Secure Age Verification
Double-blind. Automatic. Nobody learns who you are AND where you went.
Why the current approach is struggling
The aim is protecting children, and nobody argues with it.
The difficulty is what adults are asked to do. To reach perfectly legal content they must present a photo ID, submit to a facial scan, hand over a credit card, or enrol in a digital wallet — every time, and to whoever happens to be asking. Each of those creates a record, somewhere, of a person and a place they went.
Adults are not the problem. But they are the constraint. Told that the price of entry is a record of where they have been, a good many will decline, or go around — and the protection fails along with them. In the months since checks began here, VPN use has climbed, major providers have withdrawn from the market rather than implement them, and step-by-step guides to getting around the rules sit in ordinary search results where any thirteen-year-old will find them.
The sites that comply carry the cost. The traffic moves to the ones that never intended to.
And spare a thought for the site owner
A lawful business now has two bad options: collect identity documents and become a target worth attacking, or lose the customers who will not hand them over. On top of that it must know the age rules in every country it serves, and keep up as they change.
What we propose instead
Nobody in the chain learns both who you are and where you went — not the site, not us, not anyone. No document is presented, no photograph taken, no record created that anybody could be asked for later, or could lose.
The site asks one question and receives one answer. The rules themselves — which age, which country, which category — are held and kept current by a trusted party, so the site owner integrates once and is never out of date.
And it is not only age. The same machinery answers any check of this kind, without ever disclosing the person behind it.
And it can prove the check happened
Because the question travels through a party that knows the site but never the person, that party can count — this site asked, this many times, in this country, this month. Nothing else. It is a record of compliance that does not come from the site itself, and it can never become a record of anybody, because the party holding the count never knew who was asking. Today a regulator has only the operator’s word for it, and an honest business has no way to prove it did the right thing. And a site that ought to be asking, but never does, shows up as a gap where the questions should have been.
We have developed a secure method of age verification that maintains user privacy. Something verifies who you are, and something else knows where you are going — but no party can link the two. The young lad does not get in — the content simply is not available to him. On the other screen, Robyn is verified and through in an instant — and nothing along the way could connect her identity to the site she visited. Someone knows who you are, and someone knows where you are going, but no one knows both — it is double-blind.
And it works page by page. A site can require verification on one page, on some pages, or on every page if the content or the law demands it — rather than gating the whole site once at the door and forgetting about it. The check runs between the user’s own device and the site: it is entirely out of the hands of Apple, Google and the app stores, with no platform in the middle deciding who may prove what, to whom, or on what terms.
The site itself sees only what any site sees of any visitor — typically just an IP address and whatever is required for access; that much no scheme can avoid. What it never receives is who you are.
The preferred implementation uses THWIXEL, where the checks run on secure hardware and are confirmed on pixels malware cannot touch. It may be useful to watch the video first, and then play with a Virtual THWIXEL, to see how that foundation works.
Age verification can also be implemented on other processors. The resistance to manipulation — and to invasion of privacy — varies with the strength of the platform beneath it; THWIXEL is the preferred implementation.