alt Hacker NewsSo, that's not anonymous then. Because it allows tracking across multiple accounts, some of which are associated with your name. An unchanging proof of age is pretty much just another name for a government ID number.
So, that's not anonymous then. Because it allows tracking across multiple accounts, some of which are associated with your name. An unchanging proof of age is pretty much just another name for a government ID number.
Not necessarily. In theory, the attestation that someone is of age can be provided by a central service. The central service does not need the website account information to provide a non-fungible certificate, that you show to your service that has no way of knowing who you are from the certificate. All it needs to ensure is the certificate is used only once per account.
You can then prevent certificate forging by forwarding a cryptographic hash of the requester identity (generated by the website client), which will be included in the cert body so the website can verify the attestation was generated for this specific request, and it cannot be randomly reused.
Of course this doesn't solve the problem of using your grandma's id to bypass age restrictions, but I think that problem is worth the cost of privacy gains from corporations not validating IDs directly and screwing up like Discord's vendor did here.