Technology

You already have one. It's called your payment provider.

Age verification is one thing, but I routinely verify my id online. Banking, insurance, taxes, various other government things, car registrations, some of the kids school stuff and so on. We have pretty decent infrastructure in place here in Finland and the entities I identify myself online already has my info anyways. I can use either my banking app or mobile verification to securely prove I am who I claim to be and the systems have roughly the same user experience than MFA tokens.

Each of those are roughly zero-knowledge, the website I log in receives just "User with login token xxx is IsoKiero with SSN 123456789" and the tokens expire after a while. Also there's restrictions in place that my insurance company can't just sell my data to whomever unless I opt-in for their "marketing" program (not going to happen) and even then there's some limitations on how they can use the data.

The same system could be adopted to age verification, but that's a whole another can of worms.

Fidelity, Banks, Coinbase (before I got out of cryptocurrency entirely).

But, basically, only when government regulation does (or SHOULD) impose KYC requirements.

Age and ID verification might be good in a very few cases, but it should definitely be a deviation from the norm.

Same for me my man. I hate the fact that anonymity on the internet will eventually fall before the end of this decade. The west is not that far away from the authoritarian regimes it claims to be fighting against

IMO steam does a reasonable job of age verification - if you've registered a credit card, you're obviously old enough to have one.

YouTube's can be broken and that's the only one I cared about. I guess steam would be an issue if they tried it.

Pretty sure anything else I can easily just bail on.

"Why don't you just trust me that I was born January 1, 1900?"

Age verification wouldn’t be a problem if there was a service I trusted that could verify my age, generate an anonymous one way hash or public/private key pair that could verify my age, and then dispose of all information that would could tie me to that info, I’d be ok with it. The problem is there isn’t a group that I’d trust (well that would be willing to do it) and everyone wants to hoard information and create a central repository that will be broken into. It’s not that there is a possibility it could be, but a certainty that it would be. This isn’t really an unsolvable technical problem, but an unsolvable trust problem.

People have been forgetting that home routers come with something called parental controls.

This is the most privacy respecting solution that puts all the power of parenting into a parents hands.

If the government were really "thinking of the children" I would propose a group of bipartisan curators to curate the Internet. Thinking of how libraries function, we have librarians that classify books by age and genre. The same can be done for websites, and these curated lists be made available to parents. This can be funded by local government and be region and country specific.

These lists would effectively function as whitelists, blocking everything that's not on the whitelist. Parents can then turn on a specific whitelist for their kids if they so choose, and they gain access to a curated list of age approved websites.

Parents can then, if they so choose, add or remove items form the list to grant their children access to specific sites.

All this tech is already available and it would prevent children and adults from having to provide a website any extra information. It would also mean websites would now not need to build infrastructure to collect this information.

Could you imagine a publisher of books needing you to send them a picture of your face to verify your age and identify before you even opened a book? Why are we proposing the same equivalent concept for a website or "digital book".

The problem with "age" verification is that politicians are confusing it with identity verification.

I should not have to prove my name and other biometrics to prove age.

Age verification is the fascist way to get people to identify themselves and their online activity. Almost every state that has some sort of age verification law has zero method to actually verify age. No digital ID service, no way to share a credential for verification.

They want people to upload an ID.

This isn't about keeping children safe and it never is. It's about identifying critics of the government.

I ordered some alcohol online because I couldn't find the brand of rum I was looking for locally. They did some age verification before I could order, same that I could have encountered in a grocery store.

Of course they just got sent a token and not a photo id which changes the calculus some. I'm against trusting random websites with personal information, not an age block on its own.

Tax filing?

I am actually not fundamentally against the idea of age verification for some things online. We have many things with age restrictions in real life, for various reasons, it kind of makes sense to have it online as well for some things.

but...it has to be done with zero-knowledge proof so we limit the amount of private data exposed to the absolute bare minimum.

If you've put your real identity on your passport on some platforms and you're going to use those platforms for purposes other than work, get ready to be a good and loyal dog.

Are we really "protecting" the children? Or is there a huge amount of powerful and wealthy individuals searching for an easy way to get to the children. With the global Trump Epstein Files scandal currently happening, how do we know they are not just stalking more kids? Not a conspiracy theory, just a different point of view. So many horrid groups in the world claim to be protecting children, but they always have a hidden nefarious agenda.