I'm going to restate my proposed age verification system here. I've posted it several times as a comment on this website. It works as follows:
1. A private company, let's call it AgeVerify, issues scratch-off cards with unique tokens on them. They are basically like gift cards.
2. AgeVerify's scratch-off cards are sold exclusively in IRL stores. Preferably liquor stores, adult stores, and/or tobacco/vape shops. Places that are licensed and check ID.
3. Anyone who wants to verify their age online can purchase a token at a store. The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.
4. Giving or selling these tokens to a minor is a criminal offense. If a store does it, they lose their liquor or tobacco license. Treat it just like giving a minor alcohol or tobacco.
4a. Run public service announcement campaigns to communicate that giving an AgeVerify token to a child is like handing them a cigarette. There should be a clear social taboo associated with the legal ban.
5. The buyer of the AgeVerify token enters it into their account on whatever social media or adult website they want to use. The website validates the code with AgeVerify.
6. Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.
7. A separate token is required for each website/each account.
8. The website is responsible for enforcing no account sharing.
No identifying information is stored anywhere. Kids find it very hard to access age-restricted materials online, just like the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes.
And I am going to restate how it’s an absolutely terrible idea, and will always fail with its perverse incentives. This does not solve any problems and creates many more.
Your idea will create a massive black market for “adult validation tokens”, handing billions of dollars to criminal groups reselling these things.
And then where such a system goes in 5-10y. Sure it’s sorta anonymous today, but then new government decides - “let’s make it mandatory to be sold with a binding identity and credit card.” Suddenly you need that token to log in to any public website. And Chinese, European and American authorities demand realtime access to the global logs.
Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about. Don't design or build oppression technology.
The very idea that you can realistically enforce Point of Sales age checks at scale is not sensible.
> Your idea will create a massive black market for “adult validation tokens”,
No bigger than the current black market for beer and cigs for kids. Adults have no need to resort to black markets. They can buy this stuff legitimately.
> Sure it’s sorta anonymous today, but then new government decides - “let’s make it mandatory to be sold with a binding identity and credit card.”
They're already trying to do that right now! If we can head them off with a system that's as robust as age verification for alcohol we take away the moderate voter's support for making everyone upload passports to access FaceTok.
> Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about
Hasn't happened to cigs or booze so far. How long is "eventually"?
> The very idea that you can realistically enforce Point of Sales age checks at scale is not sensible.
This needs strong evidence. My evidence is that we already do it for many products.
> Suddenly you need that token to log in to any public website. And Chinese, European and American authorities demand realtime access to the global logs
If you treat everything as a potential slippery slope you won't get anything done. Right now the threat is governments mandating actual ID and destroying everyone's anonymity under the guise of protecting the children. I fear they have the votes to ram it through. Unless we find a good enough alternative that preserves privacy.
> No bigger than the current black market for beer and cigs for kids.
I don't think this part is true. Kids are currently used to having access to all of these services. And there is a lot more utility to having access to the whole internet, than having a a few packs.
To say nothing of the fact that these codes can be distributed digitally once they have been purchased. So it's harder to deter.
Everything is a slippery slope. Better nothing be done than keep inventing new ways to oppress humanity. Why does something need to be done anyway?
You can’t nerd harder and solve this problem. You have to fight these ideas at the root, and you my friend are being the so called “useful idiot” by raising and supporting such oppression and censorship.
>Better nothing be done than keep inventing new ways to oppress humanity
Well, you are correct. But you see people want to have a sense of control, so they think that doing SOMETHING is better that nothing, not realizing that often in some situations,s inaction is the best course of action. Among other examples where I think inaction is good are free markets and many cancer treatments.
I think your objection regarding future governments is valid. The others I don't think are valid. For the record I agree with your conclusion that any effort like this is doomed to fail. But we already enforce point of sale age checks at scale across multiple domains. And as for perverse incentives, part of the proposal is more or less identical to how scratch cards for gambling work. There probably is a black market for these and there probably have been attempts at fraud. But they aren't very large, not enough to tank the system anyway.
> Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about
Nobody is being censored. We regulate who can buy alcohol or tobacco, gamble at casinos, or operate a motor vehicle without it turning into a slippery slope.
Politically, the free speech argument might have had a point if Silicon Valley’s most-visible “free speech” advocates hadn’t lined up behind an authoritarian who’s creating diplomatic tension (and thus domestic political capital) the world over.
Accessing information is not a harmful substance or a dangerous activity that requires training.
The problem is that you are drawing the parallels in the first place. These are not the same things. This is precisely what a totalitarian regime espouses: information so dangerous it must be selectively distributed and access must be accounted for. Today it's pornography. Tomorrow LGBTQ materials are labeled as pornography. And soon thereafter you're putting in age verification to access non-state sponsored news, wondering "why is this required? should I be looking at this?"
