Re: [Taler] [address@hidden: 'Oh, that's an idea...': U.S. parents respond to China screen time ban]

[Christian Grothoff]

On 9/4/21 5:36 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> China's new rules for game servers, which limit use by minors to a
> certain amount of time on certain days of te week, are based on
> identifying all users to find out which ones are minors.
> 
> If this could be done by a special adults-only Taler coin, it could be
> implemented without identifying users.

Well, what is important to keep in mind here is that Oec's proposal for
age restrictions requires local configuration of the restriction:
whoever controls the Taler wallet at the time of withdrawing the digital
coins has to request from the wallet to set the age limit. As a result,
this only works well for parents protecting their children. So if a
government is happy with making it easy for parents to restrict how
their kids use the Internet for gaming, this will do. But it will not
prevent minors from doing something if they have their parent's consent.

All that said, I think the clause "to a certain amount of time" is the
killer here, because implementing this requires re-identifying and thus
tracking users over time, which is inherently incompatible with good
privacy. Now, I guess one could do (repeated) 'adult-only' purchases
that are then not tracked over time and 'age-unrestricted' purchases
that are tracked and time-limited, but that still then doesn't give
children adequate privacy. So this doesn't sound like an ideal match
with the age-restrictions proposal by Oec, as that one is about
zero-knowledge leakage for everyone.

Regardless, this echos my point that "protect the children" is a reason
that we will see put forward again and again as for why we need strong
identification solutions implemented, and that we need to find ways to
deflect.

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