Age verification can be achieved without destroying anonymity and privacy online using anonymous credential systems, but it has to be designed that way from the ground up, and no one pushing age verification is interested in preserving privacy.

This comes up in every thread, but the purpose of the laws is not to verify that someone can access an anonymous token. If we had a true anonymous token system then everyone would just share tokens around.

The real world analog would be if you could buy beer at the store with anyone's ID because they didn't make any effort to reasonably check that the ID was yours or discourage people from sharing or copying IDs.

The systems enforce identity checking because that's the only way age verification can be done without having some reason to discourage or detect credential sharing.

The retort that follows is always "Well it's not perfect. Nothing is perfect." The trap is convincing ourselves that a severely imperfect system would be accepted. What would really happen is that it would be the trojan horse to get everyone on board with age verification, then the laws would be changed to make them more strict.

No it really can’t. Age verification requires identification.

Even if you could anonymously verify age to issue a “confirmed adult” credential, the whole chain of trust breaks down if one bad actor shares their anonymous credential and suddenly everyone is verifiably an adult.

The solution to that attack is naturally to have some kind of system for sites to report obviously-shared credentials. Which means tracking.

The destruction of privacy is the whole point.

This is something that's technologically feasible, but will never happen in practice.

Yes, but this is not popular among technologists (see the average sentiment towards age verification here). Legislators aren't going to build technology. This will happen if age verification actually becomes a widespread requirement. But until that point the prospective builders will be fighting the entire premise of such systems.

Apple and Google have already implemented private age verification.

They are interested - interested specifically in opposing it. These groups don't care about age verification - it is a trojan horse for censorship.

the EU is. but their verification age process shows the design flaw that preserving privacy means the system can be easily circumvented with a mitm allowing to circumvent the age verification process.

AFAIK there are designs in the EU that respect privacy. There is a range of options being pushed around the world, and theres definitely a few of them which are more technically defensible than others.

And they continue to act like opposition just wants a wild west/don't care about kids, which is the oldest trick in the book. We just don't want "protect the kids" leveraged to tear up our rights.

It's addressing a real problem in a bad way.