I have no doubt that these are well-intentioned attempts by concerned citizens and civil servants to preserve some semblance of a decent society. The problem is that it's _always_ coopted. _Always._ Yet we can't seem to help ourselves but clamber towards more consolidation of power in the face of some new hysteria.
Your final point... _these supposed free speech advocates have supported an authoritarian, therefore they have no credibility_, _the only free speech advocates are in silicon valley_, _this is the only defense of free speech_. I have no idea what your point is.
That a few capitalists used free speech as a shield to make more money, we should throw the baby out with the bathwater?
You are putting forward a false equivalence between social networks and accessing information.
Meanwhile actual studies on the topic show that social network actually creates addiction - who could have guessed when they were literally engineered for engagement - and have deleterious effects on health especially for teenagers.
This is not a free speech issue. This is a public health issue. This is the digital equivalent of the tobacco industry we are talking about, not a library.
There is a special tax on sugary drinks in France to curb sales and distributors have been banned from schools years ago precisely to limit the health impact.
What a terrible and entirely unconvincing argument.
"$unhealthy_thing is not subject to restrictions, therefore $other_unhealthy_thing should also not be"? lol. lmao, even.
Should we let children purchase cigarettes? Alcohol? Cannabis? Cocaine?
The BMI epidemic in America tells me maybe we should ban sugary drinks.
At some point, society draws a line between what it deems acceptable and what it does not. In two generations it is virtually assured that we/our grandchildren will look back on Facebook and TikTok the way we currently look at the tobacco industry. The way I know this is because the CEOs don't let their kids dogfood their products. Famously, Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids have an iPhone. Mark and Cecilia didn't let their kids use socials.
These are bad products designed to be deliberately addictive, and it turns out they're really only good at making people feel shitty and giving teen girls eating disorders.
Righ! And the best place to start fixing it a cancerogen France is famous for, which is wine. I guess that will be the second thing the french parliament going to do - banning the sale of wine. Health is very important, I guess everybody is in agreement with that.
Yeah in France you can get wine for lunch in the company canteen even. Imagine sitting down with your boss for lunch, opening a bottle of wine lol. But there that flies.
I'm not American :) And I wasn't looking down on the French practice, in fact I like the more relaxed attitude.
But I did want to point out that wine is kinda sacred there. I worked for a company where the CEO was a teetotaler and he tried to ban it from the canteen and caused a huge riot lol.
The sale of wine to minors is already illegal in the USA, bro.
I'm beginning to get the sense that the old adage about how it's difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it is applicable to you.
When parents can't take care of their children the government takes over. Children are the greatest treasure of society and our entire system revolves around teaching and protecting them. The disgrace is giving tech companies one iota of power.
Yes yes, the specter of the boogeyman. Your outrage and arguments are tired.
Global capitalists are bad, governments that prop them up are worst. The only thing worst than that are the useful scared people pleading for these policies evoking this kind of fear and rhetoric.
> This is the digital equivalent of the tobacco industry we are talking about
I reject the counter-equivalence you've offered.
This is not mutually exclusive: I can acknowledge that social media is bad (for everyone) and also advocate for a non-gated free and open internet.
My argument is more sharp: do not pass laws for- and build a censorship infrastructure to- solve an institutional problem. If we must discuss this, then we should first discuss fining and breaking up the companies and criminally prosecuting the executives that did the harm knowingly. This takes more care to understand: how is it we want to shape our commons, and what are the steps that we'll take as citizens to enforce it.
But that can't be packaged into a short quip.
If this is a meaningful debate, then we should avoid sloganeering. Your last sentence is a nice soundbite, but it disregards all nuance. It's exactly the kind of content that creates harm on social networks: optimized for being being catchy and divisive. Something someone can go repeat and remain uninformed. Funnily enough, the construction is also a tell-tale marker of something written by an LLM. (To be clear: I'm not accusing you of writing this with an LLM, just noting how prevalent this rhetorical device is).
You are pretending that the moral value you place on unfettered access to any places on the internet trumps the provable deleterious effects social media as a product have.
The issue with my analogy - it is not a slogan - is not that it's unnuanced. It's that the framing - that social media is actually a product - completely dismantles your point.
I'm sorry but banning for an age category is a perfectly fine and workable solution. I don't see why France should artificially limit itself to suing foreign corporate executives to appease foreign absolutists.
You're not sorry. And your argument is not nuanced, it's a blunted half-clever framing. The propaganda has no effect on me. There's no point in arguing further. We are ideologically opposed. Your support for these policies in my mind are worst than the companies doing harm.
I do not respect people begging to be policed. I'll fight you more then I'll fight them, and I look forward to it!
No disrespect but paying to verify age feels absurd, let alone putting a private company in charge of what should be an essential function of the government.
