it is up to you. You could restrict it at the OS level (which is another thing we ALREADY have).

This would match the current system, which allows households to set their devices to block whatever they want, and the devices get metadata from the content producers.

No ID checks needed.