This is absolutely insane. Creating a surveillance dystopia "for the children". What about that even sounds like a good idea?
I swear people would call personal identity cards dystopian if we wanted to introduce them today.
There is nothing dystopian about applying existing laws on the internet.
In Germany, compulsory ID cards were introduced by the nazis.
The internet is a communications network, analogous to the telephone or post system. Such compulsory surveillance of private communication is not part of any existing laws.
First versions of a personal id in Germany were introduced in 1850. I doubt the nazis introduced ids in South Africa or Vietnam.
I also don’t think the internet is comparable to telephone or postal services. There is a whole information space on the internet simply not existing in the other two.
You guys need to stop treating the internet as the wild west.
Famously free countries. Let me guess, SA used ID cards for the same purpose as the nazis?
Not knowing how the internet is like a telephone network is exactly the problem. It's like making laws about breaking and entering without knowing what locks or windows are.
The internet is not lawless. It wouldn't exist without laws, chief among them constitutional guarantees for freedom of information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_identity_card_policies_by_country
Must be all Nazis then 🤡
Not knowing how the internet is like a telephone network is exactly the problem.
I can’t imagine AI generated porn of real women being published on telephone lines without the internet.
But yeah sure it’s just information bro nothing to worry about.
The issue isn't with being identifiable, it's with control over who has access to your identity. Even back when IDs were introduced, people would take issue with them being copied and sold by the bale to literally anyone who asks.
Greetings from germany to my fellow germans who had a light chuckle seeing Censorsula announcing a zero knowledge app.
She must be very envious of Xi, or rather, her lobbyists are. The place for rotten corrupt politicians should be in prison for life, not on a comfortable throne in Brussels.
Why the comparisons with China? Doubt that they’re using zero knowledge proofs and open source.
None of that matters because the objective is the same. This measure is simply the normalization of government and corporate overreach towards authoritarianism under the flimsy excuse that it's to protect children.
They know very well that it's unpopular, and therefore western leaders are coming up with the strategy of implementing this crap all at once and taking a certain care to generate as little further distrust as possible. The enshitification will come later.
I'd like a more credible source that this is zero knowledge.
Where are the photos of the document processed though? And if not on the phone itself, is the server backend open source as well? Can I self-host it? And is the data which is used to generate certificates deleted immediately or stored in the backend? I have questions.
Agreed.
It sounds like a better solution than sending photos of ID documents anywhere and everywhere, but at the same time it's not really different, it's just centralized. It removes other vectors of privacy breaches, but it doesn't remove the possibility of a breach entirely.
Just stop requiring age verification to protect an open and anonymous internet. If governments are worried about what kids are doing online, start charging their parents with neglect, because they're supposed to be the responsible party for their kids' behavior.
To be honest, I simply wouldn’t feel comfortable storing this data on the third party servers hosted on hyper scaler infrastructure. That probably works for most but I’m not keen on a Telekom / AWS combination there. The regulation itself is a totally different discussion. There’s arguments both in favor and against and I don’t really wanna judge that here. I’ll say though, that IMHO the OS level is totally the wrong place to do it. Just gives large non-European companies a powerful bonus datapoint.
Disagree. Parents apparently cannot oversee the harm they are causing. And the social pressure is too high. So it needs to be regulated.
Parents apparently cannot oversee the harm they are causing.
Then that's still the parents' fault, IMO. If you can't teach your child to use the internet safely and responsibly, or adequately monitor the services they use, then you don't give them internet-enabled devices.
Imagine if instead of the internet, we were talking about going out after dark. A few kids go out and do stupid things at night, but instead of blaming the parents who let them out unsupervised, we set a national curfew for everyone unless you obtain a nighttime permit from the government. Does that sound reasonable?
Your comparison with going out after dark is totally off. It’s much easier to monitor if the kid is in the house than if they access web site they shouldn’t.
Just to blame the parents is too easy. There’s a reason why porn, alcohol, and cigarettes is not allowed to be sold to minors in shops. What you’re asking is that parents shouldn’t allow their kids to to go to shops, just so you don’t have to be provide proof of your age to access to alcohol in your local shop.
More and more of our lives are online and I totally see why we need to do propper online verification for some things.
Photos?
I'm fairly certain the app will use the NFC feature of your ID to verify age and only age. Everything else would be a gross violation of privacy, it does not need to store anything else.
Besides, photos only prove possession of an ID card, not ownership. Imagine if an ATM allowed withdrawing funds from a card without having to enter anything. Using the NFC feature requires entering a PIN only the owner should know.
When I scan the qr code on my phone, it actually launched my country's own eIDAS app. The EU verification app looks more like an application of eIDAS, data is stored on your national id card, that's it.
The article says the document is not send to a third party, most likely it uses info on the passport (NFC, not photo) to generate a proof that the holder is an adult.
It probably just uses the EU eID system. That uses NFC and not any camera pictures whatsoever
That's a lot of very misdirected effort, with a lot of bad and not-at-all-necessary consequences.
I could not imagine myself in this timeline.