How about when you turn 18 or whatever the government gives you a signed JWT that contains your DOB? Anyone who needs to verify your age can check that and simply validate the signature via a public key published by the government.
Simply grab a new JWT when you need it, to ensure privacy.
And sure, sprinkle in some laws that make it illegal to store or share JWTs for clearly fraudulent intents.
> the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes
This feels like it comes from an affluent perspective, where I grew up it was trivial to acquire these things and much worse, there will always be someone’s older brother etc who will do this for $20 because he’s got nothing to lose.
And they can get porn from all those sites that don't obey laws anyway, like a gazillion torrent sites. So yeah what's the point really. You're not preventing anything.
Also I'm pretty sure we all watched porn when we were under age and didn't get anything from it.
When I was young internet wasn't accessible for consumers yet but I built a pay TV decoder so I could watch their porn at night. It was easy enough. Only did black and white and no audio but it didn't really matter for that purpose :)
Still, I never got the idea that this was normal sex and I've always treated women with the utmost respect.
> The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.
Your plan requires nuanced implementation details which the general public is ill equipped to understand let alone independently verify. In particular, it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer. Let's say you want to ban the computer part outright; the public won't understand why, because it's already normal to them. So maybe you permit scanning IDs but regulate the way businesses can store/use that data; the public can't see into the computer, they have no idea if the law is being followed or not. This leads to lax attitudes towards compliance and enforcement both, and furthermore, likely results in public cynicism aka low expectations, which will give way to complacency. This is why I don't think your plan will work well, it's doomed to degenerate into surveillance.
> it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer
Then why are y'all so against Digital ID? We don't make you do that in Canada, it's just the clerk eyeballing your ID if you don't look old enough. I can't believe people are letting their ID get scanned and associated with vice purchases. Is it mandatory? Land of the free, eh?
I dunno where the OP lives but in my part of the US I only get carded at the one store that cards literally everyone as a matter of policy, regardless of how obviously old they are.
Other than that, I’m under 40 and I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been carded in the last 10 years on one hand. The fact my beard is mostly grey and I inherited male pattern baldness probably helps. Never had my driver’s license scanned, ever, for alcohol.
My wife on the other hand, who looks much younger than her age, gets carded all the time.
Same here. I've never been carded in my life for alcohol. Neither in a bar nor store. Despite having lived in several countries (none the US though which is kinda weird about alcohol, where I am from we could drink from 16 not 21 like in the US)
When I was young nobody really cared about age verification yet and these days I'm clearly not a teen anymore.
If there would be a store here that cards everyone regardless of age then I will boycott them. It's ridiculous.
OP is wrong. Most places don’t do ID scans in my city. There was one place that did and I do not patronize them anymore.
I think there are some places where vendors have attempted to sell scanning systems as a way to identify fakes and banned patrons. It probably depends on the area how common it is.
Federal IDs are a political landmine for reasons mostly unrelated to privacy. The American public doesn't understand privacy issues, unless maybe you frame it as "ThE NUmBer OF ThE BeASt" oooo-oo spooky! Otherwise, most Americans just get stupified and say they have nothing to hide.
My point in all of this is that we should not delude ourselves by theorizing about ways this could be implemented in a privacy preserving way, because even if that's technically possible, its unlikely for things to work out that way.
That's the biggest part of it. But there is also grassroots opposition to anything that could be made into or even just rhetorically support the feasibility of voter IDs. And the party which would want voter IDs is also the party which is most spooked about beast numbers and antichrists...
Either way you slice it, almost nobody in America is seriously pushing for a proper federal ID, which is why we're all still abusing SSN cards for this crap.
America and the "if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" / "police don't need body cameras" duality. You really cannot trust the typical person to be attempting cognition.
I didn't even think about the ID scanning that already takes place. States that have legalized weed still have people who avoid the legal stores because of the scanning. You don't know who has access to that data and how it could implicate you because weed is still illegal on the federal level (e.g. gun owners may be wary of buying from these stores)
This is how it should be. If you happen to be 16 and look 19, well, fuck's sake, your body's old enough to drink now. People get so hung up on this kind of think-of-the-children crap like as though every generation before now didn't have plenty of underage drinking and debauchery. I'm more worried about people being shutins and not having any fun than I am about some kid having a beer.
You can do the same thing with online payments combined with a ZKP token system.
The issue is and will always remain reselling the age verification tokens. The entire system is pretty pointless. Kids will just have some hoops to jump through, and they will be very motivated to do so. Criminals will be eager to aid them for some change too.
Either you forget age verification, or you can forget about privacy. Because identity theft is the only hoop big enough for most kids not to make the jump - and even that may not hold, typically identity theft is carried out for financial returns, the age verification requirement will change the calculus on that and will likely expand that particular black market to both kids and people valuing their privacy.
