alt Hacker NewsIt's worth pointing out that full digital identity verification ("doxxing" yourself to an untrustworthy, unauditable, legally unconstrained private company) is NOT the only way to verify adulthood. We have had a system in place which enables adulthood validation without enabling digital surveillance infrastructure, with a degree of false negative risk that society has deemed acceptable for nearly 100 years now. This idea is not my own, but I'm happy to share a reasonable proposal for it.
The Cashier Standard – Age Verification Without Surveillance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809795
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/7fe74381-a683-4f49-9c2b-1...
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How does this prevent a second market for one time codes? I as an adult can just get a code and sell it someone else.
This type of system is a horrible idea for the following reasons:
1) the cards can just be re-sold which creates a black market and defeats the "cashier physically saw the person buying the card" angle
2) nickle and dimes people for simply browsing the internet (verification can dystopia anyone?)
3) related to #2, it creates winners in the private sector since presumably you need central authorities handing out these codes
I abhor the idea of digital ID verification, but if we're going to do it, let's not create a web of new problems while we're at it.
The "cashier standard" you advocate for has already crept toward centralized state tracking in places like Utah. When you go to a restaurant and order a drink, the staff are required to take it to the back and scan it for verification. The scanned data is also compared with a state database of DUI offenders. It's not clear whether the database is stored on site, or if that data goes out on the wire for the check; presumably the latter. Scanned data is also stored for up to 7 days by the restaurant, and it's easy to imagine further creep upping that storage bound.