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Could online age verification be done in a way that protects privacy and autonomy? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by 58008@lemmy.world to c/ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev

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Apologies if this isn't the right place to ask this, but I thought actual developers with a deep understanding of how technology actually works would be the people to ask!

If you were tasked with setting up a safe and secure way to do this, how would you do it differently than what the UK government is proposing? How could it be done such that I wouldn't have to worry about my privacy and the threat of government suppression? Is it even theoretically possible to accomplish such a task at such a scale?

Cheers!

EDIT: Just to be clear: I'm not in favour of age verification laws. But they're on their way regardless. My question is purely about the implementation and technology of the thing, rather than the ethics or efficacy of it. Can this seemingly-inevitable privacy hellscape be done in a non-hellscapish way?

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[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No.

Basically, as soon as a web service knows your age, they can tailor their content specifically for you. That's great when the service is Netflix and doesn't want to suggest R-rated movies to pre-teens.

That's not quite so great when the "service" is KidGroomer dot com.

Turns out that having machines automatically report the ages of their users is not such a good idea. Turns out that enabling groomers to identify children from adults is a fair bit worse than kids finding naked people on the internet.

[–] oatscoop@midwest.social 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

We use used to have a privacy friendly solution that allowed parents to monitor their kid's internet use.

You just had to put it in shared area.