In my opinion it should be the parent's job to police their kid's access to an internet terminal. It's not even that hard. Mitigating the mistakes of parents at the expense of everyone's privacy is a poor trade.
> The issue is and will always remain reselling the age verification tokens. The entire system is pretty pointless.
I forgot to mention in my original post. I'd also rate limit purchases. Maybe only allow purchasing one per visit.
> Kids will just have some hoops to jump through, and they will be very motivated to do so.
Maybe? Kids can just buy alcohol or cigs or drugs from criminals today. But most can't or don't. Some do, and we accept that as a society. And we punish the criminals who enable it.
This isn't like illegal drugs, where criminals have a massive market (adults with cash). A black market catering to only minors isn't very lucrative.
Moreover social media's network effects work in our favor. If most kids can't join, their friends are less motivated to get in.
> "I forgot to mention in my original post. I'd also rate limit purchases. Maybe only allow purchasing one per visit."
I assume these scratch cards would be available everywhere Lotto scratchcards are - supermarkets, gas stations, convenience stores, tobacconists, newsagents - because it needs to be available and convenient for everyone to agree to it.
Since the ID is not recorded anywhere during purchase, some bored person can drive around and buy dozens of them on the same day for non-valid use cases.
But rate-limiting one per site means a valid use cases are blocked - adult kid wants their parents and grandparents to sign up to a new social network (Signal-style) and mom says she will get everyone a token while doing the shopping. She can't. Adult carer tries to buy a token for themselves and the person they care for in one visit. They can't. Small business employer wants employees to use a new WhatsApp style chat app and buy tokens for their employees. They can't.
None of the design stops mom-who-doesn't-care from buying a token and giving it to whiny-kid-who-wont-shut-up for their "FortnighTik thingy", or kid from asking grandma for a "scratch off token" for Christmas, or whatever.
You're correct. Rate-limiting has the potential to inconvenience some legit buyers.
> None of the design stops mom-who-doesn't-care from buying a token and giving it to whiny-kid-who-wont-shut-up for their "FortnighTik thingy", or kid from asking grandma for a "scratch off token" for Christmas, or whatever.
And nothing stops parents from giving their kids beer and cigarettes today, just to shut them up. But they mostly don't.
The point of my proposal is: do age verification as stringently (or loosely) and with as much privacy preservation as we currently do for alcohol and tobacco. The goal being to forestall more intrusive measures, which are really meant to expand the surveillance powers of states and corporations but are dressed up as "age verification to protect children". This proposal, or something like it, will satisfy the median voter that children are being protected without compromising anyone's privacy or anonymity.
Just because something can and will be circumvented doesn't make it useless.
People will continue to murder other people. That doesn't mean that criminalizing and punishing murder is pointless.
Now, whether the above scheme is prudent or workable, that's a separate question. But the counterargument to the scheme cannot be "It's all or nothing".
Murder is all but impossible to prevent, the reason the murder rate is kept low is because it's difficult to evade attribution after the fact.
In this instance we are talking about a technology that is impossible to attribute by design, the only way attribution will happen is if the reseller makes a serious mistake. There will be resellers that don't make serious mistakes. And unlike murder, very few successful resellers are sufficient to serve everyone.
> Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.
That sounds fantastic, were just one step away from making social media entirely controlled by one single party
Perfect to push anyone you don't like into irrelevancy, politicians will love this
Journalists too, finally they can be rid of these pesky YouTubers that show how politically captured they're! Just need to get someone with admin permission in that company and you're golden
Politicians wouldn't know who has which "adult code", so they wouldn't be able to get a singular "adult code" banned/early expired by the (supposedly corrupt) code-keeping company. To know which code a particular Youtuber has, they'd need to be able to get that info from Youtube, and if they "have a man on the inside" of Youtube then they can just ask that person to ban the Youtuber in question.
Once you're selling them, put a bounty where kids can turn in the cards for money. Then you'll both set a price floor and know which stores are selling them and you can find out who's doing it. Nothing says that a token has to last for a constant amount of time. If kids turn in more than a certain percentage, then that location would have theirs expire early.
What I like here is that you've turned a digital problem into a physical one where we already have solutions and intuition for how to enforce rules.
A private monopoly sounds like a great idea. A profit incentive for access to social media definitely won't result in the price of these tokens skyrocketing to extract as much money as possible.
It doesn't even have to be a private monopoly, it can be a public service.
For example in Quebec, liquor stores are managed by the government, called "Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ)" or legal cannabis is managed by "Société québécoise du cannabis (SQDC)".
I don't see why other restrictions can't follow the same pattern?
Generally these kinds of private monopolies also have public-set prices.
Which is a huge disaster for expensive things (like your power bill), but is much less of one for a token that takes 50 cents of human labour and 0.5 cents of computing to produce.
