There is no such thing as privacy protecting or anonymous age verification. If you tell Canadian that such a thing is possible, they are guaranteed to harm privacy with any legislation they proposal. Just tell them no.
> There is no such thing as privacy protecting or anonymous age verification
There most definitely is privacy-protecting age verification. You go to a government office, you show your ID, they give you a piece of paper that officially says "over 18 years old". Now you have a piece of paper that says you're over 18 but doesn't say who you are, and the government won't know where you use it.
On the Internet, the idea is the same, but with cryptography.
By privacy-preserving, we usually mean that you get some kind of cryptographic token from an entity that knows who you are (and can attest that you are above age), and that token is anonymous, so when you use it to access a random service, that service cannot extract information about you from the token, except that you are above age.
It is possible, it just had to be implemented properly. We could complain about politicians not understanding that, of course. But if you spend 5 minutes reading complaints about age verification, you will see that nobody cares about understanding... if the people doesn't care, why would the politicians?
There most definitely is privacy-protecting age verification. You go to a government office, you show your ID, they give you a piece of paper that officially says "over 18 years old". Now you have a piece of paper that says you're over 18 but doesn't say who you are, and the government won't know where you use it.
On the Internet, the idea is the same, but with cryptography.