This keeps coming up and we keep having the same debates about what Age Verification isn't.
For the folks in the back row:
Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance
Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance
Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance
Without even reaching for my tinfoil hat, the strategy at work here is clear [0 1 2]. If we have to know that you're not a minor, then we also have to know who you are so we can make any techniques to obfuscate that illegal. By turning this from "keep an eye on your kids" to "prove you're not a kid" they've created the conditions to make privacy itself illegal.
VPNs are next. Then PGP. Then anything else that makes it hard for them to know who you are, what you say, and who you say it to.
Please, please don't fall into the trap and start discussing whether or not this is going to be effective to protect kids. It isn't, and that isn't the point.
I'd be OK with an "I am a child" header mandated by law to be respected by service providers (eg. "adult sites" must not permit a client setting the header to proceed). On the client side, mandate that consumer devices that might reasonably be expected to be used by children (every smartphone, tablet, smart TV, etc) have parental controls that set the header. Leave it to parents to set the controls. Perhaps even hold parents culpable for not doing so, as a minimum supervision requirement, just as one may hold parents culpable for neglecting their children in other ways.
Forcing providers to divine the age of the user, or requiring an adult's identity to verify that they are not a child, is backwards, for all the reasons pointed out. But that's not the only way to "protect the children". Relying on a very minimal level of parental supervision of device use should be fine; we already expect far more than that in non-technology areas.
Any time law-makers claim that a law is meant to protect children you can guarantee that the safety of children had almost nothing to do with it. This is all a push to normalize digital ID (to protect the children!); once normalized it will become mandatory.
I feel like the EFF has stretched a bit far on this one. They need to be advocating for good solutions, not portraying age verification as fundamentally about surveillance and censorship.
As many are pointing out zero knowledge proofs exist and resolve most of the issues they are referring to. And it doesn't have to be complex. A government (or bank, or anybody that has an actual reason to know your identity) provided service that mints a verifiable one time code the user can plug into a web site is very simple and probably sufficient. Pretty standard PKI can do it.
The real battle to be lost here is that uploading actual identity to random web sites becomes normalised. Or worse, governments have to know what web sites you are going to. That's what needs to be fought against.
I have a friend attempting to solve this. He's basically creating oauth for age verification. You sign up with his service and verify your age. After that it works similarly to oauth, but instead of return your identity, it just returns your age.
It's not a perfect solution, as he would still know who you are, but it's built in a way where you create a token locally to pass to the site that includes your age, and that site passes it to his site, which verifies the signature. So he knows who you are but not what sites you visit, and the sites know your age but not who you are.
I'm just waiting for governments to start requiring OS makers to verify identity on consumer phone/laptop/console devices before you can use them.
After all, they can legitimately claim it solves much of the issues with other verification schemes - no need to trust third party sites or apps, lower risk of phishing, easier to implement internationally and with foreign nationals, etc.
Of course, the downside (for individuals) is it would take just one legal tweak or pressure from the government to destroy anonymity for good.
Why don't we have zero-knowledge age verification?
One actor verifies ages - and they only need to do so once. Sites give users a key tied to their user account to run by their verifier, who returns another key that attests to their verified age encoded for that specific site, to give back to the site.
The site doesn't know anything about the user, but their user login info. The verifier doesn't know anything about what sites are being visited.
This would seem to address the issues, without creating the pervasive privacy and security problems of every age verifying site creating database of people's government id's, faces, and other personal information.
It also seems like a way out of the legal/legislatorial battle. Which otherwise, is going to be an immortal hydra.
I would trust the EFF to run something like this. Open source. With only one-way encrypted/hashed personal info stored at their end.
(I am not a cryptographic expert. But I believe mechanisms like this are straightforward stuff at this point.)
Why they don't use zero knowledge proof? Also question for the USA constitution experts, is this considered a violation of free speech? The article is not clear on this.
Not to mention people lose accounts because someone reported them as underage, and now they don't want to fully dox themselves over this. Who can blame them considering discord's own support ticket system was hacked which included people who had to validate their age.
What they should do instead is invest in technology that can do age verification while protecting privacy. This is obviously a required piece of technology. It is not acceptable for children to grow up on the Internet and easily access pornography by simply going to a website. Imagine letting your children loose in a city where they can wander in and out of peep shows without friction.
The push for age verification must be about something else. There are good solutions to this, but they are ignored. Its always about some complex setup leaking information all over the place. It must be either ignorance or indeed about surveillance, as many here think it is.
