I hate to be cynical but I worry that this isn't going to matter, because it really seems that a lot of the pressure behind age verification isn't actually very interested in the age verification part...
But a part of me wonders if this may be by design from the debate moderators - if a technical expert opens up by saying "we have a cryptographically secured solution that is backed by experts and privacy advocates alike", what's the next 45 minutes of the TV show going to be about?
All current age verification measures open up a torrent of attack vectors on user PII and privacy. Limiting the number of entities that are able to access data is one of the best ways to prevent it's leak or abuse. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good.
But therein lies the fundamental problem with surveillance capitalism. Until the sale of personal data/metadata is outlawed, the practice of targeting content based on an individuals personal data/metadata is outlawed, there is a highly punitive cost for violations and leaks that make storage outside core business functionality a major criminal and financial risk, and the compilation of this data by "intelligence" agencies it treated as a critical attack vector to national security – the attack on each citizens civil rights that it truly is – most privacy laws and regulations are just virtue signals designed specifically avoid the root causes, and further entrench the power of monopolies and incumbents.
FYI I don't believe Google sells user data. They sell products which leverage user data to give them a critical advantage over every competitor who does not have trackers in everyones pockets/computers, does not store their entire web search/browsing history, etc. It's in the interest of big tech to protect their market advantage (like ZKP, which would prevent competitors from having a new gov-mandated vector to compile user data).
Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.
We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.
Stop putting plastic wrap around people's freedoms, liberty, and right to privacy.
We will look back at handing kids phones with instagram like giving kids cigarettes and think wtf were we doing.
In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like.
Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way.
Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 1984. It makes them more money.
Are you saying that we should let children smoke and just tax it because its better for their liberty and freedoms?
Or are you saying we should just tax social media for adults but banning it for kids is ok
I mean, quite a few have come from proto-manosphere circles, too. Elliot Rodger comes to mind.
This is incredibly toxic for young men growing up and the women they interact with.
Some of the more prominent proponents are actual pimps (the Tate brothers).
I get that ZK techniques work, and reveal "nothing". That's useful.
But if they reveal nothing, isn't it wide open for abuse? Couldn't one over-18-person's proof become everyone's proof, because they can't tell it's the same proof, and the issuer can't tell where or how often the proof is being used? Or are there ways to construct data leaks that are not user-identifying but are abuse-identifying (and what would that even mean)?
Yep!
This is why the concept of zero knowledge age gating is such a trap for technically minded people. They imagine receiving a private cryptographic object that can be used to anonymously confirm that the government says it was issued to someone over 18.
That’s completely useless because a single leaked token could be used forever, so nobody actually considers this.
All of the real proposals have various compromises baked in. Some people want to require device attestation, so you could only do this handshake from a government approved device running a government approved operating system. Forget using Linux or maybe even a general purpose computer at all.
Other proposals involve online government handshakes in various ways, with a pinky promise that the government won’t keep logs or tap it for national security purposes. So we get back to anonymous by trust only.
:(
The governments’ focus might be on protecting genuine users (adults or not), not fighting fraudsters.
In other words if ZKP works for the vast majority of technically illiterate people with their EU ewallet, the job is done.
The reason this is a non-problem for the purpose being discussed (age verification on social media) is that you can simply allow anyone with a de-Googled phone or using Linux on a laptop (or even Mac or Windows) to bypass the age check. You don't need a 100.0% accuracy solution, anything above 90% is fine.
Essentially all teenagers are using social media on Android or iOS with apps from the official app store. If you make social media unavailable only on those devices, they are not going to be switching en masse to SailfishOS or start to carry around backpacks with laptops.
Maybe a few will. But then they're going to be very lonely on their social media and subsequently stop caring.
Social media is something people want. A large part of why people buy smartphones in the first place (especially at that age) is to be on social media. If you need to buy some weird kind of smartphone to do it, or ask your tech-savvy friend to do some voodoo on it for ten bucks, people absolutely will do that.
See the story of console modchips in eastern Europe for an example. Legal games were so expensive at that time that most kids / families weren't able to afford them. Console modchips existed, but they were difficult to install, and most people just didn't have the expertise. What ended up happening was that everybody "knew a guy", and that guy would do their modchip for a fee. They didn't need to know anything about rooting, ROMs, flashing or soldering, they gave a legal console to somebody and got a console that could play pirated games back.
Motivated kids can find a way! Perhaps evading age gates will produce the next generation of hackers.
