Comment by paxys
2 months ago
Their proposed alternative is even worse IMO. Even if you can figure out some privacy-safe way of doing on-device age verification, the end result will be a web that only works if you are browsing from an "approved" client - i.e. a platform controlled by Apple, Google or Microsoft.
Not necessarily. You need some source of truth (i.e. government ID) to sign digital tokens representing attributes like "18+". Those tokens are uploaded to those websites.
The risk becomes "kids loading their parents' ID into their phones" but with decent digital ID that shouldn't be a problem.
Yivi already solves this problem. It's being used as a basis for an implementation of a European digital ID of sorts, though I'm still sceptical of the European side of things.
The app works on any device because the device doesn't do anything special. All it does is POST some signed token if the user clicks "approve".
I suppose this can be a problem in the US where people hate the idea of digital government ID for some reason, but that's a political problem, not a technical one. France already has a digital ID equivalent for use with government services, as do all other EU member states in their own way, so the source of these tokens is practically ready to go.
There could easily be a web standard to allow/disallow NSFW content and the web browsers could broadcast this flag based on settings at OS level similarly to the light/dark theme setting at OS level that can be used by websites and it works on all OS/web browsers implementing this trivial feature.