this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
401 points (99.0% liked)
Privacy
41051 readers
461 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think we just have to accept that no solution is 100%. You just need some balance between success and side effects.
As long as people can communicate, it will to some extent spread. So really, the only truly 100% solution would be a couple of nuclear bombs all around the world. Look at that, crime rates went to 0!
I am not really intelligent or knowledgeable enough to provide best-balance solutions.
Anyway, as far as limiting access to porn, perhaps it could be done privately. You could have some trusted verification platform, perhaps even government provided, deal with it with cryptographic signature, maybe as I said, I am too dumb for solutions.
My idea is, the website that wants to verify your age knows the public key of the government provided service used for this purpose (who already has your data anyway), and generates some random data in base64. You copy that, paste it into the verification website, they sign it, and give you the base64-encoded response. You then paste the response into website that wants to verify your age, it verifies the signature and then that you're 18+.
Basically just trusted authority saying "verified being 18+". The website doesn't know who you are, verification system doesn't know what you wanted that verification for.
Of course, you could verify that for anyone else, but I can also walk into a shop, buy cigarettes, alcohol and give them to a kid. Not 100%, but good enough.