According to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months. It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked, which is a total no-go for privacy.

These massive privacy issues have all been raised on their Github, and the team behind the wallet have been ignoring them.

  > It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering".

I feel like you're glossing over a lot of uncomfortable but important implementation details here. None of this works without effectively banning personal computing and tying the whole system to secure attestation (which in practice means non-jailbroken apple & android devices). No thanks.

Can we go back to defaulting to parenting instead of nanny-states? Maybe make "age sensitive" websites include this fact into a header (or whatever) so that parents can decide who in their household can access which content. Instead of having some overreaching corpo-government implementing draconian "verification" systems.

If I want to live under the thumb of a strongly verified "benevolent" dictatorship, I'll move to China. No need to create a second China at home.

> It derives an age attribute such as "over 18" from a passport or ID, without disclosing any other information such as the date of birth.

How? If it’s analyzes my ID 100% client side I can fake any info I want. If my ID goes to a server, it’s compromised IMO.

I think the zero proof systems being touted are like ephemeral messaging in Snapchat. That is, we’re being sold something that’s impossible and it only “works” because most people don’t understand enough to know it’s an embellishment of capabilities. The bad actors will abuse it.

Zero proof only works with some kind of attestation, maybe from the government, and there needs to be some amount of tracking or statistics or rate limiting to make sure everyone in a city isn’t sharing the same ID.

Some tracking turns into tracking everything, probably with an opaque system, and the justification that the “bad guys” can’t know how it works. We’ve seen it over and over with big tech. Accounts get banned or something breaks and you can’t get any info because you might be a bad guy.

Does your system work without sending my ID to a server and without relying on another party for attestation?

> work at a European identity wallet system that uses a zero knowledge proof age identification system

> derives an age attribute such as "over 18" from a passport or ID, without disclosing any other information

Well, as soon someone points their chinaphone camera on a passport, it is already over.

This whole setup is a nightmare fuel.

You want to check over 18? Fine, let adults set their kids devices in a "child" mode. Problem solved.

No need to create a stasi dreamland.

This is the way. It annoys me to no end when e.g. the German chancellor demands clearnames in social media. The real issue are bots and algorithmically enhanced reach. Proof of personhood in a privacy-preserving way is enough to fix this. But it should be mandatory for social media in the EU. You don't need to expose people to the doxxing mob to protect our democracy.

Tbh, when I read that "platforms face a choice between excluding lawful users and monitoring everyone." I don't have much understanding.

No gov. ID, no participation. It's not like you cannot go outside and talk to people anymore so let's not pretend that being on insta is some sort of universal human right and anybody barred from it is some sort of terrible tragedy.

I was working on a similar concept as a hobby project with PKI. The idea being that governments would have a digital registry with citizen information and issue a certificate to be stored in a Secure Enclave on a device.

When a client attempts to access an age-restricted URL, the server redirects to a custom URI scheme which begins a negotiation for requesting verification. The server signs a message and provides it to the client. The client verifies there’s not additional info or metadata before encrypting. It then forwards to the government server. The government server decrypts the message and signs a response. This goes back to the client which forwards to the server.

I haven’t fully ironed out all the details but got so far as nearly completing the server-client negotiation. The tricky part is ensuring each stage prevents MitM tampering while allowing the client to see what is in a request so that there’s no metadata which would allow a site to track the user, nor a government to track sites a user accesses.

If the age verification is going to mandate government issued ID, the government issuer can be the Trust Anchor issuing a Digitally Signed Credential for the zero knowledge proof - using any available open source zero-knowledge process:

1) zkcreds-rs (zk-creds) [1]

2) zkLogin (Sui Foundation) [2]

3) TLSNotary [3]

4) DECO (Chainlink/Cornell) [4]

5) Anon-Aadhaar [5]

[1] https://github.com/rozbb/zkcreds-rs

[2] https://github.com/mystenlabs/sui/tree/main/sdk/zklogin

[3] https://github.com/tlsnotary/tlsn

[4] https://chain.link/education/zero-knowledge-proof-zkp#preser...