Shameless plug: I wrote about hash chains some time ago. They are a nice and simple solution to age verification. https://spredehagl.com/2025-07-14/
If age check is truly anonymous/zero-knowledge, as in the requester can't identify me, the issuer can't link me to the attestation... why wouldn't someone start selling age verified accounts? Easy money for some 18yo.
I would be happy if we just moved to a way we could more realistically enable audits of information flow in our lives. I don't, necessarily, want to restrict my kids consumptions. It does worry me that I don't know how to teach them to audit all of the information that is being exposed to them. Or worse, collected about them.
Generally speaking, I share the HN consensus on age verification laws. But, there is a real problem with kid's unfettered internet access. Just think about all the adults who are hopelessly addicted to social media. The negative affects are amplified when it comes to developing minds.
My SO has been teaching for nearly 20 years now, and mental health in kids has fallen off a cliff in the last two decades. I could fill this page with online bullying stories. Some of which, are especially cruel. Half her students are on medication for anxiety. It's out of control, honestly.
That said, I don't know how to solve it. It's easy to put this on the parents, but that's not the answer. Otherwise, it would be solved already. Some don't care. Some don't have the time to care because they're trying to keep the lights on, and dinner on the table. And, some simply think it doesn't apply to them or their children. Parents on HN are hyper-aware of this sort of thing, but that's definitely the minority.
I know a family that would be most folks least likely candidate for something bad to happen online. Single income, relatively well off, the parent at home has an eye on the kids 24/7. And, if you met the kids, you would most likely qualify them as "good kids". Without going into detail, their life was turned upside down because one of the kids was "joking around" online.
Again, I don't know what the answer to the problem is. Clearly, age verification laws are a veiled attempt to both collect and control data. And, EFF's emphasis on advertising restrictions as a solution, seems off the mark. There's more to it than that. Idk, this shit makes me want to log off permanently, and pretend it's 1992.
Why do you think there's a global push all at once for this? Anyway I'll order a bunch of cheap USB Sticks, load them up with porn and gore and drop them at school yards at night then. If we do that enough we can make using USB Devices require ID Soon enough.
I wonder what the psychological effect of having little or no privacy would do to people. Are we all going to be paranoid schizophrenics? How would a world of paranoid schizophrenics work? How insane are world events going to be from that point on?
The net got too big, the 90% got in because of facebook and google, and automated bots took over from there.
Either we create the fix, or the feds take it over. we need to sever the idea of a global internet. per-country and allied nations only.
anonymous cert-chain verified ID stored on device. problem fixed.
"SAN FRANCISCO-With ill-advised and dangerous age verification laws proliferating across the United States and around the world, creating surveillance and censorship regimes that will be used to harm both youth and adults, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new resource hub that will sort through the mess and help"
The surveillance and censorship system is built, administered and maintained by Silicon Valley companies who have adopted this as their "business model". "Monetising" surveillance of other peoples' noncommercial internet use
These Silicon Valley companies have been surveilling internet subscribers for over a decade, relentlessly connecting online identity to offline identity, hell bent on knowing who is accessing what webpage on what website, where they live, what they are interested in, and so on, building detailed advertising profiles (including the age of the ad target) tied to IP addresses, then selling the subscribers out to advertisers and collecting obscene profits (and killing media organisations that hire journalists in the process)
Now these companies are being forced to share some of the data they collect and store
Gosh, who would have forseen such an outcome
These laws are targeting the Silicon Valley companies, not internet subscribers
But the companies want to spin it as an attack on subscribers
The truth is the companies have been attacking subscriber privacy and attempting to gatekeep internet publication^1 for over a decade, in the name of advertising and obscene profits
1. Discourage subscribers from publishing websites and encourage them to create pages on the company's website instead. Centralise internet publication, collect data, perform surveillance and serve advertisements
I am disappointed to find no mentions of zero knowledge proofs or any other indications that we wont have to trust anyone with this task.
We have the technology to do age verification without revealing any more information to the site and without the verification authority finding out what sites we are browsing. However, most people are ignorant of it.
If we don't push for the use of privacy preserving technology we wont get it and we will get more tracking. You cannot defeat age verification on the internet, age verification is already a feature of our culture. The only way out is to ensure that privacy preserving technologies are mandated.
Parents have complete control of the Chat/Porn server and since the orgasmatron necessarily has all your desires stored in its LLM (Large Lust Model) it trivially knows your age and will lock you out.
