Germany has a system in their ID cards that allows anonymous age verification. No one uses it but it’s a technical marvel in my opinion.

The site asks for specific read permissions and the user can decide if he wants to grant them.

One of these permissions is age verification.

You put the phone on the ID card and there is a cryptographic proof that the user connecting to the site is in possession of an ID of a person above 16 (which he of course could have stolen).

So it is technically totally feasible to have good data privacy AND age verification.

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raxxorraxor 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

It isn't a technical marvel, it is technical bureaucracy. There is a reason people don't want to use it.

Also once implemented and widely adopted, the state would obviously increase demands on usage. This isn't rocket science.

I understand the cryptographic principle. That isn't the problem here.

	▲	illiac786 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		yeah, “technical” is not the right adjective, rather the marvel (to me) is the fact that a government managed to deploy a privacy friendly electronic ID system based on sound cryptographic principles. it’s a marvel because, well, as you put it, there’s all this bureaucracy and when I first discovered it was implemented and every single new electronic ID has this capability since a couple of years, my jaw dropped. But fully agree the process and the backend itself are not very usable at the moment. Maybe my expectations around government digitization are too loo though.

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biztos 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

It's hardly an age verification if it just requires the bearer to have an adult's ID card.

You borrow your friend's card, or you "borrow" your parent's card, or you pay someone who sees this market opportunity.

I think it's ridiculous how the lawgivers are telling the companies to just nerd harder, but they're definitely going to have to nerd harder than that.

	▲	brokenmachine 7 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They know, of course, that they're giving the nerds an impossible challenge. Then when they can't achieve it they can say, "well we tried the non-authoritarian way and the nerds didn't oblige, now we're forced to bring out the brownshirts. Papers please!"
	▲	illiac786 8 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think it’s better than transmitting everything including the biometric picture and requiring the camera to be on. How would you implement age verification?