A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.
A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.
There’s a HUGE lobbying effort to convince the people in power that this is a good idea. Lots of tech-surveillance companies bidding for this to go through, so everyone is forced to use their services. You think identity theft is bad now? Wait until you need to put your ID on the internet and that gets leaked.
If age verification is really the intent then it ought to be possible to develop a service these websites can call into that gives some kind of zero-knowledge age check. The age check service doesn’t need to know the identity of the service that’s asking, and the requesting service doesn’t need to know the identity of the person whose age they’re checking. You’d authenticate on a site that only knows someone’s doing an age check, and the verifying site would just get a token indicating that the age check was successful.
Am I missing some reason why this wouldn’t be possible? It seems to be a problem ripe for zero-knowledge solutions.
If it is possible, there’s really no need for an age check requirement to involve disclosing your identity to the site you’re visiting, or to disclose your viewing habits to anyone. And if governments or lobbyists are pushing for everyone to upload their full identity to web sites, it suggests either they’re ignorant or their motives aren’t what they claim.
This bill is a government login that sends an authentication string to the requesting website
Equivalent of CRA now or as an implementation that you’re familiar with “sign in with google”
The worry security wise is less about it getting leaked as it is opening a new string of fake websites (because the government data getting leaked/attacked is already an issue)