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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5464 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Zero-knowledge proof of age systems would be a very easy way to handle age verification without having to provide any identifying information to any third party instead of faffing around with crap like AgeGo or face scans.

Of course, I wonder why this will never happen ...

Of course, I wonder why this will never happen ...

Please, tell us.

It's coming, and soon. Zero-knowledge proofs for age are in the design of the age-verification framework of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, and in the specs of the Swiss eID law they passed a while back. Both involve an app on your phone holding your ID and your crypto keys and generating ZKP responses to things like age requests.

Both designs are decent in my opinion. Once you've come to terms with the slippery slope that we'll soon have digital ID checks everywhere, all the time, there's not much to criticize. It's probably the best way to do it, if we agree that we need to do any of that. But also, it's pretty far from a "very easy way". This scheme absolutely needs a central authority (probably a national government) doing the final ID/age check and then the issuing of crypto keys. I'll be curious how the US handles this. I expect Google/Apple to take over that task, since the majority probably won't trust the government to do it right...

We're probably 5-10 years out from "device with (parental) content locks enabled is able to internally detect and choose not to render objectionable content" (for separate check boxes of "nudity", "violence", and "heretical ideas", naturally). I have pretty mixed feelings about the idea: device-side removes a lot of the privacy concerns, but every year it feels like my freedom to do what I want with my electronic devices gets eroded.

Do the zero-knowledge proposals have good answers for the actual human parts of the systems? It's cryptographically interesting, but seems like it requires issuing authorities and all sorts of other identification crypto infrastructure from what I can tell.

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