Sounds like it is only anonymous if you fully trust the app. That app has all your information, and the site you are trying to access. And I bet it is completely closed source. It also likely has logs about what sires it is giving information to. Not who’s info in that log. But elsewhere it probably has logs on who’s id it verified. Get access to both, and software can start to crunch the numbers and figure out who went where. That if course is assuming they don’t decide in the future that it is worth just keeping that data together in one spot. There is just no entity that could manage that app which wouldn’t have a motive to use the data and power it has.
Anivia@feddit.org 1 week ago
No, the app is completely open source and has reproducible builds
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Now you are starting to sound like you know what your talking about. But I’m not convinced yet. So when the app sends just the requested data to the site, how does the site verify that the data is legit. A person could fork the app and hack it. I am sure they thought of this, I just don’t know what thier solution is. And I can’t read german.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 week ago
(NotOP) these things will usually use cryptographic signatures and if the app has been altered, it’d fail the check.
No clue what they are specifically doing though.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah, something like that. But while your device can validate the cryptographic sig for the app, the site requesting proof of age can’t, since it isn’t running on the same device as the app. The best I can guess, the app could request verification from the state run site, and specify what information it wants (based on what the requestor site asked for). The state site could use a private key to encrypt the response and give it back. The app could use a piblic key the state makes available to decode and confirm that only the intended information is present. Then the app can pass that to the requestor, who can get the public key from the state site and decrypt the information. But, the gap there is how does the requestor know the app it is talking to hasn’t been modified. I don’t think there is a way that it can. Only the device the app is on can verify that. And the requestor can’t trust the device either.
Some Authentication that I remember has a component where the requestor would then talk to the state to confirm the info it got from the app was requested from the state by the same app the site is talking to. This prevents using someone elses response as your own. But in this case, that would tie the site to the request which means the state would have both peices of info, who and what site. So I don’t know what there solution here could be that wouldn’t result in the same problem.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I looked deeper are read up. Everything I can find says the age verification function is not anonymous. There is an anonymous login function, but that doesn’t seem to include age verification.