EFF launches Age Verification Hub

For the folks in the back row:

Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance

Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance

Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance

Without even reaching for my tinfoil hat, the strategy at work here is clear [0 1 2]. If we have to know that you're not a minor, then we also have to know who you are so we can make any techniques to obfuscate that illegal. By turning this from "keep an eye on your kids" to "prove you're not a kid" they've created the conditions to make privacy itself illegal.

VPNs are next. Then PGP. Then anything else that makes it hard for them to know who you are, what you say, and who you say it to.

Please, please don't fall into the trap and start discussing whether or not this is going to be effective to protect kids. It isn't, and that isn't the point.

0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...

1 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-usage...

2 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/57714...

That is untrue

(This includes being robust against law enforcement action, legal or otherwise.)

When I say "if we have to know you're not a kid, we have to know who you are" I'm not stating an actual truth, but the argument as it is playing out politically.

The EU age verification solution says implementations SHOULD implement[1] their ZKP protocol[2]. Not linking it to the user is stated as an explicit goal:

Unlinkability: The goal of the solution is to prevent user profiling and tracking by avoiding linkable transactions. Initially, the solution will rely on batch issuance to protect users from colluding RPs. Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) mechanisms will be considered to offer protection. More details are provided in Section 7.

[1]: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...

[2]: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...

Assuming that's even a goal, of course. The cited paragraph mentions RPs (the websites, from what I understand), but makes no mention of attestation providers.

In the non-ZKP presentation, the "holder" (phone) sends the credential to the relying party (website), and the RP executes some verification algorithm. In the ZK presentation, the holder executes the verification algorithm and sends to the RP a proof that the algorithm was executed correctly.

The "proof" has this magical property that it reveals nothing other than the check passed. (You will have to take on faith that such proofs exist.) In particular, if the check was the predicate "I have a signature by ISSUER on HASH, and SHA256(DOCUMENT)==HASH, and DOCUMENT["age_gt_18"]=TRUE", anybody looking at the proof cannot infer ISSUER, HASH, DOCUMENT, or HASH, or nothing else really. "Cannot infer" means that the proof is some random object and all HASH, DOCUMENT, ISSUER, etc. that satisfy the predicate are equally likely, assuming that the randomness used in the proof is private to the holder. Moreover, a generating a proof uses fresh randomness each time, so given two proofs of the same statement, you still cannot tell whether they come from the same ISSUER, HASH, DOCUMENT, ...

So like, we've got this algorithm that gets sent our way and we run it and that provides kind of a cryptographic hash or whatever. But if we're running the algorithm ourselves what's to stop us from lying? Where does the 'proof' come from? What's the check that it's running and why do we inherently trust the source it's checking?

This is a simplified method for age verification:

I want to buy alcohol from my phone and need to prove I’m over 18. SickBooze.com asks me for proof by generating a request to assert “age >= 18”.

My phone signs this request with my own private key, and forwards it to the government server.

The government verifies my signature against a public key I previously submitted to them, checks my age data in their own register of residents, and finally signs the request with one of their private keys.

My phone receives the signed response and forwards it back to SickBooze.com, which can verify the government’s signature offline against a cached list of public keys. Now they can sell me alcohol.

- the “request” itself is anonymous and doesn’t contain any identifying information unless that is what you intended to verify

- the government doesn’t know what service I used, nor why I used it, they only know that I needed to verify an assertion about my age

- the web service I used doesn’t know my identity, they don’t even know my exact age, they just know that an assertion about being >= 18 is true.