you seem really eager to catch me in some sort of "aha gotcha!" scenario so that you can... what? feel good about winning a hackernews argument? you are trying to argue with someone who largely shares the exact same views as you. the only difference between us is that im offering up alternatives and you are hoping that if you yell loud enough that everyone will forget about age verification.

age verification is already being rolled out. so we can either suck it up and try advocate for less shitty versions, or we can bicker amongst ourselves while id/video-based age verification continues to be implemented everywhere.

>...if these tokens are as protective as you claim they are, why would it be important for them to expire?

read above for the conversation that occurred.

>Would you also advocate for the token issued by authoritarians' preferred "send a video of yourself [0] and/or your government-issued photo ID [1] to some random third-party for-profit company" check to frequently expire? If not, what's up with the discrepancy?

a) no, obviously not, because i dont advocate for video or id-based age verification.

b) i know that you know this, and are just pretending to be ignorant for some weird ass reason: various age verification implementations have different risks and benefits.

for some implementations, users are forced to give up significant amounts of privacy in favor of increased accuracy. other implementations give up less privacy, at the risk of reduced accuracy. look at discords implementation for a recent example (it was easier to spoof the client-side verification than the server-side id-based one. more privacy, less accuracy). this type of balancing act is not new. we do the same balancing act with alcohol, smoking, gambling, healthcare, security, development, etc.

so, when looking at potential mitigations for less-accurate methods, while maintaining the same level of privacy, a sensible option is to make the UUIDs time-bound which will limit the time an illicit token is valid. this makes much less sense for id/video-based verification, because they have higher accuracy than my version (paid for by giving up your privacy).

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something you said earlier: "Your time and energy are better spent resisting the expansion,".

so, go do that. find the people that are really pushing for age verification, and argue with them. instead of replying to me, use that time to call your state representative or something. im not your opponent here. if it were up to me, we wouldnt have age verification in the first place. you already know that my stance is anti-age verification!

my proposal is not perfect. i dont like age verification. you can have the karma from this argument, its cool, you can "win". what more do you want me to say?