this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Apologies if this isn't the right place to ask this, but I thought actual developers with a deep understanding of how technology actually works would be the people to ask!

If you were tasked with setting up a safe and secure way to do this, how would you do it differently than what the UK government is proposing? How could it be done such that I wouldn't have to worry about my privacy and the threat of government suppression? Is it even theoretically possible to accomplish such a task at such a scale?

Cheers!

EDIT: Just to be clear: I'm not in favour of age verification laws. But they're on their way regardless. My question is purely about the implementation and technology of the thing, rather than the ethics or efficacy of it. Can this seemingly-inevitable privacy hellscape be done in a non-hellscapish way?

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[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yes, kind of. In a similar way that we can currently authenticate with OpenID. Basically something like a passkey could be issued by your government that would let you prove your (pseudonymous) identity (and thus age range) through their API to a website.

This wouldn’t allow for anonymous browsing, since the website would have to identify you, but it could allow for pseudonymous browsing, since the website’s identification of you could be just an ID number that is specific to them. They already track you with cookies, so it wouldn’t be any worse than we have now, except that it’s more unnecessary bureaucracy.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This just seems like a great way for your government to know every single thing you do online.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

You could make it so that the government doesn’t know who’s requesting it.