In case people no longer remember, when China started to require websites to register for a license before be allowed to operate, it was for "protecting the children" too.
This simple policy then goes on to silence most individual publisher(/self-media) and consolidated the industry into the hands of the few, with no opportunity left for smaller entrepreneurs. This is arguably much worse than allowing children to watch porn online, because this will for sure effect people's whole life in a negative way.
Also, if EU really wants "VPN services to be restricted to adults only", they should just fine the children who uses it, or their parent for allowing it to happen. The same way you fine drivers for traffic violation, but not the road.
And if EU still think that's not enough, maybe they should just cut the cable, like what North Korea did.
The EP paper appears to be highlighting the existence of a debate regarding VPN.
Relevant quote:
"Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place. The Children's Commissioner for England has called for VPNs to be restricted to adult use only.
While privacy advocates argue that imposing age-verification requirements on VPNs would pose significant risk to anonymity and date protection, child-safety campaigners claim that their widespread use by minors requires a regulatory response. Pornhub and other large pornography platforms have reportedly lost web traffic following the enforcement of age-verification rules in the UK, while VPN apps have reached the top of download rankings."
Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs, but nowhere in this paper is "the EU" stating that VPNs need closing.
These dimwits (and I don't just mean those in EU) seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn, and are ready to mess with internet infrastructure for that. That's a depressing manifestation of aging society
> seriously want to stop adolescents from watching porn
no, they want to pretend this is the issue, so that pervasive monitoring or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized. It is to serve the state apparatus, rather than any actual protection.
If it is possible to "pretend that they want something reasonable", it means that there is something reasonable somewhere.
Maybe some want more control, but most certainly not everybody.
> so that pervasive monitoring
If you haven't gotten the memo, pervasive monitoring already exists. To sell ads.
> or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized
For age verification, it's possible to do it in a privacy-preserving manner. Now people spend their time complaining about the idea and claiming that all who disagree are extremists, so it doesn't help. But we could instead try to push for privacy-preserving age verification.
The rise of authoritarianism? Inequality? Revival of geopolitical "realism"? Decrease in empathy and holistic thinking? Increasing willingness of the general population to engage in political adventurism? Accelerating resource consumption (and decelerating resource stocks).
And if you consider none of those "real" problems, I know some people seem to have forgotten about it, but what about climate change? Given the half-life of CO2 and methane, that's a problem as "real" as they get.
It's not really about kids looking at porn, it's about tracking everyone else and making it easier for state surveillance and corporations to identify people.
Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny.
But how to make people accept it? Tell them they want to expose kids to gruesome tentacle porn, or else they'd support this. Few adults are willing to admit they even look at porn, let alone argue that this is an important activity that needs to be protected, which it is.
If you think that there is a need for new technology to identify people, I suggest you wake up and start getting informed about surveillance capitalism.
There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already.
Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that.
Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse.
Need is a very strong word. I'd call it a desire. Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved. What they want to do is to plug in a private corporation separate from whatever service that is likely to be more loyal with the state apparatus than the service, or else it is easily switched out for another.
And corporations are having issues discerning bots from people without making access to their services a fuss or dependent on possibly idealistic and troublesome open source projects, like Anubis.
It's truly, absolutely, not about "age verification". If it were about protecting kids from harm they'd take money from corporations post factum that are offending. Instead they're preparing to spend a lot of money. You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US. They couldn't care less about kids except for obscene or profitable purposes. It would be weird for them to be cosy with epsteinian networks of power and at the same time be mindful about the wellbeing of children.
Adolescents, or kids? Would you say it's completely stupid to want to stop kids from watching porn, or accessing social media?
Did you grow up with free streaming platforms? Pretty sure many adolescents were accessing porn before those, though it was slightly less accessible.
I personally don't have a definitive opinion about porn (I feel like young kids obviously shouldn't have access to it, but it shouldn't be illegal to adults, but I don't know where the limit should be), but I feel like making it harder for kids to access social media makes sense.
The title is also the exact title for that paper’s chapter.
You are right at pointing out that the paper is overall presenting the subject in a balanced manner, unfortunately it seems a bad choice was made when it came to that specific sentence, that gives a venue for it to be fed in the outrage machine.
But you single out just one paper. If you include all paper and discussions the picture is super-clear, and the title is not misleading at all. This has to be said.
> Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs
The word choice is quite revealing. You write "regulate VPNs". To me this is not "regulation" at all - it is restriction or factually forbidding it. It is newspeak language here if we dampen it via nicer-sounding words. It also distracts from the main question: why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?
> why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?
Live sports, they’re already assaulting internet infrastructure in various EU member states (eg. La Liga forcing Spanish ISPs to block cloudflare IPs during matches). With this in mind it seems less a case of surveillance state and more a case of corporate state capture.
Governments already have everyone's ID, including DOB. They say that the problem is non-adults accessing adult sites and services. So therefore, the sites need to know that users are over 18 (or the selected government age).
There should be a standardized government ID service/API that allows a person to let it disclose their age (or other user selected information) to a requesting site/service. That's all that is needed if the government ID service has appropriate 2FA and security.
Both the request and the response can be appropriately anonymized so that the government doesn't know the site, and the site doesn't know the person's identity.
Why isn't this a thing yet? As far as I know, no one has proposed it.
In theory, every EU state will have to support this soon so users can use it to verify age privately online. Still work to do to roll this out for real, but the technological part is very much already happening and I think the rollout plan is committed.
The german gov id supports that. They have a PKI and the id is a smart card with a cert and private key on it [0]. It lets you answer the question "are you over 18" with a zero knowledge proof. I guess it only proves you have in your possession a valid id AND know the PIN to it, but that should be fine. France apparently has this, too, according to the article.
