And why would they implement it in a somewhat private manner if it could be implemented in a privacy-infringing manner?

I honestly don’t think most democratic governments have an interest in making this privacy-infringing. Lobbyists/companies on the other hand… But all the more reason to write legislation that ensures age verification must be handled like this.

That already tells the government that I’m accessing porn because why else would I need to confirm I’m an adult online?

Cinema rickets for FSK18 movie? Ordering alcohol? Gambling? Renting a car?

Basically anything you’re only allowed to do as an adult.

But that’s kind of why I mentioned, it’s just one rough draft for such a protocol.

It should be Dot Dot! But it’s Dot Dot Dot! - sanest Bitchard moment

It’s mostly just that I don’t want the government to know precisely which websites I visit. Nor do I want the the porn sites to know exactly who I am.

I understand, I want that too. It’s easily possible though (just one example for a scheme):

• you visit porn site
• porn site sends your browser a random nonce
• you/browser tell government service: sign this if I’m >18
• government signs the nonce + a timstamp to prove freshness
• your browser forwards the result to the porn site
• porn site can verify signature per standard public certificate chains
• now porn site has proof that you are >18, but knows nothing else about you; and government only knows that you wanted proof that you are an adult, but not for what site or purpose you wanted to prove that

Alternatively, if we go the “device has an age bracket field browsers access” route, it’s even simpler, and just as if not more privacy preserving.

In that case: sorry to blow up on you. I have seen to many comments on here claiming these things while being 100% serious. I just saw your comment and incidentally had time to write the above for once, so, here we are.

I agree that there’s no way to completely cut teens off from porn. Your torrent example is perfectly demonstrating this.

But I also do not understand the current outrage at anything trying to improve the situation, even when it’s not some stupid “scan your face” scheme.

I’d also like to think so. In this case though, this was clearly not what was intended, and also involved a lot of porn.

So let me get this straight:

When I was 13, I managed to figure out the router password, disabled child protection for myself, then watched porn on my Android 2.3 phone that I had managed to put a custom ROM on because I liked the way it looked and had no idea what a “launcher” was yet.

This is not a hypothetical btw.

My parents were smart enough to enable appropriate blocking and secured access to those settings. I’m not sure something on-device was available at the time, but I included the bit about the custom rom to demonstrate that, even though I didn’t know WTF I was doing, I was more than capable of fucking around with the tech to get it to do what I wanted.

So were my parents in breach of their duties on child protection?

I don’t think they were. They actually did educate themselves (visiting a course / parent meetup to discuss and learn how to protect me from the Internet), and implemented everything they learned.

I was just a little shit and found a way around this.

And this is NOT an edgecase. Because guess what. It takes one kid in the friend group to figure out a way to circumvent parental controls, and then EVERYONE knows how to do it.

It simply does not fucking matter how well intentioned, knowledgeable, and present the parents are (mine were all of that).

Going “this would not be a problem if parents parented” is the LAZIEST fucking excuse, and I’m sick and tired of reading about it on here.

(Because I probably have to make it clear: I’m not advocating for photo/passport scanning, third party age verification,… and all that bullshit. What I think would be a FANTASTIC idea would be privacy-preserving age verification. There are two good ways to do this: 1) on a login attempt, prove that you are of age by presenting a fresh, signed token from a government service proving that you are over 18, and nothing else; site does not get any info, government does not know what you were trying to access; 2) a device-level age field. Proof here comes from the device itself, and can be 100% privacy preserving; just a “yep, is of age”. In this scenario… GUESS WHAT, PARENTS GET ENABLED TO PARENT “PROPERLY” BY PROVIDING THEM WITH A GOOD, SIMPLE, PRIVACY-PRESERVING TECHNICAL SOLUTION.)