alt Hacker News> But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes.
Those aren't the only options. See the comments on almost any of the many other discussions of age verification on HN for details of ways to do it that do not involve giving any sensitive information to sites (other than what you explicitly trying to give to them, like your age being above their threshold) and do not involve guessing your age via LLM or any other means.
Replies
I‘m starting thinking that those alternatives are deliberately ignored by the anti-verification crowd. It’s hard to explain otherwise why the most logical way to solve the problem is not in the spotlight.
They kind of are the only options. All of these issues are sitting on a slippery slope. If you accept a technical solution that works well, then eventually somebody is going to push that further.
If you need to use your ID to log into a website (even if the website doesn't get any of your information) then society is only a step away from the government monitoring everything you do online. And at that point it's up to them to decide whether they want to do it or not, because you're already used to the process. If they decide to violate your privacy there's nothing you can do about it other than vaguely point at privacy laws before promptly getting ignored.