And internet porn can be banned regardless of age. (that's only half sarcastically said).
Demand for home Large Lust Models and orgasmatrons will soar. You heard it here first. Opportunity for entrepreneurs. And these home-based products are the only way to keep porn away from kids (if parents don't care now, they never will) and to maintain privacy on the internet.
Every place where I've worked in I.T., the rule was "No porn downloading at work. Porn belongs in the home." (especially in the days of slow home modems)
And to be really enforceable, all offshore sites would have to agree to the scheme, including certain Russian ones who are glad to pollute our children's and adults' minds with porn, propaganda and conspiracy theories.
Lastly: There always was and will be media. Micro-SD cards now? If not phones, thrift store picture frames and RPi's. "Porn finds a way."
> we must fight back to protect the internet that we know and love.
This is not compelling. The internet I know and love has been dying for a long time for unrelated reasons. The new internet that is replacing that one is an internet that I very much do not love and would be totally ok to see lots of it get harder to access.
Is the EFF captured? This is a resource against misguided laws but what's a law they'd actually approve of? This entire resource is boring defense of the status quo.
Asking for a year of birth is the best solution and always will be. Once kids are old enough to figure that out you're not going to stop them from much.
I think sadly, this is a lost battle in public opinion. And the gambling of digital assets on Roblox and other casino-like website is also starting to get public attention, and will turn public opinion further.
The CNIL gave up 3 years ago, and gave guidelines, you can read about it here [0]. At the time it read like "How well, we tried, we said it is incompatible with privacy and the GDPR multiple times, we insist one more time that giving tools to parents is the only privacy-safe solution despite obvious problems, but since your fucking law will pass, so the best we can do is to draw guidelines, and present solutions and how to implement them correctly".
I think the EFF should do the same. That's just how it is. Define solutions you'll agree with. Fight the fight on chat control and other stuff where the public opinion can be changed, this is too late, and honestly, if it's done well,it might be fine.
If the first implementation is correct, we will have to fight to maintain the statu quo, which in a conservative society, is the easiest, especially when no other solution have been tested. If it's not, we will have to fight to make it correct, then fight to maintain it, and both are harder. the EFF should reluctantly agree and draft the technical solution themselves.
online age verification is disingenuous and a pretext to give governments the hard coded technical option to regulate speech and association.
there's a great game being played out by these users of force against the advocates of desire. everything about the bureaucracies pushing digital ID is unwanted. this isnt about age verification tech, its about illegitimate power for unwanted people who are actuated by forcing their will on others.
we should treat these actions with the open disgust they deserve.
I understand this is a technology forum, frequented mostly by liberal adults, who built a lot of their internet nous on totally free internet of 90s and 00s. I am one of them.
Equally, I think insisting that there must be no controls to internet access whatsoever is not right either. There is now plenty of evidence that eg. social media are very harmful to teenagers - and frankly, before I noticed, going on FB got me depressed each time I did it at one point. And as a parent, you realise how little control you have over your children's tech access. Case in point - my kids seem to have access to very poorly locked down iPads at school. I complained, but they frankly don't understand.
We all accept kids can't buy alcohol and cigarettes, even if that encroaches on their freedom. But or course flashing an ID when you're over 18 is not very privacy-invading.
Likewise, I think it is much better to discuss better means of effecting these access controls. As some comments here mention, there are e.g. zero knowledge proofs.
I'm sure I'll be told it's all a sham to collect data and it's not about kids. And maybe. But I care about kids not having access to TikTok and Pornhub. So I'd rather make the laws better than moan about how terrible it is to limit access to porn and dopamine shots.
EFF launches Age Verification Hub
(eff.org)366 points by iamnothere 10 December 2025 | 339 comments
Comments
For the folks in the back row:
Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance
Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance
Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance
Without even reaching for my tinfoil hat, the strategy at work here is clear [0 1 2]. If we have to know that you're not a minor, then we also have to know who you are so we can make any techniques to obfuscate that illegal. By turning this from "keep an eye on your kids" to "prove you're not a kid" they've created the conditions to make privacy itself illegal.
VPNs are next. Then PGP. Then anything else that makes it hard for them to know who you are, what you say, and who you say it to.
Please, please don't fall into the trap and start discussing whether or not this is going to be effective to protect kids. It isn't, and that isn't the point.
0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...
1 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-usage...
2 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/57714...