[5] https://github.com/anon-aadhaar/anon-aadhaar

this is slightly better but not the hero we want or need. zeero knowledge proofs are improvement over uploading raw documents, trust is still an issue here. why should users have to authenticate with a government-backed identity wallet to access platforms to play games or access a website in the first place. we didnt have any of these guards in the 90s and early 2000s and everybody turned out just fine . in fact the average gen z is in a lot worse place than we used to be despite that we had complete raw algorithm supervision free access to the internet with far more disturbing content (remember ogrish and KaZaA)

The average person does not understand the math behind zero-knowledge proofs. They only see that state infrastructure is gatekeeping their web access. Furthermore, if the wallet relies on a centralized server for live revocation checks, the identity provider might still be able to log those authentication requests, effectively breaking anonymity at the state level.

On a practical level, this method verifies the presence of an authorized device rather than the actual human looking at the screen. Unless the wallet demands a live biometric scan for every single age check, they will simply bypass the system using a shared family computer or a parent's unlocked phone. We used to find our way around any sort of nanny software (remember net nanny)

what you are describing still remains a bubble and I really hope Americans aren't looking at EU for any sort of public policy directions here.

In your system, can companies verify age offline, or do they need to send a token to the Government's authority to verify it (letting the Government identify and track users)?

Switzerland is working on a system that does the former, but if Government really wants to identify users, they can still ask the company to provide the age verification tokens they collected, since the Government hosts a centralized database that associates people with their issued tokens.

> Jurisdictions that accept facial estimation as sufficient verification are not taking enforcement seriously in the first place.

Or they want to spy on people.

One question I have, that perhaps you might be able to answer (though I see you've gotten too many replies to this comment already): I'm aware of a number of such systems being developed, and "is over 18" is always the example given.

Are there, say, two other potential use cases that anyone has come up with yet?

I think there's a tradeoff triangle here, not dissimilar to Zooko's triangle or the CAP theorem, where the three aspects are age verification, privacy, and the freedom to run custom software on devices of your choosing.

You can have no system at all, which gives you freedom and privacy, but not age verification. You can have ID uploads, which give you age verification and freedom, but not privacy. You can have a ZKP-based system, which gives you age verification and privacy, but not freedom. This is because you need a way to prevent one unscrupulous ID owner from issuing millions of valid assertions for any interested user.

You mean that system that requires either to use an original unmodified Android phone, or a iOS phone and it does not work in absolutely anything else?

That's really awesome. I hope that soon we will also have humanity verification without sacrificing our anonymity.

With LLMs and paid actors wreaking havoc on social media I do think that social media needs pivot towards allowing only human users on it. I wrote about this here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...

As soon as age-gated access depends on a government-issued credential, you're implicitly tying participation to state identity infrastructure

Immigrants do not have an ID for up to a few years when they move to Germany. Just this week the Berlin immigration office stopped issuing plastic residence cards for budget reasons, so people get a sticker in their passport.

Passport recognition is also spotty. The ID verification providers used by banks do not recognise Indian passports.

Will we exclude a few million people because it’s too expensive to verify that they are over 18?

Add this to “falsehoods programmers believe about ID verification”.

> As long as you trust the government that gave out the ID

I'm a citizen of a European Union member, I trust my government to issue me an ID and use said ID in my interactions with the state, I do not trust my state with anything more than that.

This is true, but I think it's more that those jurisdictions don't actually care about something solving this securely so much as they want face scans for other purposes?

In Amsterdam 1850 the municipality kept track of people's names, address, age, gender and religion (bevolkingsregister). It meant nothing at this time, but 90 years later the Nazi used these lists to murder jewish people going house by house. Thanks for the partisans setting this archive ablaze, life were saved.

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, you tell me, I just want to point at this random timeline.

I have a few questions.

