[flagged]
We have mandatory identification for all kinds of things that are illegal to purchase or engage in under a certain age. Nobody wants to prosecute 12 year old kids for lying when the clicked the "I am at least 13 years old" checkbox when registering an account. The only alternative is to do what we do with R-rated movies, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, risky physical activities (i.e. bungee jumping liability waiver) etc... we put the onus of verifying identification on the suppliers.
I've always imagined this was inevitable.
When I go buy a beer at the gas station, all I do is show my ID to the cashier. They look at it to verify DOB and then that's it. No information is stored permanently in some database that's going to get hacked and leaked.
We can't trust every private company that now has to verify age to not store that information with whatever questionable security.
If we aren't going to do a national registry that services can query to get back only a "yes or no" on whether a user is of age or not, then we need regulation to prevent the storage of ID information.
We should still be able to verify age while remaining psuedo-anonymous.
Querying a national registry is not good because the timing of the queries could be matched up with the timing of site logins to possibly figure out the identities of anonymous site users.
A way to address this, at the cost of requiring the user to have secure hardware such as a smart phone or a smart card or a hardware security token or similar is for your government to issue you signed identity documents that you store and that are bound cryptographically to your secure hardware.
A zero knowledge protocol can later be used between your secure hardware and the site you are trying to use that proves to the site you have ID that says you are old enough and it is bound to your hardware without revealing anything else from your ID to the site.
This is what the EU had been developing for a few years. It is currently undergoing a series of large scale field trials, with release to the public later this year, with smart phones as the initial secure hardware. Member starts will be required to support it, and any mandatory age verification laws they pass will require sites to support it (they can also support other methods).
All the specs are open and the reference implementations are also open source, so other jurisdictions could adopt this.
Google has released an open source library for a similar system. I don't know if it is compatible with the EU system or not.
I think Apple's new Digital ID feature in Wallet is also similar.
We really need to get advocacy groups that are lobbying on age verification bills to try to make it so when the bills are passed (and they will be) they at least allow sites to support some method like those described above, and ideally require sites to do so.
And note that if we are, the records of the request to that database are an even bigger privacy timebomb than those of any given provider, just waiting for malicious actors with access to government records.
Beer, sure. But if you buy certain decongestants, they do log your ID. At least that's the case in Texas.
Yeah, but many people don't actually think War on Drugs policies are a model for civil liberties that should be extended beyond that domain (or, in many cases, even tolerated in that domain.) That policy has been effective, I guess, in promoting the sales of alternative “decongestants” (that don't actually work), though it did little to curb use and harms from the drugs it was supposed to control by attacking supply.
That's how it should be, but it's not how it is. Many places now scan your ID into their computer (the computer which, btw, tracks everything you buy). It may not go to a government database (yet) but it's most certainly being stored.
That would completely defeat the purpose. The goal is to identify online users, not protect children.
There is already plenty of entities that not only have reliable way of proving it's you that have access to account, but also enough info to return user's age without disclosing anything else, like banks or govt sites, they could (or better, be forced to) provide interface to that data.
Basically "pick your identity provider" -> "auth on their site" -> "step showing that only age will be shared" -> response with user's age and the query's unique ID that's not related to the user account id