Japan has a similar system for payments. If you prefer to buy things online with cash they give you a barcode you take to any convenience store. The store scans it and you pay with cash.
1. You can go to the mayor's house to get the token. No need to associate tobacco/alcohol to it.
2. It's free.
3. It's culturally enforced to exchange tokens with other people. This way users themselves help make sure it's truly impossible to trace their activity.
4. It's illegal to publish your or someone else's token. It's like a paper ID, with a QR code.
5. Can be reused. Expires after 5 years .
This way if you want 5 pornhub accounts you don't have to buy 5 stamps. You are also extra sure that the tokens cannot be linked to you because you can exchange it with anyone.
What happens with point 7 when you verify your age to Google Plus and then you go to Reddit and “sign in with Google?”. If your verification doesn’t transfer, that would be silly because you aren’t a different age.
Trying to start a new social network in your world either has “every new signup must go to a store and spend money” or every new social network becomes tied to “sign in with Google”.
Your plan locks us into the current social networking forever?
Not only this but every age verification system will create an immense motive for the kids to obtain an "adult pass". Money, uncles, "family engineering" on parents or obscure paths will be used by the kid to become a hero to their peers. In a few months/years the system will degenerate and become abandoned.
That (mostly) doesn't happen for booze or cigs today. You're alleging that kids will behave like heroin junkies in order to access social media. If that's true, social media is more dangerous than we thought, and we should be having a very different conversation.
Electronic screens are "audiovisual drugs" delivered in hour-dosages through the sensory organs. After any type of ban there will be a craze by spoiled kids and/or spoiling parents to get a pass. And these are the people that the ban targets in the first place. Results from Australia's expirement are coming mediocre.
Yes, browser can do that. A browser starts with GET and gets new HTTP 1xx or 3xx response with “Age-Verification: required <age>” header. Browser calls your AVP (defined once in preferences) and gets short-lived certificate of age (expires in 30 seconds), then passes it to website in “Age: <age> <certificate>” header. The website uses known public keys to verify “at least certain age” claim in certificate. AVP public keys can be published in some registry and cached by websites.
Then, at a minimum, the platform knows where you bank. But in any case you're trusting the platform and bank to not collude to violate your privacy. They both have strong incentives to collect that info.
>6. Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.
> 7. A separate token is required for each website/each account.
I propose instead:
A single code valid for 10 packets sent to a single IP address, or 30 seconds, whichever expires first.
Sounds good. Except the reverify thing. The whole reverification is becoming a bit of a disease lately.
I've already had my bank AND my mobile provider demanding an updated scan of my ID. Which is completely BS, after all I'm still the same person. I didn't suddenly become someone else. It's ridiculous they demand it.
But these cards sound like a better solution than using government ID yes.
Perhaps we should drop age verification and just ban sites that use AI to scam attention for everyone? I would be happy enough if X and FB were banned outright.
I'm half convinced it's satire but I'll answer sincerely anyway.
As an adult I just couldn't be bothered buying this again year over year, let alone even once. I'm dropping the site instead of going to the store to buy this. Guess I'd just go fully offline.
Why would you need to buy it over and over again? Your age verification isn't going to become invalid as if you magically aged backwards. The time limit is (presumably) so the tokens can't be stored and resold on the black market indefinitely.
So a kid just has to get their hands on a token then access is open to restricted websites for a year (or whatever time period) while adults are inconvenienced? The black markets for these things would pop up instantly and you'd deal with secondary effects of that (scams, fraud, etc.)
I think the whole idea of age verification on the internet is dystopian and should be tossed in the garbage.
I didn't say "monopoly" anywhere in my post. Strangely you're the second commenter who assumed that. Probably a communication error on my part, because I only named AgeVerify in my example and didn't enumerate their competitors.
I don't believe the goal of 'age verification' has anything to do with children. Politicians have been very explicit objecting to anonymous people online complaining about them including calling them 'fat'.
> I don't believe the goal of 'age verification' has anything to do with children.
Some people pushing for it are sincere. I believe keeping children away from social media or adult content online is good. But I also believe most of the existing proposals to do it dangerously erode adults' privacy. And that's the real end goal for many politicians.
Implementing a fully anonymous, pretty-good-but-not-perfect age verification system can cut the legs out from all the demands to upload ID to "protect the children". I've proposed a relatively simple one that doesn't rely on zero knowledge proofs or something else the general public can't understand.,
The other thing OP presents is very different from any eID scheme in terms of anonymity. You'd show an ID to a human at the counter and even if the seller stores your info somehow, it can't be linked to the token they sold to you. The required infrastructure is minimal and relatively simplistic. The only drawback is that being anonymous means it's easy to resell tokens.
