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by padjo
3 days ago
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Is that the only way? It seems conceivable to me that you could have some sort of publicly run infrastructure that asserts your age is above some threshold without sharing your identity. So long as that system recorded no log of who asked it for assertions about whom then I can't see an objection to age verification. |
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Two problems with this:
1. Any system which is anonymous becomes trivially abusable. A true anonymous system with no records kept means a single stolen or leaked ID could be used by everyone, defeating the system. You can try to search for and block leaked IDs but that doesn’t stop one kid from copying their 19 year old brother’s ID and using it to authorize the entire school. So these systems gain logging facilities to try to rate limit requests and the politicians don’t like it because it’s too easy to circumvent. They really want ID attached to accounts so there can be some consequences for ID fraud.
2. Routing every request through a government entity will not be anonymous or log-free, no matter how much you want it to be. With everything we know about government intrusion into services in the name of national security, you can’t expect a centralized service that gets access to people’s ID, IP address, and sites they visit to be kept as a special zone for privacy. It would be a top target.