Apologies if this isn’t the right place to ask this, but I thought actual developers with a deep understanding of how technology actually works would be the people to ask!

If you were tasked with setting up a safe and secure way to do this, how would you do it differently than what the UK government is proposing? How could it be done such that I wouldn’t have to worry about my privacy and the threat of government suppression? Is it even theoretically possible to accomplish such a task at such a scale?

Cheers!

EDIT: Just to be clear: I’m not in favour of age verification laws. But they’re on their way regardless. My question is purely about the implementation and technology of the thing, rather than the ethics or efficacy of it. Can this seemingly-inevitable privacy hellscape be done in a non-hellscapish way?

  • blitzen@lemmy.ca
    10·
    7 months ago

    I agree with others here when they say that age-verification laws aren’t about children at all, and identification isn’t a side effect, it’s the raison d’être.

    But if I were to earnestly try to solve the problem, I might look to the physical (non-online) world. In every part of the world I’ve been to, buying alcohol requires one thing; to be of age. So if you very clearly look of age, you are allowed to buy it. If you look younger, you may be asked to provide ID proving you are old enough. While some vendors may take additional precautions such as scanning your ID, it is not a requirement and most do not. They simply look at your ID to verify, then allow the purchase.

    One could buy a physical verification token, like one might buy a gift card currently, and the purchase requires the same verification as buying alcohol. Imagine you buy a plastic gift-card-like item branded Roblox and they verify you are of age, when you sign up for Roblox you enter in the details of the gift-card-like item. You are verified to be of age, and no-one has any other details.