Paper: Private and Decentralized Age Verification Architecture
slides-agews-paper-private-and-decentralized-age-verification-architecture-00

Sofía Celi, Kyle den Hartog, Hamed Haddadi

Today, it’s widely acknowledged that we face serious chal- lenges in controlling what content is accessible to children online, and more importantly we currently lack effective tools to address this in a privacy-preserving and effective way. The core difficulty lies in the tradeoffs involved. But if we approach the problem thoughtfully, we can strike a balance: preserving the Web’s openness and user agency, minimizing unnecessary data collection and privacy harms, and empowering guardians (whether parents, teachers, or school IT administrators) to better manage what children are exposed to. In doing so, we might even unlock broader benefits, such as combating misinformation, and curbing manipulation and fraud by bots or foreign actors. These are ambitious goals: but how do we make them a reality?