To be clear, I’m not advocating for online age verification. I’m very much against it in any form. I’m just curious from a technical standpoint if it’s possible somehow to construct an accurate age verification system that doesn’t compromise a user’s privacy? i.e., it doesn’t expose the person’s identity to anyone nor leaves behind a paper trail that can be traced to that person?
The problem is not the system or the idea of age verification
The problem is that no one on earth can be trusted with that level of monitoring, control and power.
You definitely can do this with cryptography, it’s a really hard problem, but I worked in this space for a number of years, it’s possible.
Like I implied, the problem isn’t the HOW to do it.
The problem is in giving any one person, government, corporation or company this amount of power and control.
And because it’s so powerful, no one who had it would want to give up control by making it anonymous or in objectively protecting privacy for the user.
Right, I understand that perspective, but there is a way to do this with multi-party computation and some other cryptography where no one would have the actual power/be able to see the data/have control. The main issue is it’s expensive to run and no one would be incentivized to run it.
Nah you can totally trust me, I’m too lazy to do anything nefarious
Wait until you have that power and you’re made offers that are hard to resist.
Great! … the solution to our problems … let’s all trust edgemaster72
Oh, oh shit, this has backfired massively, I didn’t think anyone would go along with it, that’s way too much responsibility
This is precisely what the chosen one would say!