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Could online age verification be done in a way that protects privacy and autonomy? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by 58008@lemmy.world to c/ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev

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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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[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I think this is the best possible solution, great write up and explanation. A minor improvement would be to make the card some kind of OATH device to generate TOTP tokens rather than a single ID number, so that you can reuse the same identifying token in multiple places with no way to connect the token.

Edit: On second thought, I can't think of a way to make that work, without compromising privacy, and I can think of a few possible ways that the original idea could potentially go wrong, too. Still, I think this is the closest possible solution.

[–] blitzen@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

Oh, mine is a terrible idea, but maybe one of the least bad. I like your idea of making it reusable somehow.

[–] Zagorath@quokk.au 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

On second thought, I can't think of a way to make that work, without compromising privacy

I'd say check out my top-level comment, and the link to the crypto Stack Exchange within it.