Exactly. Governments that really care about age verification should provide the tools to do so. They have the means to do so without violating privacy. Something like the Dutch DigiD service (the one they're about to sell to the US despite literally everybody opposing that) would be a great basis for this; just add an age verification service to it. They already know who you are in the most legal sense possible.
I think all the identity verification schemes should start with the beneficial owners of companies. Governments have been lobbied to allow complete anonymity for the wealthy that own businesses doing questionable things while regular people are going to have to show id to buy food.
Yep... and to make it worse, nobody is trying to push them towards looking at privacy-preserving age verification: instead technologists try to convince them that they just shouldn't regulate anything. Which... may not work so well.
As someone who lives in a jurisdiction which does require such disclosure: it is a significant inconvenience for small businesses, and no benefit to the general public.
Do small businesses in your area have complicated ownership structures that it's significantly inconvenient to disclose the one family that owns, for an example small business , a plumbing repair company with 4 vans and 6 employees?
They might? If they don't and it is trivial to identify the beneficial owner, why is it necessary to create a requirement to disclose? The practical experience is that people are quite bad at this sort of requirement, that may well be a source of problems and that on aggregate making it harder to do business has a notable impact [0] on general prosperity. Don't needlessly put barriers in front of people who create wealth.
It isn't a stretch to imagine that a small business owner literally doesn't have enough time in their life to maintain their own health and run their business. There are some pretty grim stories out there, I can tell one based on a friend of mine who was working ... I think 70 hour weeks. Sounded rough. It isn't actually crazy to say they may not have an hour free to figure out what form they need to fill out and where to file it, or that they'd be too sleep deprived to get it right. Assuming that this thing is the only thing they need to disclose and there aren't any other pieces of paperwork that need filing (which we all know there will be).
Sure if they have to they'll probably figure it out in most cases, maybe it is trivial. But the businesses where a straw broke the camel's back don't exist any more to point at as evidence. It is hard to know.
You get extra spam. Any data that ends up on those public lists will be used to spam you. Some websites will also correlate all the data they have on you too, so you can get that spam at home too.
Basically, you have no privacy if you start a small business under these kinds of rules.
VPN usage increased, but how to they draw the conclusion that this is children. I think it's more likely that adults are using VPNs to not have to deal with the ID process. I would do that.
As VPNs usually cost some money, which is already a barrier for minors.
Governement should force companies to give parental controls tools. Gaming companies like Nintendo and Steam do that, I can create a kid account with parental controls.
Social media companies (e.g. Meta, Snap) are the first that should provide that but they don't.
Band and severely punish systematic violations of privacy.
Regulate the poison first, not the access to it. All this age verification nonsense is an admission that some platforms knowingly harm their users. And instead of fixing the issue by cracking down on the proverbial crack, governments make everybody's life worse.
I remain hopeful that one day, humans will regard the online advertising companies with the same scorn we do the tobacco industry and may they be ashamed and disgusted at our inaction.
> Doesn't mean that it's equivalent to giving them free access to those consumables.
Who do people on HN always need to look at things as a Boolean state? It’s entirely reasonable to have some preventative measures but acknowledging that there are ways to circumvent them and accept that as a reasonable conclusion.
Things don’t need to be “all or nothing” ;)
> Source?
I grew up pre-WWW. Literally lived and breathed the points I’m making.
Just the fact that it takes NGOs and journalists to uncover tax evasion practices. The governments and tax offices aren't looking. CumEx was a scandal in 2017, and despite being known since 1992, has only recently led to just a handful of prosecutions.
To be replaced by the Irish tax department making direct deals that are essentially the same. But ONLY for specific companies (principle: big multinationals don't pay tax at all, local companies get big tax raises. Irish companies are dying, multinationals are moving to Ireland)
In case anyone wonders: this means the FANG companies don't pay tax in Ireland if they hire enough people in Ireland, which has famously high income tax. It is, in other words, effectively a massive tax increase on the employees while actually reducing total tax income in the EU compared to the "double dutch sandwich".
Note that Ireland signed at least 2 international treaties that they weren't going to do this (OECD minimum tax treaty, EU tax treaty). Of course, there are no consequences to this.
The response to is that EU is exploring company-tax-per-transaction which is so incredibly bad in the massive administrative burden it will generate. It's not final, but it will mean that for every transaction done companies will have to keep (PER transaction) pieces (plural) of evidence for what country they happened in. Every single transaction.
Lots of governments give tax exemptions to selected industries (film comes to mind) or even companies (Foxconn/TSMC); I don’t support this behavior, but I don’t see what makes Ireland special in this regard.
Why? Isn't your age verified when you renew your drivers license? Purchase something on Amazon?
When I was a kid, child programming and commercials were heavily scrutinized. Now any kid can access porn, violence, and scams on the internet. That's a blight. Not age verification.
Broadcast TV had a very simple solution to this problem: Only air the not-for-kids stuff at times of the day when the kids are already asleep, i.e. late in the evening or at night.
It was still the job of the parents to set the bed times etc, but at least this was something the parents could actually control.
And for pay-per-view stations with actual heavily violent or pornographic content: Yes, they were absolutely age-gated, usually via a PIN.
How can you define a tax loophole then? Since there isn't a thing you can do called a "Tax loophole", but rather a collection of otherwise totally legitimate practices, just used as an optimization, they are impossible to define, and as such, be scrutinized. It's a neverending whack-a-mole...
I have a question that's been going through my mind -
Why is age verification connected with identity verification?
I understand why the former is not possible with the latter, but my question is -
Whichever entity is responsible for the verification can just pass on the age verification confirmation without passing through any of the other details, right?