Forcing providers to divine the age of the user, or requiring an adult's identity to verify that they are not a child, is backwards, for all the reasons pointed out. But that's not the only way to "protect the children". Relying on a very minimal level of parental supervision of device use should be fine; we already expect far more than that in non-technology areas.
As many are pointing out zero knowledge proofs exist and resolve most of the issues they are referring to. And it doesn't have to be complex. A government (or bank, or anybody that has an actual reason to know your identity) provided service that mints a verifiable one time code the user can plug into a web site is very simple and probably sufficient. Pretty standard PKI can do it.
The real battle to be lost here is that uploading actual identity to random web sites becomes normalised. Or worse, governments have to know what web sites you are going to. That's what needs to be fought against.
It's not a perfect solution, as he would still know who you are, but it's built in a way where you create a token locally to pass to the site that includes your age, and that site passes it to his site, which verifies the signature. So he knows who you are but not what sites you visit, and the sites know your age but not who you are.
After all, they can legitimately claim it solves much of the issues with other verification schemes - no need to trust third party sites or apps, lower risk of phishing, easier to implement internationally and with foreign nationals, etc.
Of course, the downside (for individuals) is it would take just one legal tweak or pressure from the government to destroy anonymity for good.
One actor verifies ages - and they only need to do so once. Sites give users a key tied to their user account to run by their verifier, who returns another key that attests to their verified age encoded for that specific site, to give back to the site.
The site doesn't know anything about the user, but their user login info. The verifier doesn't know anything about what sites are being visited.
This would seem to address the issues, without creating the pervasive privacy and security problems of every age verifying site creating database of people's government id's, faces, and other personal information.
It also seems like a way out of the legal/legislatorial battle. Which otherwise, is going to be an immortal hydra.
I would trust the EFF to run something like this. Open source. With only one-way encrypted/hashed personal info stored at their end.
(I am not a cryptographic expert. But I believe mechanisms like this are straightforward stuff at this point.)
Shameless plug: I wrote about hash chains some time ago. They are a nice and simple solution to age verification. https://spredehagl.com/2025-07-14/
i am a child header = i am verifying myself as valid target header
has anyone realized that whatever at all the "good" guys do, the "bad" guys will abuse it.
we need canaries [bots with child header], to get a metric on any increase of attempted crimes vs a child.
Make children write down what they got out of social media, every time they use it.
Maybe then it will sink down that it basically offers close to zero actual benefit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989890
My SO has been teaching for nearly 20 years now, and mental health in kids has fallen off a cliff in the last two decades. I could fill this page with online bullying stories. Some of which, are especially cruel. Half her students are on medication for anxiety. It's out of control, honestly.
That said, I don't know how to solve it. It's easy to put this on the parents, but that's not the answer. Otherwise, it would be solved already. Some don't care. Some don't have the time to care because they're trying to keep the lights on, and dinner on the table. And, some simply think it doesn't apply to them or their children. Parents on HN are hyper-aware of this sort of thing, but that's definitely the minority.
I know a family that would be most folks least likely candidate for something bad to happen online. Single income, relatively well off, the parent at home has an eye on the kids 24/7. And, if you met the kids, you would most likely qualify them as "good kids". Without going into detail, their life was turned upside down because one of the kids was "joking around" online.
Again, I don't know what the answer to the problem is. Clearly, age verification laws are a veiled attempt to both collect and control data. And, EFF's emphasis on advertising restrictions as a solution, seems off the mark. There's more to it than that. Idk, this shit makes me want to log off permanently, and pretend it's 1992.
Why do you think there's a global push all at once for this? Anyway I'll order a bunch of cheap USB Sticks, load them up with porn and gore and drop them at school yards at night then. If we do that enough we can make using USB Devices require ID Soon enough.
Either we create the fix, or the feds take it over. we need to sever the idea of a global internet. per-country and allied nations only. anonymous cert-chain verified ID stored on device. problem fixed.
