I’d love to engage in this. Before we do that, please can we be clear if we are talking about the EU system, or the USA-proposed OS-based system? Given they are not the same, the reactions to these two systems have also not been the same.

The EU age verification system, of which I’m talking and of which the OP was about, is not baked into the OS. That might be the case in the US. I’m lucky I don’t live there. And this discussion here is about the EU system, not the US one.

Your ISP has a record over every single website you’ve visited and your payment provider knows 99% of all purchases you’ve made and your phone knows where you’ve been at all times. Your threshold for having to trust that laws prevent wanton use of all this information doesn’t shift with anonymous age gating.

Frankly the concerns you display in the post reveal to me that you’ve not spent a great detail looking into what’s actually being proposed.

I don’t have to give up any rights for age gating to work anonymously and properly. Neither do you.

“Due to COVID we are temporarily suspending the trolley service in your train”. Never returned.

“Due to COVID, we have temporarily removed your inflight magazine”. Never returned.

“Due to COVID, we now temporarily only clean your hotel room if you request it”. Still have to request a room clean.

“Due to COVID, the salad bar has been temporarily suspended”. Still no salad bar.

“Due to COVID, you now have to book a slot to go to the tip”. Still have to book a slot.

“Due to COVID, the sleeper train has been temporarily suspended”. Never returned.

These are just the examples I can think of.

Anthropic right now are the good people.

That probably won’t last. But out of a bad bunch they’re the least bad.

Been there, so many times.

Late in Perfect Dark Zero’s development (a complete shitshow to get launched for X360 day 1) we added something called “kill planes”, behind which all entities would get nuked. The aim was that you would physically move through the world and eventually get to “no turning back” points, behind which we could remove all entities to save some cycles.

Turns out there were a large amount of places that assumed that once they had a pointer to an entity that pointer would remain valid.

So yeah, code that was like “I’ll just flip this bit on this entity I kept track of” was now flipping random bits on memory.

These were fun to chase down.

In the end we inplemented NoTaD pointers (“notified on target destruction”, essentially weak pointers but this was back in the day when weak pointers and smart pointers weren’t really well defined) that would discover when the thing they took a precious pointer to was actually no longer valid.

Except from 0.x.x to 1.0.0. That one means you’re committed to keeping the API/format stable. At least how I think about it.

What if I told you that by regulation, the EU age verification system has to be anonymous and that it’s only the AUKUS countries that are moving forward in a way where anonymity is “a nice to have”.

Denmark’s system, which is a front-runner implementation in the EU, is going to be fully ZKP.

And yes it’s basically built with tokens.

You identify with a government system in an app. The services issues you signed tokens that are anonymous. You hand these anonymous tokens over to the sites that demand proof of age.

“Oh you’re Danish! You should meet my friend Geert Van den Berg, he’s also from Dutchland!”

If I had a penny for every time, I’d have at least three fiddy.

Yeah but the party prefers their brown shirts.

In a world of corporate control over everything, I’ll take my globally defined, physical interface standard thank you.

That’s a hell of a lot better than most other systems. If true, and if scalable, this is a huge innovation.