Am I mistaken here? Because if this was possible, I could still go ahead with using the VPN.
You are right, it is possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. Feels like most people being very vocal against the idea don't know about that.
At least most complaints I see here are assuming that age verification means tracking.
Too bad, there could be interesting discussions about privacy-preserving age verification, if people just bothered getting informed before complaining.
This seems to be what "double-blind" verification is doing:
> The report highlights emerging approaches, such as “double-blind” verification systems used in France, where websites receive only confirmation that a user meets age requirements without learning the user's identity, while the verification provider does not see which websites the user visits.
It's a question of blind trust in your government to respect this, when they themselves control the age verification apps, at least in the EU who wants to impose its own system and not rely on an autonomous third party.
It is cryptography. Just like you don't have to blindly trust Signal with end-to-end encryption (their client app is open source), it could be implemented in a way that you don't need to blindly trust your government.
From a tech perspective it has been a solved problem since about a decade ago, via DID (decentralised identities) and their Verifiable Proofs.
The EU digital wallet framework is built around those, and your suggested scenario is a first class citizen.
It is now moving from the academic/research world, to the political field, and feedback/pressure from both commercial groups and political agendas is muddling the field.
Here are some links to canonical docs, you can easily find high quality videos that explain this is shorter/simpler terms to get a grasp of it.
The people who really want to stop VPNs are commercial streamers, especially for live sports. Regardless of state, or governing party, it always comes back to money.
Age restrictions + VPN bans + encryption restrictions + client-side monitoring + restricting general purpose computing.. It's just rapid descent into digital fascism set up by people who have no ability to see how the dots will end up connecting.
I am sorry you see it this way, when the very subject at hand is a practical example of how the EU has planned and built a wallet around the very same ideas you seem to cherish.
Unfortunately, now that it comes to the news cycle, it’s easy to get outraged around misleading headlines.
I encourage you to invest time in researching what the EU has done in the past decade around digital identities and their framing around privacy questions on this. I hope you will find, as I do, that it moved the needle in t he right direction.
I don't care for a limited and selective best-possible interpretation of a subset of measures viewed in isolation. The point it that a broader set of vectors are being used continuously to gradually ensnare and limit digital freedom.
This is not a misleading headline, this is a document from the European Parliamentary Research Service that calls out VPNs as a technology that may need to be moderated in order to enforce restrictions such as age verification.
As you are calling me out - specifically answer how restricting access to VPNs would benefit the freedom of thought, communication, and information within Europe, and not be something that - together with other measures - can help facilitate digital fascism.
Speaking from the POV of my country, you absolutely have prime minister + minister level understandings that seem to plainly be based on issues such as "we need to stop children from bullying each other on social media", "we need to help police surveillance to stop crime", "we need to protect people from internet porn" etc, and it seems to be that the political capital and will to create these measures comes from short-term attempts to solve certain problems, without being able to understand how a broader set of these measures will together create digital fascism.
Beyond that I fully believe there are intelligence agencies, advertising agencies, military interests, IP control interests etc that are all working very diligently and in more targeted ways to each achieve their goals better by pushing for specific measures and helping to amplify moral panics to build the necessary political capital.
VPNs are essential tools against government persecution. Linking identity to a VPN session under any guise (age verification or otherwise) is something out of the playbook of dictatorial states.
Perhaps these legislators are addicted to porn and don't want their children to do to themselves the same they have done. Would explain their obsession and relentlessness to get this done.
It's just a pity they are destroying the internet while doing that. They should be attacking the companies making money from porn instead.
And by the way porn can damage your mind even after 18 so age verification is not a real solution anyway.
I agree that age verification is old perverts addicted to porn simply projecting their problem onto others. Kids after a day of continuous swiping of tiktok and instagram want tattoos and bitcoin.
Ah yes, the most pressing issue of our times. Mandatory surveillance of every person's activities is a reasonable solution to the critical issue of teenagers watching porn, who totally won't be able to bypass this by... grabbing Dad's phone.
Obviously, it's not about the children. It was never about the children. If I had my way every one of these people would be taken to a gulag, because they are evil, have evil intentions, and blatantly lie to further their evil goals. I am tired of the intolerant being tolerated, and by allowing this to fester we are headed for a much worse totalitarian dystopia.
That will only very rarely happen. Do you actually know people that will just give you their phone so you can watch porn? For more than one minute? People are so addicted to their phones.
> it's not about the children
It's also about the children, but there surely are parties which use the process to further their own goals.
> Do you actually know people that will just give you their phone so you can watch porn?
They don't ask for it, they take it when you're busy or sleeping. Teens certainly weren't asking for Dad's VHS tapes or magazines when I was a kid. I suppose this problem is solveable, too, though. Mandatory biometric locks on every device capable of accessing the internet, why not?
> That's not the right quote for this case.
It is. These people are fascists. Their goal is to create a society where the government has a permanent record of everything every person is doing, monitored 24/7 so nobody can defy it. The point about tolerating intolerance is that by abiding such people, you allow them to create an intolerant society, thus it is prudent even in a tolerant society to be intolerant specifically towards those whose goal is intolerance.
Can you not be disingenuous beyond belief? That is not even remotely close to what I said. What I take issue with is that the solution is worse than the problem (and does not even solve the problem). We can solve all problems of society if we lock everyone in an isolated prison cell 24/7 except under strict supervision when working or studying. That, obviously, is a fucking insane idea. Yet it is what we are creeping towards when you defend government surveillance of every person's device usage. A solution to a problem should not be 100x worse than the problem it allegedly solves, and this is doubly true when it doesn't even solve the problem.
