And this is where I'd say I disagree. There's nothing about Peter Thiel, and his current business focus, that shows anyone he's not in the business of surveillance. Look at the company he keeps and then align that with many of the things Peter and who he surrounds himself with have said publicly. Thiel is tied to Palantir and Alex Karp. That relationship alone should tell you very clearly that, even if Thiel wasn't actually in the game of surveillance (opinion: he is) he would be very much associated with supporting it.

Karp said: “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.”

Yeah, sure... I mean I can't imagine the fact that Thiel is tied at the hip to Palantir that he doesn't have an agenda with it other than data analytics and, what, ad rev? Right.

Thiel said, publicly, that everyone should be concerned about surveillance AI [0]. Let's call spade a spade. Thiel is in the business of surveillance whether or not there's some poor LLM generated sites stating that is the case, but then using that as the basis to give Thiel a pass on this because: not enough evidence here.

Thiel is a big part of what's wrong with his class. He's worried about something that he wants to control. He's not actually worried about you or I though. He's worried about someone else having the full surveillance view and so he's aimed to build and be part of that. So, maybe, we shouldn't give Thiel a pass just because he hasn't fully proven himself to be the person that the world paints him into a picture of.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/22/palantirs-peter-thiel-survei...

https://tboteproject.com/git/hekate/surveillancefindings-new...

In the meantime a FOSS maintainer who is just trying to put the pieces in place to comply with the law (as written) got doxxed and harassed.

I hate it here

Since authorities have the power of accessing that data and identify the user who created the certificate, this scheme is not anonymous.

Authorities can access that data via court orders today, or via a global automatic mandatory data sharing law in the future.

In the example of USA, even if for some reason people still trust the current Government (although ICE already accessed private medical records to track and arrest people), I don't see why they should trust all future Governments which will have retroactive access to all that data.

Untraceable-but-single-use proof-of-age tokens? Good for privacy, but now that 14-year-old can get tokens from an 18-year-old friend for cash.

Proof tokens that only last a few minutes, or a three-way handshake between user, government and website? Harder to trade, but now the government's got a good guess about who's opening pornhub.

Requiring sites to keep audit records, to prove they really did the verification procedure? Wildly insecure, we don't want them storing passport photos. Requiring them to not keep audit records? Then they can skip or half-ass the checks.

Camera-based age estimation? Once again the 14-year-old can have an 18-year-old pass the check for them. Or a video game character creator or something. Scanning a government ID card? Better hope Dad never leaves his wallet unattended for 5 minutes. And not everyone has a passport or driver's license.

Age attestation from an electronic driver's license, plus face id biometric validation, with a secure element, trusted execution environment and code attestation? Congrats, now you've handed your national ID database to the world's largest adtech/tracking company. Hope you weren't trying to distance your nation from US tech dominance.

https://walt.id/verifiable-credentials

Set parental controls on set up, pass a single flag to websites and apps, similar to the Global Privacy Control.

No privacy is lost. Control is handed to the device owner, and implementation is technically trivial.

Fullly anonymous + untraceable attestation --> unlimited certificate sharing

Because it focuses on technical aspects and accepts the premise of 'age verification must be solved'. It doesn’t, and discretion what content and and what age children and teenagers can consume should be up to parents.

Not government, nor corporations.

You keep your own private key and the government has your public key.

Verified anonymous age credentials don’t allow for this, so they don’t matter.

The negative privacy implications are the primary features of these laws, not a bug. It is intentional.

We also have gazillions of examples of apparently innocent rules being used to boil Chomsky's frog, one small temperature rise at a time. For the first time in a long while, I'm starting to sense a certain fanaticism on this topic here on HN, which sounds very much like the molecular agitation when water starts to boil.

>Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

[MERGED]

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/24/foss_age_verification...

As a parent: the hard-won lesson is that most of this threat surface shrinks when you're genuinely present (listen/talk/educate).

The harms of big tech, social media, and addiction mechanics are a lot more tangible to the average person than the anonymity aspect.

We do regulate a lot of things to protect the people, especially the children. It's common to make it illegal for children to drink alcohol, smoke stuff and drive vehicles, and it seems completely natural for many of us. We usually don't say "it should be legal for a schools to sell cigarettes and whisky to kids, because it's the responsibility of the parents to educate their kids".

The same applies to the Internet: just like we don't want children to be able to buy porn in a store, we don't want them to be able to access porn on the Internet. Or, more recently, social media. So the obvious idea to prevent that is to do what we do in store: age verification.

The problem on the Internet is mass surveillance, and done incorrectly, age verification adds to that. Technically, we can do age verification in a privacy-preserving way, but:

- Politicians are generally not competent to understand "the right technical way", and the tech giants do benefit from surveillance. Even if they mean well, it's hard for them to take the right decision out of incompetence.

- In some big countries that tend to set the technical norms (e.g. the US), many people completely distrust the government. But private companies have no interest in implementing the privacy-preserving solution, so the only viable way is with the help of government regulations (I would argue that the government should be the ones owning the service).

- The vast majority of people, including the vast majority of politicians, do not understand and do not give a damn about surveillance capitalism. It just does not exist for them. And in those conditions, there is of course no reason to even consider a privacy-preserving solution, because it is technically more complex.

I strongly believe that in many countries they mean to do well. They are just not competent to understand the problem, and they turn to tech giants who do understand it, but have an interest in making sure that the politicians implement it wrongly.

If not before but with high school kids will need access to a computer and also the internet in many schools and countries.

I get that parents are responsible but parents have limited resources. Even the best parenthood will not keep kids from wanting to engage with peers. Even the best filter or block by parents will not cover the www and their millions of websites and services.

Should society help the child, by making it more difficult for them to access harmful material, in the same way we age verify alcohol?

What if the parent is responsible, but finds themselves in a situation where they don't have the time/ability to either educate or set up robust controls? Should we make their responsibilities easier?