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Some ideas re: age verification (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 15 hours ago by mrnngglry@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There has been a lot of swirl around various pieces of age verification legislation and how different platforms and operating system developers are responding. I believe strongly in privacy and that the responsibility for the online activities of children is that of the parents. That said, as a parent, I think we need better tools available, especially for those who are less technically inclined. Here are my ideas:

A standard needs to be established that is open source and cross platform.
It should run at the OS level.
It should be controlled by someone with administrator access to the device / OS (a parent in the case of devices used by children).
It should be completely optional for that administrator whether they want to turn it on or not.
The only input should be birth year of the child whose account is being set up. No other personally identifiable info should be included.
All relevant sites/apps/platforms such as social media and NSFW sites should be required to honor the age indicator.

It needs to be assumed that at some point, any kid who really wants to learn will find a way to circumvent any controls but parents do need better tools.

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[–] artwork@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

There are numerous options to choose from already existing... Yet, some should just consider that the recent "age verification" were initiated for another purpose than a general age verification process. Have you checked out the recent Persona source code exposed?

Regardless, some civilian approaches to be mentioned is how the verification is handled in Baltic countries, that is Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, for example:

Smart-ID is the easiest, safest and fastest way to authenticate yourself online, register in e-services and sign documents...
Smart-ID can be used to log in to e-services, for online banking and for signing documents.

Source: https://www.smart-id.com/

---

Smart-ID itself has no age restrictions for its users – but age limits have been set by identity providers and depend on the Smart-ID account type and authentication method chosen...

Creating a Smart-ID account for a minor requires a parent/legal guardian to authenticate their account...

Don’t just click “continue”: read the instructions on the screen carefully and double check that all the information you enter is correct, and the whole process will be easy and stress-free... The child cannot continue with their registration until we’ve got one parent approval...

Source

For the API, for instance:

# Where can I find users date of birth?

Birth of date is encoded into personal identity code. Latvian new personal identity code format is exception though. Special birth of date field will be added to Smart-ID certificates in stages and only for Qualified accounts.

For convinience smart-id-java-client and smart-id-php-client have special function getDateOfBirth... for that. For getting that info directly from certificate see getDateOfBirthCertificateAttribute and getDateOfBirthFromCertificateField.

Source

Similar to Latvia, the number of Estonia and Lithuania has the date of infinitely magnificent event as someone's date of birth, too!

The ways in which such a system is implemented vary among countries, but in most cases citizens are issued an identification number upon reaching legal age, or when they are born...

In Estonia, a Personal Identification Code (Estonian: isikukood, abbreviated as IK) is formed on the basis of the sex and date of birth of a person...

In Lithuania the Personal Code (Lithuanian: asmens kodas) consists of 11 digits, and currently is in the form G YYMMDD NNN C, where G is gender & birth century, YYMMDD is the birthday, NNN is a serial number, C is a checksum digit...
/* ... */ C = lt_nin_checksum("3840915201");

Source

Therefore, there should be an option to verify the age without the personal identification code. And if not, just a personal number got within the age verification scope, transferred within secure government session channel, should be enough. The government, in turn, won't share such information with untrusted services - access to the API.

Related: Age verification online (...can be done safely and privately. Here's how...)

[–] detren@sh.itjust.works 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Your last link gives a 404 error :/

[–] artwork@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Thank you! Fixed!
It had a redundant character > in the URL path I accidentally added during the formatting.