# Age verification actually doesn't have to threaten privacy

If any of [the proposed online age restriction policies](https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/14-05-2025/dont-just-ban-social-media-for-under-16s-ban-it-for-everyone) are implemented in a way that threatens peoples' privacy, I'm going to be very disappointed.

People rightly oppose age verification systems on the basis that a naive implementation would either leak every person's age and identity to every age-restricted service they register at, or leak their registration with that service to the government. This would be terrible, and my stance is that if that's how you're going to do it, you shouldn't do it.

A smart implementation of age verification would employ [zero knowledge proofs and nullification](https://docs.world.org/world-id/further-reading/zero-knowledge-proofs). It's explained very well there, but to summarize: ZK proofs allow a person to prove a fact about themselves (eg, that they're over 18) without revealing any other information, such as their identity. Nullifiers allow a person to prove that they haven't taken a particular kind of action before, again without revealing who they are. If we had a well designed digital identity system, users would be able to prove to a service that they're over the age of 18 (and that they don't have a bunch of other accounts) without revealing anything else to the service, nor revealing anything to the government that they don't already know. Every government is already verifying peoples' ages, they might as well sign it as a digital credential and let you use that.

In all of this debate, I haven't seen anyone propose this. Which is disturbing given how important this stuff is right now. I'm not sure what's going wrong with the discourse here, but I have some theories:

- Maybe a lot of the people who care about this issue, who also know about privacy preserving tech, are holding their tongue about this in the hope that if they keep this proposal so malignantly flawed as it currently seems to be, it will discourage the other side from going ahead with it. I hope this isn't going on, if it is going on I've got some choice words for people. Helping the opponent to make their policies less bad is basically what democracy consists of, it's pretty important to at least try to do it. You also can't have democracy online without real identity systems, because if you don't have a way of systematically excluding bots or sybils then votes can be bought and their results wont represent the people. There is a need for real identity systems. There always has been, there is especially now that the problem of distinguishing bots from humans is *no longer solvable* endogenously. If we can get a privacy-preserving real identity system out of this, then it will become possible to build democratically governed systems on the internet, which would be likely to augment democratic systems in real life.

- But maybe it's just that the nullification part isn't obvious? It's possible that most proposals of privacy-preserving age verification have been shot down in a backroom with "what if someone just generates a lot of age proofs for every kid who wants one". Nullification prevents that by making sure that an adult can only generate one age proof for each service. Maybe people just don't know about nullification? Maybe it's being assumed that such a thing isn't possible and that this leads back to a need for a list of real names in cleartext? Well it doesn't!

I don't particularly want age-verification for such a broad category of thing as social networks. There's nothing inherently damaging to a growing mind about reading and writing things online. We should be trying to build healthier kinds of social networks, so that there's no need for talk of bans (and I am trying to do that). But I acknowledge that for young people today, the options are basically all bad. I'd prefer that we addressed this by creating better options, but last I talked to them, the government didn't think they could do things like that.

If it is to be done, let it be done gracefully.

[🦋](https://bsky.app/profile/mako.dreamshrine.org/post/3lqvqpwnhz22f)