[palata]

> Think carefully about why a politician might disregard this extremely simple mechanism and you'll have your answer about the real goals here

You (and many others) frame it as "the government versus the people". I think this is extremely naive.

Many, many, many parents are in favour of preventing social media access to kid, assuming it is done in a reasonable way. For instance, having a police officer follow every kid everywhere they go 24/7 is not a reasonable way, and everybody agrees on that. Now what if there was a reasonable way?

Ask yourself this: do you believe that privacy-preserving age verification is not a reasonable way, or do you know it? In order to know it, you have to understand how the cryptography works at some reasonable level. Do you? Most comments I read online come from people who believe and then repeat arguments they have read that confirm their beliefs.

I was noting that the Mullvad article actually addresses ZKP (which is good and a very rare thing), but that I found it was a bit evasive in a way that feels slightly manipulative to me (probably not on purpose).