To be clear, I’m not advocating for online age verification. I’m very much against it in any form. I’m just curious from a technical standpoint if it’s possible somehow to construct an accurate age verification system that doesn’t compromise a user’s privacy? i.e., it doesn’t expose the person’s identity to anyone nor leaves behind a paper trail that can be traced to that person?
Or the government sets up an age verification service that doesn’t store logs and only reports numbers in aggregate. The restricted site sends you and a unique id off to the government service, you verify there and it hands back the id & a yes/no token to the site.
The government already has nearly all the tools to make this happen. They already have id verification services to use & web front ends to copy. Just build the public API and insist restricted sites use it.