Comment by palata
4 hours ago
You are right, it is possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. Feels like most people being very vocal against the idea don't know about that.
At least most complaints I see here are assuming that age verification means tracking.
Too bad, there could be interesting discussions about privacy-preserving age verification, if people just bothered getting informed before complaining.
We already have privacy preserving age verification: the website asks for your age (or just whether you're over 18), and lets you through.
There's no issuing party to collude with to deanonymize users, no hard requirement on owning a Google- or Apple-vetted smartphone, and generally no way to identify me besides my choice of random numbers.
You move past that, and people rightfully tell you that your scheme outright breaks privacy, or that it makes too many assumptions or is too complex to easily verify it actually preserves privacy.