Comment by toomuchtodo
13 days ago
You require a human to identity proof in real life and bind that to a digital identity with a strong authenticator. Anti fraud detection systems can suspend or ban if evasion attempts are detected. Perfect is not the target, it doesn’t have to be.
See: Login.gov (USPS offline proofing) and other national identity systems.
(digital identity is a component of my work)
>You require a human to identity proof in real life and bind that to a digital identity
That's going to be a no from me, dawg. I'm sympathetic to ID checks like if you're buying beer or whatever, but not linking my real life identity to discord or whatever.
You have to show ID to buy beer?
If you aren't obviously adult then yeah. Where do you live so there are no laws on selling the alcohol to children?
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Store doesn't get to photograph your ID, share it with 548 of their advertising partners, and leak it to 7 different hacker groups.
Why should anyone inclined to want to buy beer have to show ID to do it?
I don't know how it works where you live, but in many jurisdictions around the world (including the one I live in), you have to provide ID to prove that you're of drinking age.
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Because you’re required to in all 50 states to prove you’re over 21.
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Not my call, it’ll be the law of the land. Some may leave, but most won’t, and that’s good enough for corporate and enterprise value purposes.
Pornhub is fighting state age verification and keeps losing state by state, for example.
Porn site fined £800,000 for not rolling out age checks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990755 - February 2026
Which is by nature transient. There are many more and quite dangerous strings attached to doing this online. You never know if all parties involved in the verification are trustworthy.