There's an interesting post here which goes into some of this - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
So -
> Yep!
Actually nope.
You could build a merkle tree to say "we exist after X" but not "there is no other X". And publishing that tree for verification would seemingly violate "zero knowledge", unless you know of some way to scrub that, and also hide timing information, because timing information can identify visitors to observers.
- you enter ph and must age-verify. It says 'your secret: "capable peanut", enter age proof below'.
- you go to age-knower (e.g bank or government page). You provide the secret phrase, and you get back a cryptographically signed json with the secret phrase, a claim 'above18', and a field stating who attested for the age (e.g government or bank or whoever).
- you paste this signed json (maybe encoded as base64 or something) into ph. It will verify that the attestee is good, then use it's public key to verify the signature, before checking that the secret is the correct one, and that it contains the age-claim.
Is the problem that if ph and the attestee colludes they can compare the secret string and figure out who you are?
For some isolated scenarios, that collusion risk may be completely fine. But not for something that is poised to control access to the internet as a whole, or in any way relates to maintaining safe free speech on the dominant public platform for doing so (the internet). People need protection from their government (present and future), or it's not a "right", it's just temporary retroactively-revokable permission.
See https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/age-verification-id/#dev... for some more detail.
When you want to provide information from that document to a third party a protocol is used which allows you to demonstrate to the third party that (1) you have a document from the government bound to your hardware security device, (2) you have unlocked the hardware security device, (3) and the document says what you say it says (e.g., "the birthdate field in this document contains a value that is more than 18 years in the past").
This third party gets no additional information about the contents of your document. The protocol takes place entirely between your device and the third party, so the government that issued you the bound document has no idea when or if you use it.
Someone over 18 person could indeed decide to help others prove age, but they would either have to do it in person or be willing to loan their unlocked security element to those others.
1. Imagine what the protocol would look like without privacy (zk allows you to “sign” a computation, so just do the computation in the clear)
2. Imagine what the protocol would look like by revealing a hash of the passport only (the idea of a “nullifier”, a unique identifier that hides the data and and can be revealed to prevent replays)
The first one should already answer your question: the way you would prevent replays or portability (I use your proof) is to attach some sort of session context to your proof
Your proof proves two claims. That the person proving their age is over 18, and that they're using a device and software that hasn't been tampered with. That software requires human presence at every age check.
ZKPs for age assurance are trading off privacy at the expense of software malleability.
Note that this has nothing to do with open source; it's perfectly fine to release the source code for the relevant software. You can even allow for reproducible builds and full auditability if that's what you want.
The released code can do all of that, and then nothing still assures me that they didn't implement just a POST <my whole information> to their partner and called it ZKP and pointed at google's repo.
https://blog.vrypan.net/2026/06/29/260629-whats-wrong-with-e...
Europe doesn't really have that status. Either you're known to the government and can receive documents from it, or you're a criminal in hiding, avoiding any and all government offices.
I have written a paper on how to do age verification in a completely privacy-preserving way, and it doesn’t even need zero-knowledge proofs:
When not doing privacy oriented cryptocurrency (cough money laundering cough) with ZKP's, if you really want private verification you are in a position where a single actor can authenticate the entire world and no one will know it happened. And to prevent it you assemble the pieces necessary to deanonymize anyone.
Make no mistake. ZKP age verification, as proposed, will just require multiple parties to collude to figure out your identity.
They can't even implement ZKP for remote attestation due to the auth-the-world problem.
So you should assume the government can track you, because you should assume both will be streaming those identifiers to it.
Ideally, no age verification would be required or proposed. However, if it is, this implementation should be the base minimum, should it not?
This is a gazillion percent better than a foreign corporation being in charge, isn't it?
First it's 'over 18?', then it's 'over 25?', and then 'biological sex?', 'employed?', 'enjoys posting on HN?', 'active in the early morning?' and after half a dozen questions, all with binary answers that are safe individually, you can zero in on a 23 year old woman who has a job and posts on HN in the morning.
Ask a few dozen questions like that and you'd be able to sieve an individual from a group of millions, especially if they're unlucky enough not to be absolutely typical.
Obviously if you see a bunch of proofs for known circuits coming from the same IP address then yeah, you can infer a bunch of info from that metadata.
It's moving the goal post from one entity to another.
You can also fake it by letting someone else solve it for you.
Fair enough, that's true. But there is no solution that could ever prevent this, right?
