There are at least some technological solutions here, such as anonymous credentials. [1] Modern versions of this technique allow one to associate metadata (like a proof of age exceeding a threshold) in such a way that the verifier can't even correlate repeated requests across users.

Governments that are serious about age verification and individual privacy (which, doubtful they truly are) should agree on a protocol and set up certificate issuers that are associated with a digital ID. Then age verification will not be an invasive procedure or risk data leaks or insider threats.

[1]: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...

> You’re not happy about it, but you hand over a photo of your passport and hope it doesn’t come back to haunt you.

I think for this argument to carry weight with voters, privacy advocates need to be much more specific about what "coming back to haunt you" looks like. They do a little bit of it later on[1], but I think most people do a rough cost benefit in their head and decide that the small benefit outweighs the small risk (to them).

[1] "And that creates a lot of risks for data breaches, overly broad data collection and retention, censorial legal demands for collected data, corporate and governmental malfeasance, pressure to self-censor, and perhaps blatant First Amendment violations. Every new layer and every new mandate brings more potential for risk. As we’ve unfortunately seen many times over the years, people including high-level government officials will maliciously seek to root out the identities of their critics, so the more layers of anonymity we can preserve in online speech, the better."

> you’re criticizing a powerful politician, or talking about your experiences with abuse or addiction, or discussing embarrassing medical issues you’re facing

This is not the problem. Even if, like millions, you are not talking about these things online, these systems still place you in danger. Even if you are a perfect, clean, compliant citizen these privacy-destroying systems place you in danger.

Fundamentally these systems expose you to coercion, extortion, blackmail, ID theft, etc. by criminals and immoral people who want money or power over you. There are countless examples of bad actors inside and outside these systems obtaining access to innocent people's private data and misusing it to their detriment.

This is the strongest argument against these bad ideas. Arguments that paint innocent, privacy-seeking people as suspicious or immoral in any way, should not be used.

It is rational and moral to seek privacy for your own safety and the safety of those you care for. Don't let them argue otherwise.

Assuming no revolutionary changes are coming to the USA, I am planning to opt out of the digital world when I retire. Physical media only. No subscriptions. Spend lots of time in the library. Find like-minded people and meet in person. Will only keep the bare minimum for survival, like banking.

The path ahead in the next few years (at least for the UK)

1. Age gating + VPN ban under the guise of protecting children from social media

2. Few years pass, Identity Passport gets ushered in under guise of convenience of not having to repeat those pesky age verification checks.

3. Utilities start to require ID Passport. Including signing up with an ISP.

4. Renting starts to require ID Passport.

5. Work requires ID Passport.

6. Well done, you built the torment nexus!

I appreciate the wealth of technical solutions that don't violate privacy, but isn't this overlooking an important point: that children don't need to be connected to the Internet at all times from such an early age? Many internet and cell phone providers seem to take it for granted that children must be online, which is already a net loss for their privacy as they mature.

I’m glad this is finally becoming the cause célèbre du jour. This feels like THE FIGHT or at least one of the TOP 3 THE FIGHTS and it hasn’t had even a fraction of the public’s attention until now.

I am always surprised that people get shocked when online privacy is put at risk, as if it was a fundamental human right.

REMOTE PRIVACY NEVER EXISTED BEFORE A FEW DECADES AGO!

And what happened in these decades are enough for the societies to wonder whether this new possibility in human connections (i.e. remote privacy) is globally a good thing. Just stomping your feet because the new toy may be declared illegal is not helping anyone. Governments are expressing serious doubts: this discussion needs serious interventions, not temper tantrums.

No, it won’t. The internet is just getting smaller from my perspective because there’s no way I’m handing over my identification and allowing every connection made to a server to be tracked back to me.

It’s simply not on the cards, and I live a frugal enough life in a high paying industry that I can retire in a few years. If I was willing to bank on inheritance then I could retire now.

I feel for the people that are forced to engage though. But too many of them simply don’t care about privacy, which is why we’re here.

Also a very good game, https://store.steampowered.com/app/239030/Papers_Please/

The sad thing is that any actual bad actor will find a way to circumvent this, but it will just invade your privacy and lead to a worse Cambridge Analytica-style breach of privacy.

Far worse than "decimate", which implies that nine tenths of it survives.

Do you think that this will lead to a new version of a alternative "internet" where people try to avoid the government control? And is that even possible? Or will we all just comply?

We'll move permanently to the dark web, then. Ideally, we should maintain resilient wireless community networks that can withstand government abuse, as well.

There will be your internet-connected computer which will be assumed to be compromised, & which little, if anything of use will be kept on, & then there will be the airgapped system you do work on, which will probably be the last trusted version of a Linux distro you have multiple copies stashed away of. It will be a very old-fashioned experience, & moving/sharing data will become a dicey business.

