Comment by stubish

Starts off with a flawed assumption, playing into the hands of people who want surveillance.

"The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely."

If you start by legislating that you can't collect personal data or ID, then you are forced to do your age verification through other means. And legislate the government can't see what websites a user is visiting if you can to stop overreach. End result is a workable solution, zero knowledge proof or similar where government (the source of your ID documents) signs a token brokered by a proxy.

But when you start arguments from the position of 'no way to do this without violating privacy', the end result will be to violate privacy, because it seems an awful lot of people are demanding age verification and will sacrifice if they believe it is necessary.