Virkkunen said the Commission will also establish a European co-ordination mechanism to ensure consistency as member states implement their own national age verification schemes, which currently vary significantly in approach and minimum age thresholds.
The app arrives as at least a dozen European countries, including the UK and Norway, have enacted or are actively considering legislation setting minimum age limits for social media, typically between 13 and 16 years.
Part of a global lobbying effort as Canada's governing party, the Liberal Party of Canada, is also discussing age verification simultaneously, as are a number of US states.
Powers that be do not want an anonymous internet that helps illegal actions (illegal is large, from organizing slavery to organizing a protest that could endanger the established organization).
The rest is just posturing, seizing opportunities, and moving gradually. It's just allowing government intelligence to do their job for the powers that be.
If we want to change this, we need more democracy. Like much more. And properly teaching basics of political science / sociology / macroeconomic so voters know where the tradeoffs are, because there are always tradeoffs.
“Online platforms can easily rely on our age verification app so there are no more excuses. We will have zero tolerance for companies that do not respect our children’s rights.”
Not being able to access a website is not a right. Being able to browse the web without being exposed to disturbing material without consent can be seen as a right, but it doesn't require age verification beyond a simple "are you over 18 years old?".
Being forced to provide an image of yourself or your ID to a website that you can't trust if you want to access a website or service, if there's also the option to do it with a zero-knowledge proof, could maybe be seen as a violation of one's privacy rights (non-functionally-necessary data must be opt-in, AFAIK). But these rights are not limited to children, and it doesn't apply to under-age them as they won't be able to access the service anyways.
Zero-knowledge proofs are cool, the german id card has such a feature, afaik. It just certifies that the user is >18 years old, and doesn't leak the actual age, your name, or other identifiable information, afaik. (I've never used it.) I can't judge what they implemented, or if one can trust that they implement what they specify, or what metadata might be involved.
Being able to access the 18+ side of the web without having to worry about privacy is an important right. It weights more than protecting children from the consequences of their own free decisions in this case, imo.
The EU verification app is actually doing what you described for the German ID card, you get back a signed predicate "over 18" and that's it. It's also there for other legally meaningful ages, in a way you can you it to target the age a bit better, but you would have to issue many challenges to the user.
Being able to browse the web without being exposed to disturbing material without consent
Advertisements on the internet are very disturbing...
but it doesn’t require age verification beyond a simple “are you over 18 years old?”.
In what world does that stop any kid? Should a bartender also just ask if people are over 18 (or what your drinking age limit is) and then just believe whatever little Johnny says?
Here are 2 things that you should know:
For this to work, you must block a lot of non-EU websites. There will be a lot of pressure to do just that, not just from ideologues but also the copyright industry, and maybe even parts of Big Tech. The copyright industry wants to block pirate sites. Actually, anything that suppresses competition is good. See for example how piracy shield works in Italy.
That means, that all online activities by minors must be carefully monitored. "Private" messages from or to minors must be scanned for suspicious content and possibly handed over to authorities. That implies that offering encryption to minors must be outlawed.
Especially cyberbullying is very complex and deeply personal phenomenon. It may include spreading rumors, or excluding someone from a group. Somehow Big Tech is supposed to find a way to solve this. We take all the grievances against Big Tech, and this is the conclusion?
But maybe it's okay, because our governments will be instructing Big Tech on what do. Is that really how much you trust your government?
I find it unlikely that this infrastructure would only be used against minors, once it exists. EG the government servers that indicate your age could also indicate that you are under investigation, and that all your activities should be recorded for the police.
Does this also mean that if two minors of lets say age 16 exchange spicy pictures that were previously only between them, from then on involves at least one adult "reviewer" who then has to save the image for documentation purposes creating a large library of flagged spicy pics, possibly worth millions?
That already exists.
Those spicy pictures are so-called CSAM; Child Sexual Abuse Material. Most countries have exceptions in their laws to keep kids out of jail. But it is legally very risky. As soon as such images are shared, even other minors may face prosecution.
When the police seize such images, they go into databases. They are also shared with some privileged companies, that are allowed to handle such images. They use them to scan for these or similar images being shared on the net. I understand that it is quite lucrative to offer such services, on account of having near monopolies. I'm sure not all those who volunteer for these jobs are hardy men who do it only for the satisfaction.
I would be more interested in EU-wide firewall that blocks all advertisements from outside. Just a little quality of life.
Taxes for big Internet platforms please, and remove any copyright laws that US media imposes in Europe. Looking at the broken YouTube copyright system where anyone can strike channels without any proof or review in particular...
Cool now the pedophile class can track everyone. What could go wrong?
Is the app actually old enough?
I'm kind of starting to think the whole Internet thing was a bad idea and we actually should get rid of it. Well, maybe not all of it. Let's go back to silly blogs and personal websites that are updated once a month.
Zensursula is at it again.
As long as it increases shareholder value (they will now know who is a bot & who isn't + potentially a lot more of your contextual personal info) that is mission achieved for the ... representatives of the ~~megacorps~~ people.
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