[russelg]

People are far more worried about the government knowing that you're using a social media site, than they are about the social media site knowing who you are.

I don't see a way this could be implemented where the govt doesn't know what site is requesting the verification. I'm assuming it'll be an openid type flow where the social media sites will have to register client IDs with the govt myID, in which case the govt will directly be able to tie a person to what social media they use. It won't tell them what account it links to on the social media side, but depending on what data is returned, they can easily just ask the social media company for this info later on.

[hcfman]

I suspect that it is technically possible to make an anonymous identification service because the result to the social media site just had to be yes or no.

In the Netherlands you have a government identification service that identifies people to other government sites. And a bank service that uses the banks identification service also roll to identify to other sites.

Technically it would be possible to delete any trace afterwards.

However. I have never ever in my life seen any government choose not to take advantage of an opportunity to exert more control over their citizens if the possibility exists.

Plus rather than force it on everyone it should be a choice of the parents. Clearly not doing this is better but in the absence of that parents deciding is better for the others.

[tzs]

> I don't see a way this could be implemented where the govt doesn't know what site is requesting the verification

Blind signatures. Briefly, a blind signature is a way for a party to sign a document without seeing the contents of the document. The cryptographic forms of this, at a high level, work like this:

1. You do a keyed reversible transformation on document D that produces a transformed document D'. This is called "blinding" the document.

2. They sign D' with signature S'.

3. You apply the reverse transformation to S', which gives you a signature S from them for D. This is "unblinding".

Use a random key each time you need to get something blind signed and throw away the key afterwards.

Even if they later see D and S they can't match them up with any D' and S' because they don't know the key.

For age verification D would be some kind of token you obtain from the social media company during age verification. You'd then have the government blind sign that with a signature that is only used when the government has verified you are at least 16. You'd unblind the signature and give that back to the social media company.

There are also protocols to do this using zero knowledge proofs.

[greggsy]

The proposed digital ID solution is designed to protect the individual from this type of information disclosure.