I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

I will never tell my real age if possible. I especially love free forms for entry, because then I can be born in the 1800s. Surprisingly few services have an issue with that.

I use multiple "real" identities so I don't have my real name associated with certain open source projects that involve sensitive things like cryptography etc. This is a huge concern of mine.

Personally, I can see use cases for verifying my identity:

Banking, taxes, treasurydirect, linkedin, docusign, online filing,

Right now all those are tied to my gmail account.

So I'm feeding google all this juicy (IMO) confidential information. What happens when I get locked out by google's automatic systems? I already lost my first gmail account from like 2003, when you had to get an invite to sign up. I'm stuck in a verification loop that emails a yahoo email that no longer exists. Impossible to get a real person to look at it.

If I can just verify that I am who I say I am without an email account... That'd be worth it. Of course that just shifts the burden to the identity verification company rather than an email company.

But verifying my age? I see no purpose other than a backdoor for mass identity verification. keeping lists of people and what they're accessing. Buying alcohol online still requires the person accepting the package to be over 21. Buying firearms online still requires being shipped to an FFL.

I already despise how much information my ISP has about what I see, what I access, and when.

Age verification is about one thing only, it's about controlling how you participate in public society. The state wants a veto on public participation that they don't like. This system will not prevent children from being exposed to unsafe spaces, but it will be effective at barring people with counter political narratives from sharing online. Look how they've desperately tried to crack down on Epstein and information on Gaza. They want the same controls over information and political content as China.

I wish we lived in the timeline where the most reputable and market-leading age verification provider was PornHub, which would have a modestly dressed model check via video chat. I'd actually trust that more than the actual providers that exist in reality, and hey, if even 1% of the money goes to college tuition, great. Of course, if that was how this worked, the optics would kill most of these schemes before they were implemented.

As a parent, I'd like to point out that the threat I care about is not "my kid of age N talks to a sicko of age M, where M - N > P for some legislatively-prescribed value of P".

The threat is "my kid of age N talks to or can be observed by a sicko".

These age verification schemes do nothing to help against that. Also, the worst predators online are often the vendors providing "kid friendly" services.

On top of that, these laws are being pushed hardest by the worst of the most corrupt politicians on earth. Why would I install a webcam on my kid's machine because that group of people wants me to?!?

Maybe we should focus on prosecuting the backlog of stuff in the Epstein files pertaining to politicians pushing these age verification services, not let anyone (except parents) control how kids access stuff online.

Stop making your kids my fucking problem/annoyance.

Some company or, hell, the gov't setup a proxy service that whitelists the internet and have your kid use that. Do your fucking job.

It’s a hand out to advertisers losing uuids.

The only people who can be trusted with any form of identity (including age) vertification is the government. You know, the same people who issued the identity documents and know who you are.

It's not some SV-backed startup. It's not Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or Meta. It's the government.

Age verification is quite bogus. Parents can stand over their children's shoulder and force them to do or not do one thing or the other (and maybe not even them); but some website dictating which content young people can watch or not watch - not acceptable. And if you want to make a "protect the delicate mind of children" argument - let's first see some censoring of all of the ads, sponsored content, and state and corporate propaganda as unfit for viewing by underaged people; which is, of course, never going to happen.

We’ve had age verification for decades. It just depends on specifically what is being verified. Congress passed Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act back in 1998, that basically made it extremely tedious for websites to serve children under 13 years of age. How did everyone manage this in the early 2000s? Every child simply lied to the website with an incorrect birthdate. Now that was before real name policy was instituted by social networks and it was also common for people to provide a false name to websites. This approach of “asking the user for a birthdate and accepting it as true” is the only age verification method that’s sane.

I simply do refuse such systems, so far using decentralized or distributed socials like Nostr, Lemmy (self-hosted) and VPNs as glorified proxies and that's just because there aren't enough co-Citizens to impose a significant change with a national general strike enduring as much as needed to makes the government RUN, literally, to avoid lifetime jail...

These are the times, even renewing a nmfta scac code in the US may require government ID, social security number, and biometric profile check. Save yourself $5 and use a smart-phone, as a webcam will not work... There are no refunds after 3 failures to scan ID.

In general, a social security number is extremely sensitive, and should never be shared outside your home country tax system.

Verification is indeed a perverse invasion of privacy, and a liability to those with financial holdings. I guess the credit-lock service is now a must to deal with the circus that is modern logistics. =3

See, I think, you're not supposed to continue using those services as before. They want them all gone, and so-called age verification is a means to chase away users that are less dedicated.

What I think must result is, a monotonic cultural erosion and deprecation of such platforms and regions implementing those restrictions, and continuous replacement with engineered and packaged foreign imports from venues and regions from psychological "upstream" where there aren't such restrictions. But I guess that's what they explicitly desire.

People don't like these checks. Ok. But. Parents worry about their kids being exposed to porn and social media. They want someone to do something about it. That political force is real, and someone is going to take advantage of it. What tools can they ask for if not these checks everyone agrees they hate? That's what I hope for in these types of comment threads.

> I haven’t been asked to verify my age for a DVD purchase (online or offline) in a very long time.

Offline there is a reason for that, online are enough countries where it breaks the law if you sell without verification at least for NC-17 titles

I'm not reluctant to. I just won't!

I'm punching myself in the balls one way or another.

I initially thought, well, we can implement it with zero knowledge claims, just a yes/no from a government app: am I allowed to use this app? I.e. is my age above let’s say 16 or 18?

But then I remembered the game 20 questions, and how few yes/no questions you need to guess pretty much any concept.

I am no longer willing to share anything, not even a yes/no question.

Umm. Yes. I completely agree.

What else is there to say?

Any such verification service will either sell your data or lose it. Will not may.

This guy is reading my mind ...

Age and identity verification can and should be done at the country level.

France has an ID service to pay taxes, and they have a network of possible ID verification systems. Like, you can ID through the tax system, or through the healthcare system. It works fine.

Implementing an API that uses the same to provide age verification is not rocket science.

If you need age verification for a website, say "smedia.fr", then you go there, then it makes you get an age verification token to "franceid.gov.fr", that guy gives you back a token, you send the token to smedia.fr which checks the token with franceid.gov.fr

I don't understand how this is even an issue.

Steam was asking for your Age since day 1.

1 - 1 - 1970 is always mine - Unix zero

The most relevant question to answer for your jurisdiction is "What is the penalty for lying?"

If none, you were born on March 5, 1957.

(Note on evaluating this: there are some circumstances where the penalty changes later. I know one person who's Global Access paperwork was delayed because they lied to their airline's frequent flyer program about their age. But that was the whole consequence: a need to update their data with the airline).

Honestly seems like the moral panic of the day. I was just reading about some “red vs blue” school meme in London which led to a lot of hand wringing and parents keeping their kids at home. The kicker? There was no actually school battles, it was a viral meme (mostly consumed by adults) and the kids just thought it was a joke.

Pretty much sums up all modern discourse in banning social media and doing age checks. When I was growing up it was satanic symbols in the music I listened to.

I guess - wtf is wrong with adults? Why do they feel compelled to control the younger generation?

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Your ipad babies are not my problem. It's called parenting. Don't do ipad parenting then. We didn't get a SEGA console and cable TV was restricted to only 2 hours. It was fine. It was fun. The only thing I wish for from my child is more time with friends not more screen time.

Enforcing laws against porn companies distributing porn to minors seems reasonable. It's already illegal many places, such as the US. It is then their responsibility to gate by age. It has always worked this way for liquor stores or basically anything else age-gated, including some online services like poker. If you dont want to provide age verification you don't have to.