An eID system links your real life identity to any use of the eID online. Anyone who thinks there's a math or technology that fixes this misses the fact that it's the trust in the humans (companies, institutions, governments) who operate these systems is misplaced. Math and technology are implemented by people so there are many opportunities to abuse these systems. And once in place I guarantee, without any shadow of doubt that sooner or later, fast or slow, it will be expanded to any online action.
I will take anonymity and the small minority of kids who will find a loophole to access some adult-only stuff over the inevitable overreach and abuse against the large majority of people whose every online move will be traced and logged.
> The only drawback is that being anonymous means it's easy to resell tokens.
That’s a pretty major flaw. These tokens will be sold with markup on black markets, rendering the whole system unfit for its intended purpose.
Additionally, in line of drawbacks, buying porn scratch cards will be stigmatised, because everyone will (think they) know what you’ll use them for. Are you comfortable doing it in front of your teenage child, neighbor, crush, grandma, or spouse?
> Math and technology are implemented by people so there are many opportunities to abuse these systems.
And yet we have functioning asymmetric cryptography systems that enable secure encryption for billions of people, despite malevolent actors having a clear incentive to subvert that, much more so than age verification tokens.
> […] the inevitable overreach and abuse against the large majority of people whose every online move will be traced and logged.
This is happening right now already, in a scale hardly imaginable.
> These tokens will be sold with markup on black markets,
Black markets catering to minors aren't very large or profitable. No adult needs to buy from this black market. How big is the black market for beer for teenagers? Yes, some reselling will happen, just as minors sometimes get alcohol or tobacco from older friends and siblings. Prosecute anyone involved. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough without sacrificing privacy.
> buying porn scratch cards will be stigmatised
There was once a time, in living memory, when people had Playboy and Hustler mailed to their houses. You're overthinking it. And also why would the seller assume it's for adult content instead of social media?
> Are you comfortable doing it in front of your teenage child, neighbor, crush, grandma, or spouse?
So don't do it in front of them? You're allowed to go to stores alone.
I have less than zero interest in this, or any, business. I don't have any interested friends either. Any other baseless accusations you want to throw at me?
> It’s not a problem that needs to be solved by building a market for porn licenses.
You're blind if you can't see the rising wave of legislation that will make us upload ID to use the internet to "protect the children". The problem being solved is "protect the children without uploading ID".
You seem to stick on the idea that someone will make you upload your ID, while every initiative working on this issue is moving toward cryptographic proof of ownership without ever disclosing your identity to the age verification API nor the service you requested access to to the government.
The government API, the legislation around it all, the legal framework for the gift card issuers, the public education necessary, and on and on — there’s lots of complexity hidden in those "gift cards".
It's ok to be mean if you're constructive. You aren't. Your comment violates site guidelines. But here we are in 2026 so instead of flagging you, let me be nice.
Give me a reason why my idea is "garbage" that hasn't already been covered in the comments. I'll summarize the current comments and my responses:
1. "Age verification is censorship and evil"/"This is the parents' job, not the state's" - That's a valid point of view, and I understand where it's coming from. But IMO it's increasingly a losing one.
2. "It's not perfect/it can be circumvented by ..." - All of the same circumventions also apply to tobacco and alcohol. Everyone accepts that and the world goes on. We prosecute people who break those laws. Whatever the harms of social media and adult content, they aren't worse than literal poisons that cause car accidents and cancer.
3. "It doesn't preserve privacy because they record ID where I live" - Fix the law. Ban scanning ID where you live. I can't believe you ever accepted that for tobacco or alcohol but now's your chance.
4. "Why do I have to pay? This should be provided by the government" - Then we're back to ZKPs (not comprehensible to laypeople) and paranoia that governments are tracking you anyway. But hey, I'm not a policy or crypto expert, so I'll defer to people who are. Maybe this aspect can be improved.
5. "This requires a lot of new legislation" - Yes. Governments are already at work writing legislation for age verification. Do you want to be proactive to make it privacy forward or sit passively while they decide for us?
Or we have devices attest user age. On setup, the device has the option to store a root ("guardian"?) email address. Whenever "adult mode" is activated or the root email is changed, a notification must first be sent to the prior root email. That notification may optionally contain a code that must be used to proceed with the relevant action, though the user should be warned of the potential device-crippling consequences.
This setting is stored in a secure enclave and survives factory resets.
I will note that these two systems are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of ways to "think of the children" that don't trample on everybody's freedom.
I misunderstood then, I’m all in favor of that approach. If mainstream manufacturers include an optional child mode then that doesn’t affect adults. I do think it’s better if the child device simply blocks adult labeled content rather than attesting that the user is a child, just to avoid leaking any information about minors. But it’s still an OK solution.
You underestimate the average American teenager’s shell-buying game (honed for decades by our asinine alcohol laws.) I’m sure kids elsewhere would pick it up pretty fast too.