The day reddit asks me to upload an ID to shitpost about the NBA is the day I stop using reddit.

Might want to check https://github.com/helloyanis/agechecker.net-bypass/ and help.

This seems more like a technical problem that we could actually solve well if we wanted to and had competent people advising the governments. You go to DMV and they generate a keypair and an entry in a DB. App looks up your age with your public key + signed private key authorization from you. Apps can ask for specific checks like is_over_21, is_citizen or whatever without any more data. Something like that, details are probably off ;) The whole infrastructure could be open source. Age verification doesn't need to equal identity verification by a 3rd party company that will leak your IDs.

Who'd have guessed hitting the library would become an act of rebellious defiance

Soon you'll need a passport to read a Wikipedia article

Just a minor nitpick: "decimate" means killing one out of then.

Try "devastate" maybe.

That's one of the reasons why I opted for multiple citizenships. I was fortunate to have the option to rehash parts of my name, and I am using my birthplace country's passport as a throwaway for everything, and my other citizenships docs only the governments and legal system know about.

Plus, like others mentioned, I am preparing my future self to be in a total offline/unplugged world and be a semi-ghost digitally, and even now in 2026 I found a bunch opportunities already doing it in a semi-agorist way (e.g. second hand, cash on hand, offline remote physical work, hunting/fishing, farming/a little farm, etc).

This just legitimises the existing practices. They already know who you are.

Feels like identity control is not such a bad thing (prevents bots, identity thefts, cyberbullying, ect...). The questions is not "if it happens", its more a "who controls it?". If an NGO controls it, or a company that has "no political or national ownership", or something that is decentralized like BTC is, it's not a problem, but if it's a huge corp that only belongs to one single company which is backed and "piloted" by a government, that's when problems emerge.

This could be good to make the lack of privacy online more explicit to users, and actually cause people to be more cautious online, which all the snowden revelations failed to do. If we start using the internet the same way we use government websites, log in, do the thing, log out.

I feel we are still living in this bubble that treats the internet as some sort of utopian democratic institution. For certain people with strong mental gating it can be the case. But I'd say it's a massive projection from intelligent technologists on the rest of humanity. Most people really need some guardrails to avoid becoming hopelessly addicted to the worst material.

I hope this creates pressure for new technologies and media that answer some of the problems of communication which the internet couldn't. I guess people will find new bubbles of anonymity like Signal/Whatsapp groups to get information and discuss. Hopefully which reward some degree of contribution and proper thinking. Revive the genuine social sphere rather than tuning into the corporate filtered simulacrum of a town square. The truth I've seen is that the current internet is pure poison to most minds, and anonymity is just one less bit of friction to mindlessness.

First observation: if you use social media, your privacy is already decimated.

So the article is not really defending privacy; it's simply defending social media. (Under-16s are an important demographic they don't want to lose).

That said, the article is forced to concede:

> Australia does order that personal information collected for age verification “must be destroyed once all purposes have been met.”

Let's repeat:

Social media MUST DESTROY all personal information collected for age verification.

But let's be honest: if you really value your privacy, you shouldn't be using social media.

How is it any different from being required to identify yourself to get a phone or electricity account? Identifying yourself on the internet is long overdue.

Meta has spent $2B lobbying for Age Verification Tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410870

I think it was Ethan Zuckerman who once said that Congress is ill-equipped and incompetent to solve this kind of problem and that we need to design systems that guarantee outcomes and cites Signal as an example. We need to have that mindset now: a clarion call to software engineers.

There is absolutely no privacy on the internet, Snowden told us 13 years ago but we all forgot.

The government already knows everything about us, and I mean everything. It is extremely naive to think they don't or that you are safe behind a VPN.

Age verification is identity verification... except when it's in California or Illinois?

You're on HN. You likely have lots of extra money.

Donate to FIRE: https://www.fire.org/donate

Donate to the EFF: https://supporters.eff.org/donate

Any others?

The goal should be to not repeat Star Wars - new technology that gives power and advantages is always adopted by companies first, then governments, and then it’s used to subjugate people. In Star Wars you have the trade federation abusing little planets. Little planet leaders go to government for help and vote a more “strong” approach to government that will “fight for the little guy”. An authoritarian leader steps in and uses the new technology to subjugate galaxies. In Foundation that leader can also clone himself, leading to 1000 years of fascism. Today prize camels and horses are being cloned in the middle east. Fiction is a guidebook sometimes.

