EFF launches Age Verification Hub

Motivations Behind Age Verification Laws

• Many see “protecting children” as a pretext: the real goals are normalizing digital identity, expanding surveillance, and creating leverage over users.
• Others argue governments and data brokers already know enough; they see limited incremental data value and believe parents/children may actually benefit.
• Some posters think the political drive is genuine concern about youth mental health and porn/social media harms, later hijacked by pro‑surveillance interests.

Privacy, Surveillance, and Digital ID Concerns

• Strong fear that mandatory age checks lead naturally to de‑anonymizing all internet use, banning VPNs/encryption, and making privacy itself suspect or illegal.
• Comparisons are made to China, mass surveillance, and “papers, please” requirements to speak or read online.
• People point out that verification vendors and large platforms will centralize highly sensitive identity databases, inviting leaks, abuse, and subpoenas.

Technical Proposals and Zero‑Knowledge Proofs

• Several participants stress that privacy‑preserving age verification is possible with zero‑knowledge proofs and standards like OpenID4VP / EU digital identity wallets.
• Others highlight hard problems: issuer–site collusion, device binding, government‑controlled apps, phone dependence, and eventual function creep once infrastructure exists.
• Debate over whether ZKPs meaningfully prevent linking identity to browsing when states or companies collude or are compelled.

Parental Controls and Content Rating Headers

• A large subthread prefers shifting control to the client side:
  • HTTP headers marking “adult” or content categories (RTA/PICS‑like).
  • Device/OS‑level parental controls that interpret those headers.
  • Optional “I am a child” or “adult” headers vs. server‑side ID checks.
• Concerns: jurisdictional age differences, ease of circumvention (proxies, old browsers), potential abuse of “child” flags for tracking or targeting, and fairness of punishing parents.

Effectiveness, Circumvention, and Enforcement

• Many argue any strict system is trivial to bypass (VPNs, foreign sites, proxies, shared credentials, older siblings), so risk to privacy far outweighs likely benefit.
• Others counter that real‑world age checks (alcohol, cigarettes) also leak and are imperfect but still shape behavior; they see some regulation as necessary.

Harms vs. Moral Panic and EFF’s Role

• Genuine concern over youth anxiety, bullying, addiction, and porn exposure coexists with skepticism that the current panic is evidence‑based rather than another recurring moral wave.
• Some want EFF to accept age verification as politically inevitable and help design the least harmful implementations; others praise EFF for focusing on outright opposition instead of negotiating “less bad” compromises.