Update on age requirements for apps distributed in Texas

Meanwhile I actually started college at 16 which is illegal in some locales.

If the hammer ever comes down on this issue, ie hardcore requirement for age verification, there are ways to do this while protecting privacy.

We are experimenting with bootstraping a PKI certificate trust chain for facilitating trust projection and information verification online. Think of it as the ability to do things like age verification at scale via a peer-2-peer ish mechanism instead of sending your government id to a service provider.

One experiment is with PGP key holders (for now Keybase key holders) as CAs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46576590

And also .gov email holders:

https://blog.certisfy.com/2025/12/using-gov-email-addresses-...

It's all self-service and requires no sign-up or download of anything, the app (https://certisfy.com/app) is an in-browser app and all the cryptography happens in the browser.

(Not in Texas)

Did this apply to X (Twitter) at all?

It is interesting to me that we are running a giant social experiment with people's childhoods- something we know can only be done once.

Meanwhile the silicon valley elite admitted that they don't let their 12 year old daughter on Instagram...

Just let the parents be responsible. Jesus.

Attach minor accounts to the account of the parent, make the parent say yes.