Sounds better in German: https://mises.org/mises-wire/papiere-bitte-papers-please

I'm pretty sure this is a "pick your poison" problem. We as a society are damned no matter what we do or do not do. For my part, we need to do something, because things are not fine the way they are, including the half ass Australian solution. We can't keep putting the onus on private enterprise to address social issues.

I may sound crazy for saying so, but I think the answer is more government run infrastructure for enabling identity-based operations, like payments and authentication, with rules about standards, open source, contractor selection, and audit that make operation transparent. It can work if technical operations are legislated instead of "left for the engineers to figure out." Then at least the evolution of systems can become real political issues that map to election cycles.

My stance is probably a polarizing one, but this is precisely why we need to be able to debate the minutae of these systems through our political discourse instead of just "will we; won't we" legislation. This should be debated in democratic process.

This was in part caused by the general public’s comfort with federated identity for OAuth. If everyone already has one anyway (the thinking may go), why not mandate it?

it is the fight, but the game is already over.

what do people think the billions of billions of pattern matching used in ads will be used for?

people think 'anonymous' credentialing will work here?

they've captured scroll patterns, typing patterns, language patterns, all sorts of fingerprinting.

the game unfortunately is basically already over.

privacy online is already largely gone

"X will decimate your privacy" [please accept the following tracking cookies, including for 3rd party ad analytics from a company whose CEO has called its users "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data]

Don't get me wrong, just because it's a hypocritical headline doesn't mean it's incorrect. Just still rankles to see it, is all.

If they wanted to verify your age or that you are a real person with ID/selfie it could always be done on device locally to respect privacy which of course they don't because its not about that I even googled just now and see is solutions for this like PrivateID

I can’t think of a better solution to the issue of children being so aggressively harmed by the internet. That doesn’t remove any of the problems associated with this.

There is a real problem here to be solved.

Whenever I speak to someone who's planning to vote Reform (UK hard-right party) their views are primarily shaped by seeing AI slop videos on TikTok/Instagram, showing immigrants doing crimes etc etc

Reform will probably win the next election because of this, unless we find a way to make platforms manage the situation.

Interesting example: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/london-tiktok-fake-news-cr...

I think thats kinda the point. Tracking everything everyone does in an identifiable manner is extremely lucrative.

> * whether you’re protected from hackers or data breaches*

Not a matter of if, but when, a breach happens.

My what now? What privacy do I have on the corporate internet? I'm already being observed. My data integrated in vast "AI" models that try to predict me. We have seen tons of examples of the current tech giants farming out content moderation, hiring empoverished workers in the 3rd world to view all my videos and listen to all my conversations.

What privacy are we protecting here?

What privacy? With the enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 it was game over. Were you not born then?

Privacy or accountability, pick one. Everyone holds your identity or pointers to it. They - pinky promise - won’t weaponize it until it becomes advantageous or ordered by the government.

In the end someone has to be held accountable. Society does not work without accountability and never has. We were living in temporary illusory world made by nerds. Now the rest joins in.

Interesting trivia: 90% of people don’t know the definition of decimate

Is a 10% reduction that bad?

The discussion is not about whether it's a good or bad idea, but whether we will yield the power to these people to ratchet in further oppressive laws onto formerly free countries.

Tech companies should ignore it and just publicly name whoever attempts to prosecute them and see how the population responds. I think people today are orders of magnitude more informed about their privacy and the consequences of digital ID laws. A few countries are on the edge of revolt at the moment anyway, and this would be a good way to get young people into the streets.

20 years ago, people would have had no defense against it or understanding of what was being imposed on them. Today, normal people use Signal and encrypted messengers, faraday bags, and leave their phones at home. Where we were nerdy security guys back then, non-technologist women and girls use spy tradecraft level electronic opsec for their own safety and security from middle school. People are much more sophisticated about their privacy now. They're ready to take this on.

The laws coming into force are on people who are not in favour of them, and I'm so optimistic that I will not interrupt the enemies of privacy and human dignity while they are making a mistake.

Is the general public really so politically illiterate that you have to call autocracy for papers, please era? We are screwed.

It's just the web we're losing. The internet is still free. As for the web, good riddance, let's build something new.

I am glad that more and more people wake up to the highly criminal age sniffing movement. That age sniffing movement, sometimes called age verification to insinuate a more harmless movemet, wants to destroy the anonymous internet as we knew it; see their fight against VPNs. This is not accidental - this is very integral to this evil movement.

The only logical consequence and response to that is to completely abolish those lobbyists that work against freedom.

It won’t decimate my privacy, it’ll just digitally marginalize me. I don’t have any ID that any of these sites will accept.

my toaster is about to ask for my social security number

320 comments and no one has mentioned Gaza

try out nostr instead of just complaining and whining

So everyone is on the same page on this issue. The First Amendment is the right to anonymous free speech. I doubt they teach it in the govt schools but the Federalist papers, which argued for the US Constitution, was published anonymously.

