[Mindwipe]

A fairly poor piece.

It fundamentally doesn't understand tokenisation. It claims that you could have an age verification token that doesn't reveal to the government what you were trying to view, but how would that work? The site receiving the token still has to cryptographically validate it as being genuine, and having not being revoked, so it will still need to ask the government database (giving the government an instant kill switch against sexual minorities it decides it doesn't like into the bargain). There's no anonymisation here (and bluntly the government doesn't want that).

It's defence against a government using it for nefarious purposes is literally just the defeatist argument it decries as a fallacy in the paragraph before. Ultimately the best defence against such a government is that the harm it wants to cause can be made slow, expensive and inefficient, and that is a very good way to discourage governments from doing things en masse. But with a single identifier and digital ID it becomes far more efficient.

[mattbessey]

The UK government has announced very little about the plan and in fact made it clear that the details are yet to be decided https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-id-scheme... Yet plenty of people including in this thread have lept to criticising details of a non existent specification.

I find it perplexing. I agree with Tim. This could be done well. The UK Govs Digital Services Department have done fine work in recent years. I have faith in them to pull something like this off well.

Next though, we need an actual tech spec and public technical consultation. Then perhaps we can have a meaningful debate on it.