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?
Yeah, there is a massive difference between a 9 year old and a 14 year old. Someone who is 17 is not necessarily significantly different from an 18 year old, yet we have to draw the line somewhere. I think if you own and pay for the service it should be up to you at a service level, not up to the government to demand a random third party company be accessed to verify ID and so on. That third party company stands to make money while also being a wonderful target for hackers.
That brings us to the whole concept of the internet. Decentralisation. Everyone at this point is impacted; and while age is being used as a weapon, the internet is becoming more and more centralised.
Amazon and cloudflare outages were warnings before the real storm. Decentralisation is where we should strive for - and yet the only thing this proves, is the naiveness and the lack of understanding the people that make these laws have.