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ansuz / ऐरन

Regarding age verification technologies:

Zero knowledge proofs let you prove that you have a valid government id without revealing the details of that government id.

They do not, however, let you prove that you haven't just borrowed a parent's id, or grabbed someone's passport from a leaked dataset.

The computer doesn't know about that stuff. Even if you then hook it up to a live government database of revoked ids, there will still be cases where the holder of a document does not know it has leaked.

This is what I mean when I say "If it is anonymous it is transferable".

Such a system would need to be both private and effective. I see cryptographers talking about how to make it more private, ignoring that even if you can limit that particular harm, you will do so in a way that defeats its whole purpose.

In the process, you make it so that anyone who doesn't have a valid government id (and this includes many overlapping categories of people) will lose access to systems on the presumption that they might be children.

The EFF and others are arguing against these systems on the basis of privacy, and I believe they have good intentions.

Still, I think this kind of single-issue advocacy makes it easier to distract from the fact that we should remember three core requirements for such a system. A proposed solution must be:

1. effective
2. private
3. proportional

Numbers 1 and 2 seem incompatible based on everything I've researched, and lots of people on either side of that debate seem content to forget about #3

If someone were to propose a system which somehow matched all of the above requirements, then I might agree to it being deployed.

I feel pretty comfortable saying that because I strongly believe that the problem is fundamentally intractable. Such a system is not possible.

Every "solution" I have ever seen ultimately hinges on relaxing at least one of the requirements rather than addressing it.

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