I'm afraid "age assurance" has nothing to do with "the children".
> Today, we open sourced our Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries, fulfilling a promise and building on our partnership with Sparkasse to support EU age assurance.
Done.
I made a formal submission to the Australian Government in the very small consulting window they held for the Access and Assistance bill. Pleading with them to consider simply not introducing the law, as there was no justification for it at all. Google also made a submission against the bill, as did many large local and overseas corporations.
The government went ahead anyway.
What are the chances of me swinging any government when Google et al are on the other side, determined to provide privacy and anonymity destroying products to bolster their bottom line?
Probably worth mentioning that the Access and Assistance bill permits the Australian government to secretly (even just verbally) compel anyone building age assurance technology to secretly backdoor it to collect metadata, or any other information they choose. There's no level of safety from the government one can achieve with any app. If they resist they go straight to the Australian version of a secret national security court. The bill doesn't even make it clear whether briefing their solicitor about the request is legal. It doesn't matter how good the crypto is if the app is recording details outside of that. Its all just theatre at this point. There's no safe app, so we should completely resist all attempts to do things the government could restrict, leak or misuse.
I dont see how this is even slightly contentious in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty six, after decades of leaks affirming governments do this stuff, decades of governments and corporations dangerously failing their citizens privacy, when a particular government is hell bent on using all the personal data it can hoover up to persecute migrants and refugees. How are people blindly monofocusing on the crypto while trusting everything else?
Age assurance is being used in more than a single scope. I dont disagree that the revolution isnt happening, but theres no need to be so reductive.
>Of course the social media companies object to their product being banned. It's like cigarette companies objecting to plain packaging.
They aren't objecting to age assurance tools. They are objecting to the current ham fisted model, but when they can organise something less nebulous than the current regime they will be fighting to implement it first.
So I have little sympathy that the resulting laws are not optimal for them.
It was solved. Dont collect information.
The problem is making shitty psychotic apps, not determining who can use them.
I would much rather they cut meta into pieces and sold them off as scraps, than just scarfing up the PID of the users to make arbitrary determinations about who can have what brainrot.
There are more people than just you (and other tech literate folk) online.
I would also rather meta be cut an sold of as scraps. This is sadly not the question being framed.
I’ve dedicated a portion of my life volunteering to moderate content in communities. It is an unmitigated shit show. The status quo is great for firms and corrosive for society.
If theres a takeaway from this sub thread, is why “meta being broken up and sold for scraps” not being raised as a question in the first place.
Is it another case of too big to fail?
reddit isn't the vast majority of the population, fren. it's 1% of 4%.
unless you've got polls you could show to back up your claim? polls, not opinion pieces. polls asking unambiguous questions like "are you in favor of banning social media?" or "are you in favor of age verification laws?", not vague ones like "are you concerned about the content your kids might see on the internet?". got any of those?
https://yougov.com/articles/51000-support-for-under-16-socia...
This was in 2024, since then the attitude is still very much that kids should be taken off social media, but that the current restrictions aren't yet working as the face scanning verification is easily bypassed.
> Support among parents for a social media ban for under-16s is highest in Malaysia (77%) and India (75%), Argentina (55%) and lowest in Japan (38%) and Nigeria (39%)
> Globally, the majority of Gen Z (51%) – the first true digital natives – support a social media ban for under-16s. Support for the ban is highest in India (73%) and UAE (67%), Argentina (54%) and lowest in Japan (28%), UK, and Canada (both 40%
https://www.varkeyfoundation.org/post/6-in-10-parents-worldw... Support among parents for a social media ban for under-16s is highest in Malaysia (77%) and India (75%), Argentina (55%) and lowest in Japan (38%) and Nigeria (39%)
increasingly few people are parents, so these numbers are don't reflect 'the vast majority' of the population.
> I dont see how this is even slightly contentious in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty six
Violent revolution in response to data privacy issues?
Done.
Politicians don't want to be seen as going soft on child predators and harms to children. That is a career-ending move. Whether the bills they introduce even protect children at all has no bearing on it. PR is PR.
If you're essentially telling somebody that children don't need to be protected, you might feel smug and superior, but you're achieving nothing. You'll be ignored as a conspiracy-theory-loving nutjob.
If, on the other hand, you tell politicians that there are multiple approaches to protecting children, all as effective, with one of them having fewer side-effects to the rest of society, now that's a much easier sell. You sound like somebody who knows their stuff and has a nuanced take.