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.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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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.
Personally I've found online banking, medical and travel services rather hard to resist.
Those new mobile phone things the kids are using also have biometrics and internets and look pretty handy to have around.
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".
People have been forgetting that home routers come with something called parental controls.
When my wife and I first signed up with Virgin as our ISP there was parental control turned on by default. Had to put in my credit card info to be able to flap.(Edit: Goddamn Autoassume! FAP not FLAP) This was 2021ish? So before the current stupidity.
Also, it's easy to feel like this is all being pushed by parents who just straight up refuse to properly parent their children...but it's mostly being championed by Puritan lobby/pressure groups. They think even totally consensual, CIS/HET amateur porn is disgusting and sinful. They don't want to see, so they're on a mission to make it so literally no one can see it.
With help from companies and people who have a vested interest in creating a panopticon-esque surveillance state. And the rest of the people involved in passing it are too old or ignorant or paid too well by the other two groups to stand in the way of it, or to have cut out the really egregious shit from these bills before they were passed.
Came here for this comment.
Governments know about parental controls. They know it's the most effective, most efficient, and least destructive way to deal with this. They don't care. And they don't care about the children. If they cared, they'd develop their own parental control software, offer it for free, and encourage it's use.
If they really wanted to get draconian about it, as they are doing now with age verification, they would pass laws to prosecute parents who don't use parental controls for negligence.
But it's not about the children. At all. It's about preventing you and me, and all of us from talking to each other and entertaining ourselves. It's about turning the Internet into TV, a one way faucet of entertainment and information controlled by the wealthy .001% where us peons can't talk back.
These age verification laws are just the first step. They kill small forums and games like Urban Dead, and leave only sites controlled by megacorporations that can afford the age verification infrastructure and the massive corporate fines if a single kid sneaks in. Once you get used to this, it's easier for you to accept not being able to communicate online at all, or start your own forum, or YouTube channel.
I'm skeptical that governments know about these solutions given how little people in general understand technology. It's a "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" situation. Ideally they should have experts available to consult with when making laws to prevent BS like this.
The people at the top certainly don't. There IS absolutely large swaths of the government that definitely do. Even if only subconsciously, all (or most) government workers who use a workplace computer of some kind should understand that sites are able to be blocked. They might think you'd need to be a Grey Beard of the 16th Order to set it up, but I'd wager a fair percentage have tried to go to a site and it's been blacklisted.
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.
You're still thinking too small. They want to be able to see what everyone is doing and saying, no anonymity.
I thought the had Roblox for that
As someone without kids, I don't know what the problem is with that specific game. I haven't played it. Can you elaborate?
This is just the latest one. There's also the fact that their profit generation format is essentially child labour exploitation. And also the latest one is just an extension of the platform's longstanding issue with child predators.
Selection of videos below on Roblox and it's history of being probably the last place you want to let your kid hang out......
I'll check these out be sure to educate my sister with unsolicited parenting advice for her kids. Thank you.
No worries 👍
It's one of those things I feel like anyone with a young person in their life should be aware of.
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.
It is possible to build an age verification system, where you use your actual ID with a cryptographic process without any personal data. The technology has existed for decades now.
I hate to point out the obvious, but they didn't accidentally confuse the two..
Force the building of a light "honour based" age verification system (just enter your birthday, we trust you not to lie to us), then as more comply add more requirements to it til all accounts are linked and they know when you shit
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.
Nym did some work on a zero knowledge verification system:
https://constructiveproof.com/posts/2020-03-24-nym-credentials-overview/
Zero-knowledge proofs are a good concept. They've been possible for a long, long time, and allow age check without surveillance.
So why are they not being used? Because age check is just a cover. These people want to do surveillance, not protect kids.
So it's a good counter. Want age check? Do it like this. Oh, you don't want it that way? Why not, pray?
Whether it works (it has, previously) or not (as with the current bullshit from the US), it does bring to the public debate that this is unnecessary surveillance.
There's also precedent you can point to. Germany has implemented a reasonable system of digital identification and (seperable) condition confirmation (age gate).
Maybe in alternate timeline where tech companies have historically acted ethically.
In this timeline where each new company and/or ceo is more slimey than the last, I know that any type of identification will be mismanaged at best or used maliciously at worst
All trust is gone between these companies.