Obviously, not all solutions have to be 100% solutions to problems. Indeed such solutions very rarely exist in the real world. But they do need to be less of a problem than the original problem, and the more invasive they are, the more you'd better expect they solve a serious problem as comprehensively as possible rather than barely addressing a trivial problem.
All accounts and that are important to kids have are being tied to their real identity and they won’t be able to get a new one if they’re banned. The potential for social engineering is insane.
All of these ID laws are going to make it more dangerous for kids online IMO.
“Hi I’m a Roblox moderator. Your account was reported for X and you’ve been temp banned. Come to platform Y to appeal. Start by submitting all your personal info and a selfie.”
And it’ll be completely normalized by big tech. Seriously. WTF are they thinking?
First, I should say that I am against online age identification. But if we are going to get age verification because the larger population wants it, I definitely prefer the EU's privacy-preserving age verification that uses zero knowledge proofs (yes, they have issues too) over private companies doing age verification, requiring uploading scans of your ID, filming your face, etc. For the reasons that you mention (people can easily be tricked into giving information to the wrong people), but also because I simply do not want my data to be in the hands of random private companies that will sell the data, give it to Palantir, etc.
That makes this fight so annoying, we have to fight age identification, while at the same time also promoting privacy-preserving age verification for the case it happens anyway.
I think this is folly. You cannot communicate this level of nuance at scale, especially when faced with opposition that actively lies to achieve their goals.
Quoting an older post...
> In a benevolent dictatorship, sure, go for a zero-knowledge proof verification as your solution. In the reality of democracy, where politicians are corporate puppets who cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses, we need to convince people to see through the lie and reject the proposals outright while reassuring them that they can protect the children themselves via parental controls. You will never be able to sufficiently inform 50.1% of the population of any country of what zero-knowledge proof even means, let alone convince them to support age verification laws but strictly conditional on ZKP requirements. That level of nuance is far too much to ask of millions of people who are not technically-informed, and idealism needs to give way to pragmatism if we wish to avoid the worst-case scenario.
In a benevolent dictatorship, sure, go for a zero-knowledge proof verification as your solution. In the reality of democracy, where politicians are corporate puppets who cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses
I do not (completely) agree with this. This seems like the very typical US-centric view of politics. A lot of members of the European Parliament are not corporate puppets and have ideals (even if they often do not align with mine). Why would the EU come with a ZKP-based verification reference app if they were sock puppets? The corporate sock-puppet politician would just push the narrative that age verification should be left to the market (which is probably what happens in the US, where most politicians are sock-puppets due campaign sponsoring, etc.).
You will never be able to sufficiently inform 50.1% of the population of any country of what zero-knowledge proof even means, let alone convince them to support age verification laws but strictly conditional on ZKP requirements.
We do not have to convince the population. We have to convince regulators and if it becomes necessary the EU/national-level courts that handle human rights violations.
Also, in the case of the EU, they made a reference implementation of ZKP age verification and asked national governments to roll this out in their apps. One of the large issues though is that the reference implementation relies on Google Play Integrity for device attestation (+ the iOS counterpart), so if national software development agencies use the reference implementation as-is, it shuts out competing systems. They should have used AOSP device attestation, which is also supported by GrapheneOS, etc. So, besides protesting age verification, I'm trying to get the message to politicians that how device attestation is done in the reference implementation is an issue. The thing that might help here is that sovereignty is also high on the agenda.
> We do not have to convince the population. We have to convince regulators and if it becomes necessary the EU/national-level courts that handle human rights violations.
Without the population on your side, it's some insignificant minority's words vs. corporation's power determining where the lines get drawn by regulators. The people can put a leash on politicians who cave too hard to corporations by voting them out of office, but if they don't even understand the issue and have been conditioned to accept age verification, that will never happen.
> One of the large issues though is that the reference implementation relies on Google Play Integrity for device attestation (+ the iOS counterpart)
I am confused as to why you suggest my view is US-centric, and then go on to acknowledge that the EU is currently in the midst of rolling out regulation that de facto enshrines the Google+Apple duopoly in law. The EU bureacracy seems to be just as captured by corporate interests as the US. At times, they put up a token protest against Apple/Google, but generally only insofar as to promote competing European corporate interests where applicable. The EU would certainly prefer to serve European corporations over American ones, but the European people don't seem to factor into the equation at any point.
the EU is currently in the midst of rolling out regulation that de facto enshrines the Google+Apple duopoly in law
It isn't, it's not enshrined in law, de facto does a lot of work here. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure such a requirement will not hold up in court either. Besides that, the developers of the reference app have stated that national apps do not have to require strong integrity from Google Play Integrity. It seems like they took the standard platform path either because they did not have time the time or knowledge to do anything else.
At any rate, I'm optimistic that it won't require passing strong integrity in my country. Age verification will be added to our national ID app (DigiD), which does not require passing strong integrity, even if it is used for more security-critical applications than age attestation.
>In the reality of democracy, where politicians are corporate puppets who cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses
Are you seriously blind? Do you genuinely believe politicians don't legislate in ways that benefit corporations over individuals? Or do you genuinely believe the sudden worldwide push across dozens of countries to surveil all internet access, prevent VPN usage, and lock down devices at the OS level is the result of an organic, grassroots desire to protect children no matter the cost?
Politicians do things that are likely to get them reelected, e.g, passing legislation that is broadly supported by their voters. Passing legislation that their constituents do not like will not increase the chances of them getting reelected.
If you could link a piece of legislation that has little support among voters, but was passed due to corporate money, I would be interested.
> cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses
Politicians lie to voters to get them to accept things they would otherwise not accept. That was literally central to the entire comment you were replying to. "But the children" and "But national security" are essentially a free pass to enact any legislation a dishonest politician wants with support from a population that cannot stay fully informed on the nuances of the incredibly complex modern world.
> If you could link a piece of legislation that has little support among voters, but was passed due to corporate money, I would be interested.
I feel like I could gesture broadly at everything. As noted, people will support something when lied to, but even without public support it's obvious that this happens. Off the top of my head, Trump's corporate tax cuts in 2017 might be one of the most clearcut examples of something that benefitted corporations over individuals, was lobbied for by corporations, and was high profile enough to have public polling while being so blatantly unjustifiable that said polling demonstrated the public was clearly against it.
People pointed that out quite a while ago already. Age sniffing is a joint attack on the freedoms of people, which explains why these lobbyists also try to abolish VPNs. Their vision for the world wide web is one of authorization. Ultimately they will fail, but a few get rich here in the process.
Ugh. Here we go again. Europe’s politicians just cannot stop with wanting to control everyone and everything. It’s as if bureaucracy is the actual goal. Privacy and anonymity should be protected by law. Not violated by law.
I listen to a bunch of (mostly left) podcasts where they sometimes invite members of the European parlement and while I can agree with some of their opinions its downright scary how they think about regulations.
For everything that's wrong in society the answer seems to be more and more regulations. The negative effects (such as the lack of European AI companies) are then waved away (it's because Europe spends their money on American AI instead of investing in EU AI).
The goal is privacy and anonymity. Removing them that is. They don't care about teenagers watching porn, what they want is to know what every person is reading and saying, and being able to punish whoever says things the eurocrats don't like. That's the reason the age limits are not set in the device by the parents, but you must give your id to some entity.
> Within the EU, multiple attempts at pushing changes in opposition to this have been proposed, debated, voted on (and rejected), as democracies do.
If 51% of people want to do something wrong, they should do it to themselves and leave the other 49% alone. Democracy is not an excuse for doing the wrong thing and going "oh well, guess people want it".
>Almost seven in ten (69%) support age verification checks on platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography.
Sometimes the majority is going to make a decision that you do not like, oh well, that is the cost of living in a democracy. People in "terminally online" spaces like HN vastly underestimate the popularity of these laws.
It sometimes even forces governments to collect more data on their own citizens like in Romania.
The only difference between the US and the EU is that the EU has somehow managed to convince a bunch of useful idiots (not saying that you are part of it) that it is better than the US when in reality its the same shit just with a different color and smell.
Sounds more like they should have sand-boxed white-listed school networks for known publishers in each age group.
Then leave the rest of the world out of domestic failed parenting nonsense. However, policy would still likely fail given the cruelty youthful ignorance often brings, and persistent 1:100 child psychopath occurrence rates. =3
Here we go again with new restrictions on civil liberties. This is Chat Control all over again.
The EU won't stop until it has access to all your data, all your messages, anything you read, save, send will be scrutinized by the the big great EU and it's little minions.
Hey, at least we get the freedom of movement right?
Too easy to dunk on the EU. The UK, USA and Australia seem to have reached the same conclusions. In UK all young males now have a VPN rather than do whatever you’re supposed to do to see porn. VPNs went from “nerd talk” to “vpn=porn” in the space of weeks. Whatever is next will suffer a similar fate.
There is no such thing as the EU wants X. There are huge differences between what the European Commission, the European Council, and the majority of the European Parliament want.
Most of the anti-privacy crap hasn't happened thanks to the EU. Particular countries and lobbying groups have been pushing this through the Commission and Council and most attempts have been rejected by the EP.
If we didn't have the EU, some countries would have long introduced this nonsense (like the UK). But in the EU that does not make much sense, since there is a single market, so you have to enforce it EU-wide.
The European Parliament + courts of justice/human rights are one of the last beacons of democracy/freedom worldwide that resist upcoming authoritarianism. We should support them and remind the Parliament over and over again that they should be continuing the good fight.
---
By the way, nearly all your comments on HN are about politics and all trying to sow dissent on Western (and especially European) democracies.
This simple policy then goes on to silence most individual publisher(/self-media) and consolidated the industry into the hands of the few, with no opportunity left for smaller entrepreneurs. This is arguably much worse than allowing children to watch porn online, because this will for sure effect people's whole life in a negative way.
Also, if EU really wants "VPN services to be restricted to adults only", they should just fine the children who uses it, or their parent for allowing it to happen. The same way you fine drivers for traffic violation, but not the road.
And if EU still think that's not enough, maybe they should just cut the cable, like what North Korea did.
The EP paper appears to be highlighting the existence of a debate regarding VPN.
Relevant quote:
"Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place. The Children's Commissioner for England has called for VPNs to be restricted to adult use only.
While privacy advocates argue that imposing age-verification requirements on VPNs would pose significant risk to anonymity and date protection, child-safety campaigners claim that their widespread use by minors requires a regulatory response. Pornhub and other large pornography platforms have reportedly lost web traffic following the enforcement of age-verification rules in the UK, while VPN apps have reached the top of download rankings."
Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs, but nowhere in this paper is "the EU" stating that VPNs need closing.
no, they want to pretend this is the issue, so that pervasive monitoring or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized. It is to serve the state apparatus, rather than any actual protection.
Maybe some want more control, but most certainly not everybody.
> so that pervasive monitoring
If you haven't gotten the memo, pervasive monitoring already exists. To sell ads.
> or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized
For age verification, it's possible to do it in a privacy-preserving manner. Now people spend their time complaining about the idea and claiming that all who disagree are extremists, so it doesn't help. But we could instead try to push for privacy-preserving age verification.
