a digital wallet with ZKP could resolve ‘are you old enough?’ without the query ever needing to leave your device.

without a digital wallet, it could be done with fully homomorphic encryption.

both of these would be innovations which i feel require guided development. innovation counter to the goal of the legislation, which is surveillance. innovation driven by the self-proclaimed purpose of ‘protecting children’; innovation driven by the impetus to make it harder for people to masturbate.

since the general attitude right now has been ‘require agegates and just leave it up to The Market™’, then the solution in practise will probably be a private third party that brokers this information, probably with a natural monopoly, that will charge exorbitantly for their API, have Google Analytics running on every page, leaks like a sieve, leaves logs everywhere, and will probably get caught selling data, which will incur a one-time fee equal to 80% the size of the company’s rainy day fund, and maybe the CEO will be asked to step down, shielding the rest of the C-suite from consequences (and allowing them to just do it again). they’ll work closely with law enforcement, they’ll be breached in the first year, and probably have a huge leak 4 years later.

in that time, due to real changes in the law or jurisprudence, or companies just ‘playing it safe’, age verification will come to encompass queer identity, sexual education and health, war coverage, counterculture and even history. more online regulation just means more barriers to entry which means a larger monopoly for multinational corporations.

i think there are better uses for this technology than controlling pornography.

the provider knows who’s asking because of the IP address and API key of the requester. if it uses a form with a redirect, they even know your IP and what page you were on, tied to your legal identity. if the provider makes any API requests to a government registry, now that knows the when, the how, and (categorically) the what. short of a statement of ‘no logs’ and an audit to confirm as such, there is definitely logs. hackers love this information. data brokers love this information.

the problem is not the service knowing. it’s anyone knowing. the provider deänonymised you the moment you gave your id. the precise implementation details are important here.

the problem is that people are being verifiably linked to their ‘adult’ preferences. this is data that is being generated, in bad faith, and handled by multiple parties. your legal identity should not need to be tied to this information. this information can be used against you both now and in the future.

we’ve already seen in the US where there is a push for information about gender and basic sexual education being labelled as ‘adult’. when i was in school, information about countries like Cuba, Afghanistan or China was considered ‘too mature’ (or marked as ‘terrorism-related’ by the school firewall) for children; i could see this thus extending to require age verification before you can access ‘subversive’ information, on the basis of ‘protecting children’ from ‘political extremism’.

But at the same time, you still post to !gunners@lemmy.world

Dbzer0 was selected as the main non-ml community 7 months ago in this thread: https://lazysoci.al/post/21253059

‘some people made a collective decision (that didn’t involve you) that everyone should move to my preferred forum, and here you are!’