the main thing that has saved the west from digital ID so far has been android OEM fragmentation, where there just hasn't been a way to manage hardware secrets in a way consistent enough across devices to be pushed down on people as a digital ID.

this thin edge of the wedge age verification solution is to normalize people showing ID everywhere and whether it's their age or some other social credit attribute is immaterial. the product is submission. the original hope for this was first in differential privacy, then ZKSNARKS, then FHE, and whatever proof they're on about now is intended to obfuscate not the data, but the actual use case, which is going back to covid era ID checks. for climate, surely.

I distinctly remember a conversation I had in 2013 while working on early instances of a related identity tech, where I said to the founder and CTO, "nobody wants this, it's something you want to impose on others. your security model needs a failure mode other than catastrophic because the incentives to take it down are tremendous- from fake ID and fraud to people like me who just think you're assholes."

Identity isn't a tech problem, it's a political problem people in bureaucracies who problematize human freedom and dignity keep trying to bully through with increasingly obfuscated tech.

for googlers reading this though, I've got a great name for your identity product: holler-it! it's just like hollerith but so much quirkier and safe feeling.