alt Hacker NewsFirst, I should say that I am against online age identification. But if we are going to get age verification because the larger population wants it, I definitely prefer the EU's privacy-preserving age verification that uses zero knowledge proofs (yes, they have issues too) over private companies doing age verification, requiring uploading scans of your ID, filming your face, etc. For the reasons that you mention (people can easily be tricked into giving information to the wrong people), but also because I simply do not want my data to be in the hands of random private companies that will sell the data, give it to Palantir, etc.
That makes this fight so annoying, we have to fight age identification, while at the same time also promoting privacy-preserving age verification for the case it happens anyway.
I think this is folly. You cannot communicate this level of nuance at scale, especially when faced with opposition that actively lies to achieve their goals.
Quoting an older post...
> In a benevolent dictatorship, sure, go for a zero-knowledge proof verification as your solution. In the reality of democracy, where politicians are corporate puppets who cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses, we need to convince people to see through the lie and reject the proposals outright while reassuring them that they can protect the children themselves via parental controls. You will never be able to sufficiently inform 50.1% of the population of any country of what zero-knowledge proof even means, let alone convince them to support age verification laws but strictly conditional on ZKP requirements. That level of nuance is far too much to ask of millions of people who are not technically-informed, and idealism needs to give way to pragmatism if we wish to avoid the worst-case scenario.