I think doing this on an OS level might be the most privacy focused way to do this but the issue is that this is not going to be the way this is implemented.

Like, I’m not American and in Germany we have ID cards that actually have your age encoded on an NFC chip in the card and an ID number that encodes the age. Like, age is part of the ID number and checksum.

You could totally do all of this age verification offline on device and just expose an API that offers the age of the user to applications. You’d never need to talk to the internet for this, the API just says if you are a minor or adult, the browser can pass that to websites who don’t need to collect personal data and everything is fine.

But that’s not going to happen. It’s gonna be some AI facial recognition kinda garbage that is gonna send your face in every angle to Apple or Microsoft or another third party.

As is common these days they are going to try really hard to absolve you as the user of any responsibility for the sake of protecting kids so they can’t let this be a simple offline thing where your personal information never ever have to leave the device because what if kids find a way around it? Well the obvious answer is don’t let your kids just use a computer without supervision but if people would do that we’d not be in need of this garbage anyway.

> Well the obvious answer is don’t let your kids just use a computer without supervision

have you literally ever met a kid?