alt Hacker NewsIf that’s true, I think the law is fine. There are good solutions for anonymous disclosure of information about you, the most mature being Verifiable Credentials, which is an open standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials
You can disclose just a subset of a credential, and that can be a derived value (eg age bracket instead of date of birth), and a derived key is used so that its cryptographically impossible to track you. I wish more people discussed using that, but I suspect that it’s a bit too secure for their real intentions.
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It doesn't even need to be that complicated. OS asks you your birthday at setup time. Stores it. Later, an app asks whether the user falls into one of the following brackets:
A) under 13 years of age, or B) at least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age, or C) at least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age or D) at least 18 years of age.
that's it. The OS can decide how it wants to implement that, but personally I'd literally just do get_age_bracket_enum(now() - get_user_birthday());
The bill is here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
The uproar seems to be extremely overblown.
In general, any proposal to use government ID for "age verification" over the internet is going to end in someone using it for mass surveillance, and it's probably not wrong to suspect that as the intention to begin with.
There is no benefit in doing that because parents already know how old their kid is. They don't need the government to certify it to them, and then they can configure the kid's device not to display adult content.
Involving government ID is pointless because the parent, along with the large majority of the general population, has an adult ID, and therefore has the ability to configure the kid's device to display adult content or not even in the presence of an ID requirement if that's what they want to do. At which point an ID requirement is nothing but a footgun to "accidentally" compromise everyone's privacy. Unless that was the point.