The surveillance and censorship system is built, administered and maintained by Silicon Valley companies who have adopted this as their "business model". "Monetising" surveillance of other peoples' noncommercial internet use
These Silicon Valley companies have been surveilling internet subscribers for over a decade, relentlessly connecting online identity to offline identity, hell bent on knowing who is accessing what webpage on what website, where they live, what they are interested in, and so on, building detailed advertising profiles (including the age of the ad target) tied to IP addresses, then selling the subscribers out to advertisers and collecting obscene profits (and killing media organisations that hire journalists in the process)
Now these companies are being forced to share some of the data they collect and store
Gosh, who would have forseen such an outcome
These laws are targeting the Silicon Valley companies, not internet subscribers
But the companies want to spin it as an attack on subscribers
The truth is the companies have been attacking subscriber privacy and attempting to gatekeep internet publication^1 for over a decade, in the name of advertising and obscene profits
1. Discourage subscribers from publishing websites and encourage them to create pages on the company's website instead. Centralise internet publication, collect data, perform surveillance and serve advertisements
We have the technology to do age verification without revealing any more information to the site and without the verification authority finding out what sites we are browsing. However, most people are ignorant of it.
If we don't push for the use of privacy preserving technology we wont get it and we will get more tracking. You cannot defeat age verification on the internet, age verification is already a feature of our culture. The only way out is to ensure that privacy preserving technologies are mandated.
1. create our own porn at home and (soon)
2. have home orgasmatrons.
Parents have complete control of the Chat/Porn server and since the orgasmatron necessarily has all your desires stored in its LLM (Large Lust Model) it trivially knows your age and will lock you out.
And internet porn can be banned regardless of age. (that's only half sarcastically said).
Demand for home Large Lust Models and orgasmatrons will soar. You heard it here first. Opportunity for entrepreneurs. And these home-based products are the only way to keep porn away from kids (if parents don't care now, they never will) and to maintain privacy on the internet.
Every place where I've worked in I.T., the rule was "No porn downloading at work. Porn belongs in the home." (especially in the days of slow home modems)
And to be really enforceable, all offshore sites would have to agree to the scheme, including certain Russian ones who are glad to pollute our children's and adults' minds with porn, propaganda and conspiracy theories.
Lastly: There always was and will be media. Micro-SD cards now? If not phones, thrift store picture frames and RPi's. "Porn finds a way."
This is not compelling. The internet I know and love has been dying for a long time for unrelated reasons. The new internet that is replacing that one is an internet that I very much do not love and would be totally ok to see lots of it get harder to access.
Verified Credentials exist on the Web.
Drivers’ licenses exist.
Just show that you are over 18 in a zero knowledge way and be done with it. Why do they need to see your IDs?
The CNIL gave up 3 years ago, and gave guidelines, you can read about it here [0]. At the time it read like "How well, we tried, we said it is incompatible with privacy and the GDPR multiple times, we insist one more time that giving tools to parents is the only privacy-safe solution despite obvious problems, but since your fucking law will pass, so the best we can do is to draw guidelines, and present solutions and how to implement them correctly".
I think the EFF should do the same. That's just how it is. Define solutions you'll agree with. Fight the fight on chat control and other stuff where the public opinion can be changed, this is too late, and honestly, if it's done well,it might be fine.
If the first implementation is correct, we will have to fight to maintain the statu quo, which in a conservative society, is the easiest, especially when no other solution have been tested. If it's not, we will have to fight to make it correct, then fight to maintain it, and both are harder. the EFF should reluctantly agree and draft the technical solution themselves.
[0] https://www.cnil.fr/en/online-age-verification-balancing-pri...
It's deanonymizing and intrusive and mandatory for sites to implement without protecting them from sockpuppets and foreign troll farms.
there's a great game being played out by these users of force against the advocates of desire. everything about the bureaucracies pushing digital ID is unwanted. this isnt about age verification tech, its about illegitimate power for unwanted people who are actuated by forcing their will on others.
we should treat these actions with the open disgust they deserve.
If people care enough, they will build a new internet.
Equally, I think insisting that there must be no controls to internet access whatsoever is not right either. There is now plenty of evidence that eg. social media are very harmful to teenagers - and frankly, before I noticed, going on FB got me depressed each time I did it at one point. And as a parent, you realise how little control you have over your children's tech access. Case in point - my kids seem to have access to very poorly locked down iPads at school. I complained, but they frankly don't understand.
We all accept kids can't buy alcohol and cigarettes, even if that encroaches on their freedom. But or course flashing an ID when you're over 18 is not very privacy-invading.
Likewise, I think it is much better to discuss better means of effecting these access controls. As some comments here mention, there are e.g. zero knowledge proofs.
I'm sure I'll be told it's all a sham to collect data and it's not about kids. And maybe. But I care about kids not having access to TikTok and Pornhub. So I'd rather make the laws better than moan about how terrible it is to limit access to porn and dopamine shots.