Comment by alkonaut 13 hours ago
Any kind of zero knowledge verification should be ok.
But with minors it often goes a long way to just make the law. It’s a good instruction to parents who should be able to control this. Laws on bike helmets for minors are followed nearly 100% not because they are enforced by authorities but because the law gives parents guidance.
The EU has been working on a zero knowledge system as part of the EU Digital Identity Wallet project for a few years now. It is currently undergoing large scale field tests in several countries with expected release late this year. All member states are required to provide at least one free secure interoperable implementation to their citizens, and regulated industries such as banks and telecoms, are required to accept it. If a member state passes a law requiring age verification on social media it must include the EU Digital Identity Wallet as one of the verification methods the site must support.
What was that about no government would consider zero knowledge to be robust enough?
(Without accepting the premise that it should be acceptable to have to provide any kind of proof...)
> Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.
None would be needed, you (sadly) only age in one direction, so valid proof would never become invalid proof.
And? Presentation of someone else's valid credentials is not fixable by any privacy-preserving mechanism. You can set an expiration date in order to rotate them, and they can be fast-rotating.
In any case, it's a moot point: the correct amount of required identification is zero.
I think parent's _want_ to keep kids in helmets and away from social media. But the pressure is some times high when Joe can ride without helmet, or can use TikTok. A law really helped the bike helmet thing at least. That they are fundamentally different I think doesn't matter since the peer pressure thing and what parents want is the same.
There is no such thing in practice.
Anything with zero knowledge is never going to be considered robust enough by a government. Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.