This is the first of a series of posts on the topic. The next is about HOW the industry leaders protect privacy. It will show technically how they protect privacy. It should reassure you that this is possible. This also is the top priority of both the UK and Australia, to make sure that age verification protects privacy.
The UK and Australian governments are not accused of any human rights abuse or surveillance or any cases of abusing the system. It is designed to make that impossible.
If any of you know of an example of a government that has used age verification to abuse human rights or to breach privacy please say and I'll investigate and talk about lessons learnt and how to prevent it etc. I would not omit anything like that but simply haven't found it.
Please do respond if you know of anything I need to cover.
I want to give scared people accurate advice and don't want to leave anything out that they need to know about.
I am a voluntary fact checker and when people say such things I fact check them and have found no facts to support the claims.
We only need your user name and email address to join and the email address is just for notifications, we don't look at it (unless needed to help you or for debugging) or share with anyone.
Public concern centers on privacy. Citizens do not want the government to be aware of their personal preferences when they visit adult websites or political vlogs. Therefore, the primary issue is not a disagreement with the concept of age verification, but a deep-seated worry about privacy and security.
This is the first of a series of blog posts. This is the priority of the governments too. The Unitied Kingdom and Australia the first two prominent countries to do age verification in a big way have strong privacy human rights legislation and it was a priority of the legislators that it has to respect privacy and not violate human rights.
In the next blog post I talk about how it is implemented by K-ID which is an example of how industry leaders do it, the best practice in the industry. They way Yoti does it is similar. This will answer most of people's concerns they will see that it is simply impossible for anyone to use it to breach privacy.
There is no way for ANYONE to associate ANY government ID with ANY website.
With K-ID they know they were asked to verify if a user of Discord was an adult or not but they have to create a new anonymized ID of their own for each new age verification and never get to see Discord's user ID. So they can't associate any of their age verifications with any of the Discord accounts.
The government ID is deleted immediately and so there is no way for a hacker of the age verifier to determine who it is whose age they verified. There is no way for the government to obtain this information by a subpoena either or any other method since nobody has the data.
So K-ID also is unable to find out which individuals asked for age verification for Discord.
So there is no way for a hacker or for a government to find out who has Discord accounts never mind associate an account with them. K-ID doesn't have that information and has no way to obtain it and Discord also doesn't have the information and can't obtain it.
It's possible to add another level of blinding of the data where the age verifier has no way to know which of the age verifications is associated with which websites.
That's how LA wallet works. You get your age verified once but the age verifier then is not able to determine which website you used the age verification for.
This means there isn't even any access to statistics such as how many users of LA wallet used age verification for pornography.
In the case of K-ID it would be possible to extract statistical information about the number of Discord age verifications. But that's all there is.
And then - though there is huge attention to this, there are no examples of any government abusing age verification to find out anything about anyone.
I have searched and found nothing.
The age verification is set up to make this impossible for governments to do and nobody has ever even tried to use it to do this impossible thing because it is impossible.
This is the first of a series of posts on the topic. The next is about HOW the industry leaders protect privacy. It will show technically how they protect privacy. It should reassure you that this is possible. This also is the top priority of both the UK and Australia, to make sure that age verification protects privacy.
The UK and Australian governments are not accused of any human rights abuse or surveillance or any cases of abusing the system. It is designed to make that impossible.
If any of you know of an example of a government that has used age verification to abuse human rights or to breach privacy please say and I'll investigate and talk about lessons learnt and how to prevent it etc. I would not omit anything like that but simply haven't found it.
Please do respond if you know of anything I need to cover.
I want to give scared people accurate advice and don't want to leave anything out that they need to know about.
I am a voluntary fact checker and when people say such things I fact check them and have found no facts to support the claims.
PLEASE DON’T COMMENT ON THIS POST WITH POTENTIALLY SCARY QUESTIONS ABOUT ANY OTHER TOPIC
Also please check the purpose of this substack - to help people scared of many things. Welcome:
- questions if you are still scared and need help
- fact checks if I got anything wrong however small
- help with debunking
Please don't post potentially scary things here unless you are yourself scared and needing help.
FOR POTENTIAL SCARY QUESTIONS ABOUT OTHER TOPICS YOU WANT DEBUNKED - PLEASE COMMENT IN OUR NEW FORUM HERE
https://ddebunked.org
There are many there who can answer you not just me. And it is setup for voluntary fact checking and far easier to use than comments here
https://ddebunked.org
It’s just a forum not social media. No age verification. Set up by myself with free open source software Flarum.
For details see my:
https://robertinventor.substack.com/p/our-own-new-discussion-forum-for
We only need your user name and email address to join and the email address is just for notifications, we don't look at it (unless needed to help you or for debugging) or share with anyone.
If you have any issues joining it do let me know.
Public concern centers on privacy. Citizens do not want the government to be aware of their personal preferences when they visit adult websites or political vlogs. Therefore, the primary issue is not a disagreement with the concept of age verification, but a deep-seated worry about privacy and security.
This is the first of a series of blog posts. This is the priority of the governments too. The Unitied Kingdom and Australia the first two prominent countries to do age verification in a big way have strong privacy human rights legislation and it was a priority of the legislators that it has to respect privacy and not violate human rights.
In the next blog post I talk about how it is implemented by K-ID which is an example of how industry leaders do it, the best practice in the industry. They way Yoti does it is similar. This will answer most of people's concerns they will see that it is simply impossible for anyone to use it to breach privacy.
There is no way for ANYONE to associate ANY government ID with ANY website.
With K-ID they know they were asked to verify if a user of Discord was an adult or not but they have to create a new anonymized ID of their own for each new age verification and never get to see Discord's user ID. So they can't associate any of their age verifications with any of the Discord accounts.
The government ID is deleted immediately and so there is no way for a hacker of the age verifier to determine who it is whose age they verified. There is no way for the government to obtain this information by a subpoena either or any other method since nobody has the data.
So K-ID also is unable to find out which individuals asked for age verification for Discord.
So there is no way for a hacker or for a government to find out who has Discord accounts never mind associate an account with them. K-ID doesn't have that information and has no way to obtain it and Discord also doesn't have the information and can't obtain it.
It's possible to add another level of blinding of the data where the age verifier has no way to know which of the age verifications is associated with which websites.
That's how LA wallet works. You get your age verified once but the age verifier then is not able to determine which website you used the age verification for.
This means there isn't even any access to statistics such as how many users of LA wallet used age verification for pornography.
In the case of K-ID it would be possible to extract statistical information about the number of Discord age verifications. But that's all there is.
And then - though there is huge attention to this, there are no examples of any government abusing age verification to find out anything about anyone.
I have searched and found nothing.
The age verification is set up to make this impossible for governments to do and nobody has ever even tried to use it to do this impossible thing because it is impossible.
Small correction: Molly Russell died in 2017, not in 2022, the article is from 2022
Oh thanks! I'll fix it immediately.
Just to say I fixed it and also in my original OSA section about Molly Russell where I made the same mistake.