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by Delphiza 2 days ago
I had to do an age check in the UK recently. There were various options (credit card, face scan, etc). The one that I chose was email address. My email address has been around long enough to vote, so I am that old. It seems like a good heuristic. If your email address is, say, 10 years old, you are likely to be old enough to create an account.

I will get downvoted by people suspicious of handing over a lot of personal data, but we do have GDPR laws, and they're not getting me to install a proctopod (tm). Giving someone my email address to verify my age is not a big deal. They're getting my email address to create an account anyway.

The practicalities of implementing 'good enough' age verification, where the website can prove that they conformed to an acceptable approach, do not require giving up all or significant freedoms. Maybe we get to something similar to DNS verification where you need to create a dummy TXT record in an already verified account.