There is already age verification. It's called an internet service provider bill.
Or — just make it easier for parents to install filters for their kids??
It's already easy as fuck. Most parents just don't bother. The mandates should be on ISPs and cell carriers to provide network-level filtering. I filter adult sites on my home network and there's no getting around that without cracking the password on the service or factory resetting the gateway.
I also want zero knowledge personhood/Nationality verification for social media. Maybe with age too. I want to know where the accounts come from and whether they are a bot or not.
It can be optional, as long as I get a filter to remove all non-verified people.
Best our corporate dictatorships can offer is requiring you to surgically implant a microchip into your brainstem. Everyone without the chip will be classified as woke, and cleansed by the AI killbots on judgement day.
All heil skkkynet.
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Banking and other finance related services are the only place where I don't mind KYC. Others I drop as soon as they request it and I seek alternatives.
But I will drop my online bank as well as soon google enforce the 'only verified developer applications'. 90% of my applications, incuding system applications like laucher, are not installed from the play store. I plan to switch to a linux 'phone' and only use services which are usable from a browser / without google securnet.
The thing is usually for the bank account you have gone through rigourous checks already to open or maintain and account to prove your age. So face verification via an app is redundant.
We know it’s bull anyway but it’s at least a valid reason for no.
I’m the same as you. I’ll switch to browser and TBh if they piss me off enough I’ll start using cash
Someone else in here said the laws are confusing age verification for identity verification. If anything, I'd be okay with identity verification for banking as an additional check. (Plus my bank already knows what I spend money on)
I'm currently pushing back against discover requiring me to upload my ID to log in to my account. The amount of support people I've gone through that have certified me without needing to upload anything has been my main argument against it, but "they're still investigating"
In the US it is becoming common for federal services to require ID.me verification. I’ve never really had a problem with social security requiring ID verification. I do have a problem with data portals requiring it.
I even have a problem with ID.me, it's a private company that the US government wants you to give your driver's license and other information to. I don't trust that.
Absolutely valid. In the context of identity verification, I trust ID.me more than random companies that do not have government contracts because government contracts come with security and compliance regulations that require regular audit and make the chances of breach less likely. In either case, it’s a private company and, as any security nut would have told you, when it gets sold all bets are off like 23andme. Even more importantly, in the US, any kind of ID verification is a terrible idea, government or private, because we have no data regulation or privacy constraints. I call out the US here because we have no GDPR equivalent (CCPA wouldn’t hold up to federal data). Even if ID verification were conducted by the government, it can still be used for gnarly shit like we saw with ICE and DOGE.
On a sliding scale of evil, ID.me is the evil I know will currently fight to continue remaining the only evil which is the only solace I have in the US.
Identifying yourself for official business on a government site is not the same as providing official ID to a random picture sharing site. Pretty much every service has had a leak which required heaps of people to change their trusted password. How would you fix this when they leaked your full official identity?
The theme of this post is “what things online would I be okay giving my government ID to.” The author did not mention government services in the article, so I brought those up and differentiated which government services I think are reasonable for ID verification. In the US, social security is basically a retirement fund and a huge target for scammers. I’m willing to verify there or for my taxes (although those should just be done for me; different argument). A data portal eg census data is not something I am willing to verify my ID for because it should be public. US trademarks, for example, now require ID verification for an account. An account gives expands some access on the website and allows the ability to file. If I file a trademark, I am fine with verifying my identity. If I make an account, I don’t need to verify my identity until I file.
I didn’t mention picture sharing websites because I agree with the author’s stance.
This is just more child abuse disguised as "parental rights". It becomes clear how harmful this is when you realise that not all parents have their childrens best interests at heart (even if they think they do and sincerely mean well) and allowing parents to censor the information children have available to them allows them to censor information that the children learn only too late to prevent harm.
It's just a new "Think of the children", only worse than going after backdoors in cryptography.
Now it's "OS-level" identity checks, which means TPM+secure boot hardware lockout.
The issue is that any software is a blackbox when running.
There is no way for a user to know what code is running let alone verifying that a specific code is actually running on a device, combine that with a sector that keeps wanting more data.
Banking?
you open the acct with id. no need for the app to verify age.
"identity or age"
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