That, and the lack of real issues to solve.
The rise of authoritarianism? Inequality? Revival of geopolitical "realism"? Decrease in empathy and holistic thinking? Increasing willingness of the general population to engage in political adventurism? Accelerating resource consumption (and decelerating resource stocks).
And if you consider none of those "real" problems, I know some people seem to have forgotten about it, but what about climate change? Given the half-life of CO2 and methane, that's a problem as "real" as they get.
Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny.
But how to make people accept it? Tell them they want to expose kids to gruesome tentacle porn, or else they'd support this. Few adults are willing to admit they even look at porn, let alone argue that this is an important activity that needs to be protected, which it is.
There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already.
Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that.
Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse.
And corporations are having issues discerning bots from people without making access to their services a fuss or dependent on possibly idealistic and troublesome open source projects, like Anubis.
It's truly, absolutely, not about "age verification". If it were about protecting kids from harm they'd take money from corporations post factum that are offending. Instead they're preparing to spend a lot of money. You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US. They couldn't care less about kids except for obscene or profitable purposes. It would be weird for them to be cosy with epsteinian networks of power and at the same time be mindful about the wellbeing of children.
Did you grow up with free streaming platforms? Pretty sure many adolescents were accessing porn before those, though it was slightly less accessible.
I personally don't have a definitive opinion about porn (I feel like young kids obviously shouldn't have access to it, but it shouldn't be illegal to adults, but I don't know where the limit should be), but I feel like making it harder for kids to access social media makes sense.
You are right at pointing out that the paper is overall presenting the subject in a balanced manner, unfortunately it seems a bad choice was made when it came to that specific sentence, that gives a venue for it to be fed in the outrage machine.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
Bombing children is OK and we happily produce and deliver all the weapons needed for that.
Patterns of an ill society.
> Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs
The word choice is quite revealing. You write "regulate VPNs". To me this is not "regulation" at all - it is restriction or factually forbidding it. It is newspeak language here if we dampen it via nicer-sounding words. It also distracts from the main question: why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?
Live sports, they’re already assaulting internet infrastructure in various EU member states (eg. La Liga forcing Spanish ISPs to block cloudflare IPs during matches). With this in mind it seems less a case of surveillance state and more a case of corporate state capture.
There should be a standardized government ID service/API that allows a person to let it disclose their age (or other user selected information) to a requesting site/service. That's all that is needed if the government ID service has appropriate 2FA and security.
Both the request and the response can be appropriately anonymized so that the government doesn't know the site, and the site doesn't know the person's identity.
Why isn't this a thing yet? As far as I know, no one has proposed it.
In theory, every EU state will have to support this soon so users can use it to verify age privately online. Still work to do to roll this out for real, but the technological part is very much already happening and I think the rollout plan is committed.
[0] https://www.personalausweisportal.de/Webs/PA/EN/government/t..., https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Oeffentliche-Verwaltung/El...
You're kidding right?
Yep... and to make it worse, nobody is trying to push them towards looking at privacy-preserving age verification: instead technologists try to convince them that they just shouldn't regulate anything. Which... may not work so well.
It isn't a stretch to imagine that a small business owner literally doesn't have enough time in their life to maintain their own health and run their business. There are some pretty grim stories out there, I can tell one based on a friend of mine who was working ... I think 70 hour weeks. Sounded rough. It isn't actually crazy to say they may not have an hour free to figure out what form they need to fill out and where to file it, or that they'd be too sleep deprived to get it right. Assuming that this thing is the only thing they need to disclose and there aren't any other pieces of paperwork that need filing (which we all know there will be).
Sure if they have to they'll probably figure it out in most cases, maybe it is trivial. But the businesses where a straw broke the camel's back don't exist any more to point at as evidence. It is hard to know.
[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation
Basically, you have no privacy if you start a small business under these kinds of rules.
As VPNs usually cost some money, which is already a barrier for minors.
Mandatory age verification online is a blight imho. It should be outlawed.
Parents should learn how to be parents; the government shouldn't force companies to do parenting instead.
Social media companies (e.g. Meta, Snap) are the first that should provide that but they don't.
Regulate the poison first, not the access to it. All this age verification nonsense is an admission that some platforms knowingly harm their users. And instead of fixing the issue by cracking down on the proverbial crack, governments make everybody's life worse.
I remain hopeful that one day, humans will regard the online advertising companies with the same scorn we do the tobacco industry and may they be ashamed and disgusted at our inaction.
(Not to mention all the other consent age laws.)
That said, VPN is a national security issue, children are only a pretext.
They’d just get an older sibling, or stranger to buy it. Or they’d have a fake ID. Or they’d just steal it from a family member.
But you know which kids did this the least? It was the ones where their parents / guardians took their responsibilities as a guardian properly.
Doesn't mean that it's equivalent to giving them free access to those consumables.
> But you know which kids did this the least?
Source?
Who do people on HN always need to look at things as a Boolean state? It’s entirely reasonable to have some preventative measures but acknowledging that there are ways to circumvent them and accept that as a reasonable conclusion.
Things don’t need to be “all or nothing” ;)
> Source?
I grew up pre-WWW. Literally lived and breathed the points I’m making.
:/
https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/ireland/corporate/tax-credits-a...
In case anyone wonders: this means the FANG companies don't pay tax in Ireland if they hire enough people in Ireland, which has famously high income tax. It is, in other words, effectively a massive tax increase on the employees while actually reducing total tax income in the EU compared to the "double dutch sandwich".
Note that Ireland signed at least 2 international treaties that they weren't going to do this (OECD minimum tax treaty, EU tax treaty). Of course, there are no consequences to this.