Plus, this would spawn massive online black markets for the codes, fueled by crypto/gift cards/other shady means of money transmission.
The comparison to alcohol is apt. Some motivated teenagers succeed in getting beer. Most don't. All the adults consider that enough of a success (which it is) that any proposed legislation to require internet-connected beer cans with facial verification is dead-on-arrival.
While this can work I just don’t want any bans on speech for any age. These social media bans are going to next lead to porn restrictions and ultimately they will mainstream Christian theocratic values in public policy through an ever shifting morality goal post. That’s how it always goes. Enabling it through such solutions feels like a risk.
It's arguable, even if you're right, that the net loss to humanity is still far greater without these restrictions than with. Modern social media is leading to multiple generations of emotionally stunted, non-verbal children. Many of whom literally struggle to read.
If you haven't seen it in person, it is now incredibly common for children as young as 1 or 2 to be handed an iPad and driven down an algorithmic tunnel of AI generated content with multiple videos overlaid on top. I've seen multiple examples of children scrolling rapidly through videos of Disney characters getting their heads chopped off to Five Nights at Freddy's music while laughing hysterically. They do this for hours. Every day. It's truly horrifying.
Parents are just as poorly equipped at dealing with this as the children are, the difference being that at least their brains have already fully developed so that there is no lasting permanent damage.
I am sure that they will not lead to “Christian theocratic values in public policy” in France. That value system is fringe in France, one of the most irreligious and historically anti-clerical cultures in the world.
Among people who identify as Christian in France, the ones who could be described as radical or fundamentalist are a very small minority.
My observation is that there is a big resurgence in supremacist politics and the main identity involved is white Christian male. Maybe it’s not yet big in France but that’s what I see gaining momentum in many parts of Europe and North America.
You’re talking about a completely different thing, right-wing populist neo-nationalism based on an idea of European ethnicity and culture (which, of course, includes culturally identifying as “Christian”). This isn’t the same thing as being based on religious doctrine.
I’m in my 40’s and I’d rather just use a VPN, I can’t imagine that young people will feel any differently. Governments should feel free to take performative measures, and we’re free to circumvent them.
Leave people to their fantasies of digital control and let them learn lessons the hard way. This is not a technical issue anyway.
This is a typical technical solution to a sociopolitical problem. The powers-that-be are not comfortable with the free-for-all that exists on the internet. All these laws are meant to fix that squeaky wheel, one ball-bearing at a time.
"Children" gets the Right to march behind you unquestioningly. "Misinformation/Nazis" does the same for the Left. This is now a perfect recipe for a shit sandwich.
I agree. But if you find a different way to protect the children, that normal people can understand and relate to ("It's like buying beer"), and still maintain privacy, you take away at least one leg of support for what a lot of states really want to do (remove anonymity).
It's better than the fatalism in your comment IMO.
A very important part of the system is a nationwide program of sending homeless people to concentration camps so that teenagers wouldn't bribe them to buy TittyTokens.
Like seriously, do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune to the same problem because you really really wish they would?
You can't patch this without creating some form of a central database of who exactly buys how many TittyTokens.
> do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune
No I fully admit some minors will still get access to FaceTok. We accept this failure for alcohol and tobacco. We don't have internet connected beer cans phoning home when you open them, asking to scan your face.
But at least where I live, most kids aren't falling over drunk or puffing away at school bus stops. So if the system is good enough for selling actual poisons, it's good enough to limit most minors' access to online vices.
Moreover social media has network effects. If most kids aren't on it, the rest will likely not bother either.
So basically you've designed an expensive solution that is very complicated to roll out and has obvious cases where it doesn't work, but you still think it's a good idea, rather than explore alternatives.
I also have no issue with viable alternatives (read: have a chance of being passed as law) that preserve privacy. This is just my idea, take it or leave it. I couldn't care less.
Also, why is Tolkien's estate seemingly twiddling its thumbs while all these companies use its intellectual property? Or does the estate get licensing fees?
They have no claim, unless you create another literary character or something in the likeness of the original character. Naming a company after a fictional character is not an issue.
This status doesn't necessarily give the owner absolute control of the mark, but it can limit the ways in which others use it in trade.
Things would be this way whether "Sauron" was ever the name of a fictional character or not. The use as a character name by the trademark owner neither implicitly enhances nor diminishes the trademark's integrity.
"The insistence on perfect age verification requires ending anonymity. Age verification to the level of buying cigarettes or booze does not.
Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained, and most kids are locked out.
In the same way that kids occasionally obtain cigs or beer despite safeguards, sometimes they may get their hands on a code. Prosecute anyone who knowingly sells or gives one to a minor."
