There were proposals to do this, using encrypted containers of data that would let users authorize apps to use just the data they needed, but the idea got tied to Web3, which got some intense public blowback between the Crypto and NFT hype cycles.

https://www.w3.org/2023/Talks/0727-wearedevelopers-tbl/solid...

Now we’re onto AI, so we have suboptimal age verification, with implementations in law written by politicians

This is an impossible task. If a certain business wants to make human id required, let them. It should not be enforced by government.

You have full control over your router and kid's devices so start there. Not anyone else's responsibility.

Confirmation someone is human is harder. Over some age could be accomplished with time should most of the devices and browsers children have access to were to check for RTA/adult headers and activate parental controls. It would not be solved over night thus not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good.

At the moment what we have is no good in my opinion. What we have at the moment will put the identification information of both children and adults at risk. Children can not even consent to sharing this data thus the only people that could protect them are their parents.

I suspect something like this is on the way, in the long term. Every site has some Cloudflare captcha or the like to guard against the AI scraper bots. Eventually, we may need some kind of token which is only issued to real humans.

https://zkpassport.id/