The response to is that EU is exploring company-tax-per-transaction which is so incredibly bad in the massive administrative burden it will generate. It's not final, but it will mean that for every transaction done companies will have to keep (PER transaction) pieces (plural) of evidence for what country they happened in. Every single transaction.
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/projects-and-acti...
> How come tax loopholes aren't as scrutinized?
When I was a kid, child programming and commercials were heavily scrutinized. Now any kid can access porn, violence, and scams on the internet. That's a blight. Not age verification.
It was still the job of the parents to set the bed times etc, but at least this was something the parents could actually control.
And for pay-per-view stations with actual heavily violent or pornographic content: Yes, they were absolutely age-gated, usually via a PIN.
Before Internet they used paper.
Why is age verification connected with identity verification?
I understand why the former is not possible with the latter, but my question is -
Whichever entity is responsible for the verification can just pass on the age verification confirmation without passing through any of the other details, right?
Am I mistaken here? Because if this was possible, I could still go ahead with using the VPN.
At least most complaints I see here are assuming that age verification means tracking.
Too bad, there could be interesting discussions about privacy-preserving age verification, if people just bothered getting informed before complaining.
> The report highlights emerging approaches, such as “double-blind” verification systems used in France, where websites receive only confirmation that a user meets age requirements without learning the user's identity, while the verification provider does not see which websites the user visits.
The EU digital wallet framework is built around those, and your suggested scenario is a first class citizen.
It is now moving from the academic/research world, to the political field, and feedback/pressure from both commercial groups and political agendas is muddling the field.
Here are some links to canonical docs, you can easily find high quality videos that explain this is shorter/simpler terms to get a grasp of it.
https://www.w3.org/TR/did-1.0/
https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/
A note: it’s one of the healthy byproducts of the blockchain age, don’t get sidetracked by some hyped videos from crypto bros.
Now there is a time politicians control what websites we can access.
Unfortunately, now that it comes to the news cycle, it’s easy to get outraged around misleading headlines.
I encourage you to invest time in researching what the EU has done in the past decade around digital identities and their framing around privacy questions on this. I hope you will find, as I do, that it moved the needle in t he right direction.
This is not a misleading headline, this is a document from the European Parliamentary Research Service that calls out VPNs as a technology that may need to be moderated in order to enforce restrictions such as age verification.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
As you are calling me out - specifically answer how restricting access to VPNs would benefit the freedom of thought, communication, and information within Europe, and not be something that - together with other measures - can help facilitate digital fascism.
Beyond that I fully believe there are intelligence agencies, advertising agencies, military interests, IP control interests etc that are all working very diligently and in more targeted ways to each achieve their goals better by pushing for specific measures and helping to amplify moral panics to build the necessary political capital.
It's just a pity they are destroying the internet while doing that. They should be attacking the companies making money from porn instead.
And by the way porn can damage your mind even after 18 so age verification is not a real solution anyway.
Obviously, it's not about the children. It was never about the children. If I had my way every one of these people would be taken to a gulag, because they are evil, have evil intentions, and blatantly lie to further their evil goals. I am tired of the intolerant being tolerated, and by allowing this to fester we are headed for a much worse totalitarian dystopia.
That will only very rarely happen. Do you actually know people that will just give you their phone so you can watch porn? For more than one minute? People are so addicted to their phones.
> it's not about the children
It's also about the children, but there surely are parties which use the process to further their own goals.
> I am tired of the intolerant being tolerated
That's not the right quote for this case.
They don't ask for it, they take it when you're busy or sleeping. Teens certainly weren't asking for Dad's VHS tapes or magazines when I was a kid. I suppose this problem is solveable, too, though. Mandatory biometric locks on every device capable of accessing the internet, why not?
> That's not the right quote for this case.
It is. These people are fascists. Their goal is to create a society where the government has a permanent record of everything every person is doing, monitored 24/7 so nobody can defy it. The point about tolerating intolerance is that by abiding such people, you allow them to create an intolerant society, thus it is prudent even in a tolerant society to be intolerant specifically towards those whose goal is intolerance.
Obviously, not all solutions have to be 100% solutions to problems. Indeed such solutions very rarely exist in the real world. But they do need to be less of a problem than the original problem, and the more invasive they are, the more you'd better expect they solve a serious problem as comprehensively as possible rather than barely addressing a trivial problem.
All of these ID laws are going to make it more dangerous for kids online IMO.
“Hi I’m a Roblox moderator. Your account was reported for X and you’ve been temp banned. Come to platform Y to appeal. Start by submitting all your personal info and a selfie.”
And it’ll be completely normalized by big tech. Seriously. WTF are they thinking?
That makes this fight so annoying, we have to fight age identification, while at the same time also promoting privacy-preserving age verification for the case it happens anyway.
Quoting an older post...
> In a benevolent dictatorship, sure, go for a zero-knowledge proof verification as your solution. In the reality of democracy, where politicians are corporate puppets who cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses, we need to convince people to see through the lie and reject the proposals outright while reassuring them that they can protect the children themselves via parental controls. You will never be able to sufficiently inform 50.1% of the population of any country of what zero-knowledge proof even means, let alone convince them to support age verification laws but strictly conditional on ZKP requirements. That level of nuance is far too much to ask of millions of people who are not technically-informed, and idealism needs to give way to pragmatism if we wish to avoid the worst-case scenario.
I do not (completely) agree with this. This seems like the very typical US-centric view of politics. A lot of members of the European Parliament are not corporate puppets and have ideals (even if they often do not align with mine). Why would the EU come with a ZKP-based verification reference app if they were sock puppets? The corporate sock-puppet politician would just push the narrative that age verification should be left to the market (which is probably what happens in the US, where most politicians are sock-puppets due campaign sponsoring, etc.).
