The digital world is not like the real one. When you show your ID once all it's details are saved and can be searched across. When showing your ID to the cigarette vendor they will not notice most data and will have forgotten it a while later. So we need to be more careful with the data we give out digitally.

No ID is needed, just proof that you are above a certain age. There are technological solutions to just give out that data, but politicians seem to not want to go that way. This is the real issue, not age checking. The fear that age-checking means tracking...

In person ID requirements all rely on punishing merchants if a minor fools them with a fake ID which aligns the incentives pretty well. It's hard to imagine how that would work online. Do you go to jail/pay thousands of dollars if someone hands their phone to their kid while logged in to Facebook or Google? You would if you sold beer to a kid who was given their parent's wallet.

Without an enforcement mechanism that punishes site owners the whole system fails. And you can't reasonably expect site owners to be responsible for checking ID on every request. So, it's (practically) impossible.

> And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy

Yep, and we* lost that argument and "think of the children" hysteria won.

* I would bet the same folks opposed to ID requirements now were opposed to phone number then

>In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful.

By what possible measure have they been overwhelmingly successful? Pornography and alcohol are still used regularly by a double-digit percentage of youth.