I'm not sure "social media" is the best example. You've never had complete freedom of speech on there.

It's been true for decades in the USA that if they want to arrest you, they will. The age verification doesn't make this situation better, but at this point it's almost just a formality.

The internet is dieing just like mobile phones before that. Correction: mobiles were stillborn due to no open standards or O/S. Cant even buy a modern TV without privacy concerns -- lel.

And we all know why lolberts are worried about kids and privacy online... Regret voting for Trump yet, chuds? You can't hide once we know who you are.

All I can say is I will never vote for any politician who votes for any form of this. Even if the bill fails to pass, they will never, ever get my vote.

My Google account is 21 years old already. Is that enough of a proof?

I hold an unpopular opinion here, but well regulated digital IDs might not be a benefit to us all.

Almost all big tech giants are frankly paper tigers (can I survive without facebook, sure, without next day delivery, harder, without banking or secure ways to talk to my utility providers, waaay harder.

Having a way to get rid of bots that sour our Online discussions, lovely. To reduce billion in bank fraud, sounds great.

I feel as privacy advocates we need to be clear on the difference between secrecy (that’s gone unless you stay offline.) and privacy (your neighbour knows you are having sex in the afternoons but does not say anything.

This would never be used to do evil of course...

Singing: nobody wants this everybody hates you! Governments burning their capital hard to try to prove what tough guys they are against the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.

Wait till someone liberates all this poorly protected data

My privacy is already decimated. For 2 decades we’ve already known about the NSA slurping up everything[1] on top of the Snowden leaks.

Then you have the mega corps like Facebook who can figure out every detail about you even from merely _not_ using their system because of the hole you leave in your social network that does use them.

The only privacy left is from anonymous troll farms claiming to be an American while talking about how the Texas oblast is valuable for its warm water ports.

I am fine for privacy on consumption of content, but you should be forced to identify yourself for posting so the common man at least has a chance to evaluate your statements instead of being misled, all while, as stated above, our governments and corporations don’t have that limitation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Anything to close Pandora's box. "They" liked the eras they could control the communications, and therefore the narrative. Boomers on their last legs, question is, will the future undo the unjustness that was forced upon them? Restore the rungs of the ladders that were removed, so they could have a chance too? Or are they going to stay in the fear narrative, and make this tragedy worse?

if i run a pain vanilla website with no need for user accounts, do i have to age verify? will icann also ask for id when i register a new domain?

The internet will just stop being the "cool place". Young people will need to find some other avenue or medium to congregate away from their nannies' watchful eyes. That has been the one constant across the multiple technological revolutions we've had in the last few decades, younger generations looking for a place to call their own. Meta, etc. obviously know this, hence the "metaverse" and AI slop. But what they refuse to believe is that it can't be manufactured and forced top-down, it needs to be bottom-up.

What scary me a lot, is the amount of people here or in real life that are not concerned about that, and that are like "it is to protect the children, so whatever it is, it worth it. And what else we can do?". And often it goes on with things like "anyway, social media are bad, they ruin people even adult, so good thing". Literally they all look like repeating a carefully crafted propaganda without that much more deep thinking.

Basically, to mean it is brain rot. The problem is that it might concern a big part of the population and that is why we have such laws.

To me, it is exactly what was described in G. Orwell "Animal farm" book. Pigs are now in control and big part of the crowd are "sheeps".

Afterward, we always have hard time to understand how people could have let Nazi, Stasi, or Stalin come in power and do such awful things. But it never came in one day, and with the "i don't care, they probably now better" attitude of the current western country populations, you understand easily how all of that could have happened in a first place.

In the recent, and most recent history, let's not forget what happened to Putin's Russia. Russia was opening and on a very good course for individual freedom and rights, then a ex-KGB officer took control of the power and little by little, year after year, suppressed freedom, privacy, and opposition to reach the point of today where the country is a total nightmare for human rights and liberty.

Online privacy is already an illusion.

I mean, your ISP knows your IP, the government can know your IP, Google knows your IP, Meta knows your IP, all the websites you log on know who you are and what you're IP is, and forward your data to 3rd parties, many of these connect the dots between the various websites you visit.

If there is one benefit to true ID verification on the internet, is that people won't feel as if they're browsing things anonymously while they're not.

Maybe it will kill social media? And maybe that's a good thing?

Imagine there’s a hit list circulating on Signal with your name on it, and an anonymous user is offering $5,000 for your head.

Or imagine your daughter is getting blackmailed by some anonymous pedophile freak over Snapchat.

Nah, I need stronger arguments for why anonymity on the web is a human right.