I've never had my ID recorded at any liquor store in my life. I've bought alcohol in multiple countries. If that happens where you live I'd fight to have that practice banned legally for alcohol and tobacco purchases. Stores are definitely selling it to insurance companies.
Also after I had a certain number of birthdays, clerks have stopped demanding my ID. So my purchases are pretty much anonymous.
The card should be issued by a private company, or ideally, multiple companies. And it should be a scratch-off card with a unique code, so that codes can't be tied to transactions.
This, but seriously. Maybe some age token company might also run a raffle or other promotion.
EDIT: Because age verification tokens will likely be a commodity, low-margin business with little differentiation. So I assume companies will do stuff to make their token more attractive than the competition.
In my state, they scan your ID and check it with the state's database. Store policy is usually to do it for everyone, even if they obviously are above the age of 21, and the state mandates ID checks for anyone suspected to be 27 or below.
Historically liquor store checks were purely visual. These days they are often digital, meaning claims about privacy might (or might not) be outdated. The general principle still applies though. The physical infrastructure already exists, the ID checks do not necessarily need to be digitized or recorded, and even if they are the issued tokens don't need to be tied to the check.
Grocery stores already sell age restricted items as well as gift cards that require activation. The state could issue "age check cards" that you could purchase for some nominal fee. That would require approximately zero additional infrastructure in most of the industrialized world. The efficacy would presumably be equivalent to that for alcohol and tobacco.
I don't trust that the information about my identity would not be recorded while selling me my "free speech token". So the chilling effect on free speech would be exactly the same.
That would largely depend on the implementation details I think. Both those of the ID check itself as well as the precise nature of the tokens.
Consider a somewhat extreme example. A preprinted paper ticket with nothing more than a serial number on it. The clerk only visually inspects the ID document then enters the serial number into a web portal and hands it to you. When you go to "redeem" it the service relays the number back to the government server rather than your local device doing so directly. That would be far more privacy preserving than the vast majority of present day clearnet activity.
> The clerk only visually inspects the ID document then enters the serial number into a web portal and hands it to you.
No absolutely not. There's no need for it. We don't require Internet connected beer cans to phone home to a government server and recheck your driver's license when you're cracking them open.
> When you go to "redeem" it the service relays the number back to the government server rather than your local device doing so directly
Your possession of the token when you enter it into your social media account is proof enough that you're of age. The social media website only needs to call the token issuer's API to verify its validity. And all the token issuer should know is it's a valid token sold to a buyer of legal age. Anything more is needlessly complicated and risks anonymity. No recording of IDs in any way, shape or form whatsoever.
And there's no need to involve the government or government servers in any of the implementation or technology. It can be an open, published standard. Any company that can get their cards in stores, and sold with age verification, should be able to participate. All participants can be periodically inspected by the government to ensure compliance with standards.
Entering the serial number is the equivalent of the gift card activation step. It prevents theft and black market resale of a giant stack of unissued tokens.
As to the rest of what you wrote, isn't that exactly what I already described? The only notable difference is that your scheme permits non-government token providers.
How would I know the Clerk wasn't instructed to record the name from my ID? Also this runs into the same problems as voter ID laws, not everyone has an ID that they can show at a liquor store.
Is photographic memory a common job requirement for clerks?
Also usually once you turn a certain age they stop asking you for ID. Again, I'm not aware of how things work in place where they customarily scan and store your ID for alcohol purchases. I would lobby my legislators and fight this odious practice tooth and nail. The store is almost certainly selling that information.
Because you're standing there watching him. Have you ever witnessed him record your name or anything else when you purchase alcohol? Given the (admittedly rather restrictive and unlikely) implementation I described this quickly approaches the level of paranoid conspiracy.
Yeah, it runs into the same socioeconomic problems. Not just voter ID but also tobacco, alcohol, most weapons, and in many places other than the US medical care just to name a few. So it's already a well established problem that people keep and eye out for and at least try to address.
Consider that the alternatives are the continued normalized unfettered access of brainrot by young children or else requiring an ID check in a manner that blatantly compromises privacy. On the whole the liquor store approach seems like a good solution to me.
To be fair there is another alternative that for some reason seems widely unpopular. Make headers indicating age restricted content a requirement and legally require the OEM configuration of devices to support parental controls based on such headers. That would be a slightly less efficacious solution but would involve noticeably less ID checking.
In my proposal private companies would issue the "age check cards" for sale, not the state.
And I don't know how things work in other places, but I've never had my ID scanned when buying alcohol. These days clerks don't even ask me for ID because I obviously appear to be legal age.
In my proposal the token would be a scratch off card with a unique code. It can't be associated with the transaction.
More like "if we can't be partners we'll find your enemies and fund them instead." or, "we'll partner with your next of kin who may be more sympathetic [or suggestive] to our concerns."
It protects privacy while being as robust as any other existing age restriction method.
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