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Comment by drakythe

3 days ago

While some people may want that, everyone who has the technical know-how to restrict access can name probably a dozen different ways to do it without violating privacy via ID Upload. The only reason to push for ID Upload instead of the other methods is because policy makers are lazy and information resellers want as much information about us all as they can get. Its lazy because it just recreates the liquor store "Can I see your ID please?" experience everyone is so familiar with and takes no explanation, so lazy policy makers find it easy to push for, without accounting for how that data is handled after use. Meanwhile information clearing houses and anti-privacy wanks are salivating at how this can be leveraged so they too push the "ID Upload is the only way!" messaging.

>and information resellers want as much information about us all as they can get.

That seems implausible given that most sites requiring age verification outsource it to some third party, which means they're not getting all the juicy biometrics.

  • You've identified the group that would be incentivized to lobby for this architecture.

    • That's an unhelpful way of analyzing stuff because you can cynically retort "You've identified the group that would be incentivized to lobby for this" regardless of what happens. No age verification whatsoever? I bet social media companies would like that! Age verification by the government? I bet it's because the government wants to know what porn sites you visit! Maybe verification by the OS instead? Must be the Google/Android OS duopoly! So complicated PKI or zero knowledge proofs solution? There's probably some consultancy that would benefit, not to mention there's still going to be companies that would handle the outsourcing. There's a whole industry for handling user account management/SSO, for instance, and that's entirely open source.

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