You will never be able to sufficiently inform 50.1% of the population of any country of what zero-knowledge proof even means, let alone convince them to support age verification laws but strictly conditional on ZKP requirements.
We do not have to convince the population. We have to convince regulators and if it becomes necessary the EU/national-level courts that handle human rights violations.
Also, in the case of the EU, they made a reference implementation of ZKP age verification and asked national governments to roll this out in their apps. One of the large issues though is that the reference implementation relies on Google Play Integrity for device attestation (+ the iOS counterpart), so if national software development agencies use the reference implementation as-is, it shuts out competing systems. They should have used AOSP device attestation, which is also supported by GrapheneOS, etc. So, besides protesting age verification, I'm trying to get the message to politicians that how device attestation is done in the reference implementation is an issue. The thing that might help here is that sovereignty is also high on the agenda.
Without the population on your side, it's some insignificant minority's words vs. corporation's power determining where the lines get drawn by regulators. The people can put a leash on politicians who cave too hard to corporations by voting them out of office, but if they don't even understand the issue and have been conditioned to accept age verification, that will never happen.
> One of the large issues though is that the reference implementation relies on Google Play Integrity for device attestation (+ the iOS counterpart)
I am confused as to why you suggest my view is US-centric, and then go on to acknowledge that the EU is currently in the midst of rolling out regulation that de facto enshrines the Google+Apple duopoly in law. The EU bureacracy seems to be just as captured by corporate interests as the US. At times, they put up a token protest against Apple/Google, but generally only insofar as to promote competing European corporate interests where applicable. The EU would certainly prefer to serve European corporations over American ones, but the European people don't seem to factor into the equation at any point.
It isn't, it's not enshrined in law, de facto does a lot of work here. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure such a requirement will not hold up in court either. Besides that, the developers of the reference app have stated that national apps do not have to require strong integrity from Google Play Integrity. It seems like they took the standard platform path either because they did not have time the time or knowledge to do anything else.
At any rate, I'm optimistic that it won't require passing strong integrity in my country. Age verification will be added to our national ID app (DigiD), which does not require passing strong integrity, even if it is used for more security-critical applications than age attestation.
Conspiratorial gibberish
If you could link a piece of legislation that has little support among voters, but was passed due to corporate money, I would be interested.
Politicians lie to voters to get them to accept things they would otherwise not accept. That was literally central to the entire comment you were replying to. "But the children" and "But national security" are essentially a free pass to enact any legislation a dishonest politician wants with support from a population that cannot stay fully informed on the nuances of the incredibly complex modern world.
> If you could link a piece of legislation that has little support among voters, but was passed due to corporate money, I would be interested.
I feel like I could gesture broadly at everything. As noted, people will support something when lied to, but even without public support it's obvious that this happens. Off the top of my head, Trump's corporate tax cuts in 2017 might be one of the most clearcut examples of something that benefitted corporations over individuals, was lobbied for by corporations, and was high profile enough to have public polling while being so blatantly unjustifiable that said polling demonstrated the public was clearly against it.
People pointed that out quite a while ago already. Age sniffing is a joint attack on the freedoms of people, which explains why these lobbyists also try to abolish VPNs. Their vision for the world wide web is one of authorization. Ultimately they will fail, but a few get rich here in the process.
For everything that's wrong in society the answer seems to be more and more regulations. The negative effects (such as the lack of European AI companies) are then waved away (it's because Europe spends their money on American AI instead of investing in EU AI).
It's honestly scary.
US, from its biggest companies to the whole of Silicon Valley culture has done the exact opposite.
Within the EU, multiple attempts at pushing changes in opposition to this have been proposed, debated, voted on (and rejected), as democracies do.
Not perfect, but when you come down to laws, EU bureaucrats gave EU citizens article 8, US gave them the CLOUD act.
If 51% of people want to do something wrong, they should do it to themselves and leave the other 49% alone. Democracy is not an excuse for doing the wrong thing and going "oh well, guess people want it".
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
>Almost seven in ten (69%) support age verification checks on platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography.
Sometimes the majority is going to make a decision that you do not like, oh well, that is the cost of living in a democracy. People in "terminally online" spaces like HN vastly underestimate the popularity of these laws.
GDPR does not protect you from governments snooping on you. The same way it does not stop governments from collecting data on you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
It sometimes even forces governments to collect more data on their own citizens like in Romania.
The only difference between the US and the EU is that the EU has somehow managed to convince a bunch of useful idiots (not saying that you are part of it) that it is better than the US when in reality its the same shit just with a different color and smell.
Then leave the rest of the world out of domestic failed parenting nonsense. However, policy would still likely fail given the cruelty youthful ignorance often brings, and persistent 1:100 child psychopath occurrence rates. =3
Legislation must call real experts before making any *technical* decisions.
The EU won't stop until it has access to all your data, all your messages, anything you read, save, send will be scrutinized by the the big great EU and it's little minions.
Hey, at least we get the freedom of movement right?
Most of the anti-privacy crap hasn't happened thanks to the EU. Particular countries and lobbying groups have been pushing this through the Commission and Council and most attempts have been rejected by the EP.
If we didn't have the EU, some countries would have long introduced this nonsense (like the UK). But in the EU that does not make much sense, since there is a single market, so you have to enforce it EU-wide.
The European Parliament + courts of justice/human rights are one of the last beacons of democracy/freedom worldwide that resist upcoming authoritarianism. We should support them and remind the Parliament over and over again that they should be continuing the good fight.
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By the way, nearly all your comments on HN are about politics and all trying to sow dissent on Western (and especially European) democracies.