You know, I am in a country that allows alcohol for children (in different intensities, e.g. beer at age 14 with parents present, age 16 in the supermarket, age 18 for the hard stuff). As it turns out, our kids are alright.

Tobacco and porn have been more strongly regulated lately. In my teenage years, they were easily available to anyone with coins in their hands. Turns out: that didn't destroy us either.

The first beer, the first pack of strong tobacco (Rothändle, the dirtiest, hardest stuff), the first tiddie magazine from the railway station kiosk, those were rites of passages. It was a way for teenagers to push the envelope, realise alcohol makes you wobbly, tobacco causes diarrea (believe me, that Rothändle stuff was more chemical weapon than 'smooth'), and ultimately, all women look about the same undressed, so it is pointless to keep buying. They were small, recoverable mistakes that taught teenagers where their limits were.

Now we have banned all that away - but the teenage urge to self-realization and rebellion found a new way to social media. And: social media is safer: no-one got lung cancer from TikTok. No-one woke up in a hospital for facebook poisoning.

Ultimately, it is the rebellion the fascists dislike, not the fact that people earn money with it. So we ban that, driving teenagers to ever-more-destructive behaviour.

Teenagers need an outlet to be teenagers without living in a state sanctioned panopticum. If society pathologizes every form of adolescent experimentation, if you let control freaks raise your children, do not be surprised if they turn out to be either actual rebels, or something much, much darker.

Yes because it is so hard for kids to get alcohol and cigarettes. Kids have been sneaking and smoking cigarettes forever.

How does this solve the problem of both governments and corporations wanting to implement this in ways that allow them to hoard datasets?

As it stands, the government in the US uses an identity verification vendor that forces you to upload videos of multiple angles of your face, enough data for facial recognition and to build 3D models, along with pictures of your ID.

I use Tor, so I get to see how age verification is implemented all over the world. By large, the process almost always includes using your government issued ID and live pictures/videos of your face.

There are zero incentives to implement zero knowledge proofs like this, and billions of dollars of incentives to use age verification as an opportunity to collect population-wide datasets of people's faces in high resolution and 3D. That data is valuable, especially for governments and companies that want to implement accurate facial recognition and who have AI models to train.

Well, phones and computers have had parental controls for well over a decade.

That doesn't solve the problem: it just defers it. Who's allowed to have a digital ID?