this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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It's absolutely possible to have privacy-preserving age verification, but it requires government to trust someone else than themselves, which they'll never do.
Go to gas station. Hand cashier your ID, like you do to buy liquor. Cashier gives you a one time use token/password to the age verification system website. You go there and upload a public key you generate before the OTP expires. Voila: now the site could easily verify that you control the private key and (trusting) that consequently you are of age, without having to know literally anything about you.
It only breaks if you treat everyone as a criminal until proven innocent (e.g. "you might have stolen that key", etc), which is exactly what every government implementing this is doing, which is why it's not really about protecting kids from porn at all but about removing privacy.