In that system does the age verification result come with some sort of ID linked to my government issued ID card? Say, if I delete my account on a platform after verifying and then create a new one, will the platform get the same ID in the second verification, allowing it to connect the two and track me? Or is this ID global, potentially allowing to track me through all platforms I verified my age on?

What a verification process looks like from the user perspective? Do I have to, as it happens now, pull out my phone, use it as a card reader (because I don't have a dedicated NFC device on my computer), enter the pin, and then I'll be verified on my computer so I can start browsing social media feed? Or, perhaps, you guys have come up with a simpler mechanism?

First let me clearly state that I appreciate the amount of thought you guys are putting into creating better systems that have high privacy guarantees. I concede to you, that in some situations, your system leads to better privacy.

But I don't look at this on a purely technological level. These identity-based systems are instruments of control. Right now everything is still in flux with how these tools will be used and how accessible they are to the general population and the many minorities therein. I simply don't trust our politicians to do the right thing short-term and long-term. The establishment of the GDPR has been a major victory for better privacy legislation and now the Commission wants to hollow it out. The Commission also wants chat control to increase the amount of mass surveillance in Europe.

There is a potential future, where we all win. But I am highly skeptical, that in the current political climate, we will end up there.

This is really cool and I want it for inter-government identification. Eg country B can check a ZK proof that I'm a citizen of country A, allowed to drive, not a criminal, have a degree, etx

I just don't want to have to ID myself at every corner of the internet. Whether the site receives my details or not.

I've heard they even want to mandate periodic re-checks now which is insane. The internet should remain free.

Besides, if parents don't want to give access to social media they can just not give their kids a phone, or just use the many parental control features available on it. Every phone has this these days.

And even if the government wants to ban this stuff for all kids (which I would not agree with but ok I don't have kids so I don't really care and parents do seem to want this), they don't have to enforce it this way. They can just make the parents liable if the kids are found to have access.

To me this is just another attempt at internet censorship and control.

ZK proof can't solve the TOCTOU problem.

Not only EU -- Digital ID on iPhone does this today, and is accepted by many USA airports for travel, etc., with rollout for DLs.

Correct. A ZK Proof backed identity system is a significant bump up in both privacy and security to even what we have right now.

Everyone does realize we're being constantly tracked by telemetry, right?

A proper ZK economy would mitigate the vast majority of that tracking (by taking away any excuse for those in power to do so under the guise of "security") and create a market for truly-secure hardware devices, while still keeping the whole world at maximal security and about as close to theoretical optimum privacy as you're going to get. We could literally blanket the streets with cameras (as if they aren't already) and still have guarantees we're not being tracked or stored on any unless we violate explicit rules we pre-agree to and are enforceable by our lawyers. ZK makes explicit data custody rules the norm, rather than it all just flowing up to whatever behemoth silently owns us all.

No one would be foolish enough to trust their government nor the EU. You should be ashamed of working for such "people". Thanks for helping implementing a surveillance state.

The requirement to use google or apple services is a deal breaker. If I can't verify my age using an EU wallet without having an account with a US tech company what is the point of any of this?

For me it is disqualified for usage because I need to buy into a Google or Apple ecosystem. At least the reference implementation does. This is just the next level of enshitification. And no, I don't need a digital blockwart at all.

And I have zero illusion privacy is compromised, it is trivial to identify devices these days, so it doesn't even work technically.

Next sentence we hear some empty bickering about digital sovereignty. This is all bullshit.

Good luck finding the single government in the world that actually wants that, rather than it being a pretext for control that is too sweet to pass up. If you manage to find them, post an article on HN about it as top places to move to.

The system you're describing is good for the masses, not for those with power.

Where can we learn more about your architecture?

Someone brought up the need for device attestation for trust purposes (to avoid token smuggling for example). That would surely defeat the purpose (and make things much much worse for freedom overall). If you have a solution that doesn't require device attestation, how does that solve the smuggling issue (are tokens time-gated, is there a limit to token generation, other things)?

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Yeah, but how to convince investors that trusting the government-issued ID is good enough? /s

> As long as you trust the government…

You should never trust the government