> government passes law that requires companies to age verify users
> said government provides no way to actually verify a human's age
> hilarity ensues > government passes law that requires companies to age verify users
> said government provides no way to actually verify a human's age
> hilarity ensuesIn Westminster systems you can kick out the government all you want and often do. The point of the constitutional monarchy is to separate the people you "shouldn't criticize" from the people who actually have any power.
The reason they're doing this is that British people hate themselves, hate their children, and the purpose of the country is to take everyone's money and give it to pensioners.
> A man who was arrested by police in England for asking who elected King Charles III says he’s worried that his arrest could have a “chilling effect” on freedom of expression in the country.
Keir Starmer is "the government" if you want someone. And he's at 27% popularity.
The king's literal job is to not be the government. He gets to be the emotional symbol of the country and be treated with respect in exchange for promising to never actually do anything.
Most of them pretend the monarch is allowed to do things (as long as the government tells them what to do first), but in Japan and Sweden they don't even have that power. The emperor of Japan is basically just a prisoner we (the US, who wrote their constitution) keep in a palace for fun. They seem to like this and have taken to being the most boring family possible; the current emperor's official hobby is "water" and he stopped playing the violin because he thought it was too interesting.
As for why the UK still has lese majeste, beats me.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/23/private-eye-ca...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/17/armed-police-t...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/05/palestine-ac...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_vL-LpB0L5QrVYz0dgvpWEqN...
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/07/uk-palestine...
https://www.aljazeera.com/video/inside-story/2025/7/21/what-...
Note that, while the proscribed group spray painted war planes, they also disbanded (and regrouped under different names?) immediately after their appeal against proscription failed.
The only people who are getting arrested now, are those who are expressing support for the group (so: speech only, no action besides showing up)
In the old days the put the porno mags on the top shelf so kids couldn't read them. That was hackable too but it didn't matter much.
If I've understood it correctly, Pornhub can't see anything except that you've turned 18 (no names, no date of births, nothing) and your local government can't see that you've signed up for Pornhub using the app.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-europ...
Having to use passports or poor solutions like face scanning isn't good enough. I guess the reason they don't do this is because they fear the cost, anything governments price up these days seems to be in the billion range. So the politicians who don't understand how cheap it is to build software assume it's way out of their price range.
It is literally illegal to slap a few lines of glue code and say “there’s your age verification, look how cheap it is.” The public would be happy about saving money right up until there’s a massive privacy breach and all the ways you cut corners are exposed.
I don’t know if leaving the standards unspecified is the right thing to do (it’s probably not), but don’t pretend like a government verified solution could ever be cheap when dealing with citizens’ identities.
Then a small team of highly skilled engineers from Google/Facebook etc were brought in to fix it. They stabilized and relaunched the system in weeks at a fraction of the original cost. It showed that the problem wasn't the complexity or the standards, it was how the project was managed and who was building it.
The major advantage of bringing in the engineers (only one ex-googler, most were oracle and redhat, again IIRC) was that they were all already bigwigs and knew how to take ownership of large systems, and were given the authority to do so.
The idea that a small group of people can't produce something that can scale to millions of people is just false.
It also wouldn't just be cheaper; it would be better. The "government" way of doing things would be far more likely to be broken glue code with privacy issues because all those committee meetings and bottom of the barrel contractor selection don't produce better end results
No. Regards, Palantir, Microsoft, HP (and other government providers)
Large technological companies are unable to pull this off either, it’s unrealistic to expect it from a government.
* You create your account as part of your license renewal and have a normal-ass login. As part of that your account is manually marked as being 18+ (or just your age) by the person behind the counter.
* The government publishes a few public certs which will be used to verify.
* Then you go to your account page and click the button to generate a certificate signed by one of the government's private keys. The cert is valid for say 7 days.
* You upload the cert to the website you want to access and the website validates it.
Done. You make it illegal to provide your tokens to minors like it's illegal to provide booze to minors. Good enough for government work. It's literally just an EV cert.
The problem gets a lot easier when you have a country wide IRL ID system already in place and can write laws.
every time a country wide ID comes up, people freak the fuck out about state's rights and it being a power grab. people are already freaking out about RealID. it will take a very authoritarian system to force this through, yet it's the supporters of that leader that are the most vocally against it.
Meanwhile, the rest of us should have new fears of a National ID feature. Republicans in administrator-roles recently started corrupting federal databases, fraudulently marking living people as dead [0] in order to kill their accounts, while firing the people who pointed out it was flagrantly illegal.
It doesn't require any imagination for the same bad administrators to illegally disable National ID logins because you posted something that hurt the cult-leader's feelings. The feature cannot be made safe if the framework is still open to crooks.
[0] https://www.cbpp.org/blog/trump-and-doge-claim-power-to-fals...
Briefly, the government can give you a digital copy of your driver's license or passport or whatever that can be bound to a hardware security key you have. Most modern smartphones have a suitable security key built.
To verify your age for a site a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) can be constructed for the site to prove that you have that document, it says your age is above the threshold needed for the site, and that you have the hardware key it is bound to, and you were able to unlock that hardware key. Nothing else is revealed to the site.
Note that once the government issues that digital ID bound to your security key they are out of the picture. They have no idea what you use that ID for or when you use it.
Google has released an open source library to help with this kind of system, discussed here [1].
Eh, at least until they require all sites to ensure all posts and pictures are signed by a valid digital ID. You know, to prevent terrorism.
Breaking any security key weakens the whole system
Your idea also amounts to preventing ban evasion by linking a government ID to each account, which is on of the criticisms of linking accounts to government ID. And preventing multiple accounts even when not used to ban-evade..
And are you going to give the government N^2 queries every day?
The US refuses to do this, so we get a mess. Every state has different drivers license, Social Security numbers aren’t secure at this point, most people don’t have passports.
But if there was a true national ID, the government could provide APIs to verify those. Then these kind of things would be easy for the apps/sites.
All of that obviously ignores the problems in privacy from doing any of this in the first place, etc. i’m starting to think I’m on the side of our national ID given how much of a mess everything is with our current patchwork. But I certainly wouldn’t want to be giving it over to random sites.
We have sort of accidentally set up a system in which verifying someone’s age is a really really hard problem. If a credit card number or trying to use a photograph are the best tools we have it’s clear this doesn’t work.
Drivers licenses are the de facto one today. You can also get an id card for those who can’t drive.
But it’s fully incumbent on you to do it. You have to arrange transportation to get it, have the free time, necessary documents, live close enough, etc.
That already causes problems for people, and is getting worse as voter ID laws get passed.
“Everyone gets an ID once you’ve figured out these riddles three and gone on a quest” is a stupid system.
It mostly works.
I like the idea of a way of verifying who you are (in that you’re a real person) and age (so you could prove ability to do 18/21+ things).
I see no reason why random companies/etc would need to know gender identity, name, etc.
None of that is relevant to buying alcohol. If they need something, e.g. name on a mortgage, then maybe it’s optionally provided, under my control. I don’t know.
I’m not seriously suggesting we do this. They were clear downsides before the last 10 years made all of them ridiculously clear.
It’s more I hate the current mess and wish something nicer existed. I think it’s fixable in the abstract. But even if we had a good idea for a better system I don’t know how we’d get there. Between sovereign citizen nuts one side who don’t think there should ever be any way to prove they ever existed, to people like you with very clear and good reasons for fearing changes it just seems impossible.
Unfortunately, I agree with you that while fixable in the abstract, we're not getting anywhere in the modern USA. Can you imagine what would happen if a politician suggested removing gender from IDs?
You’re right too. Even suggesting that would be political suicide.
There’s also a system called mDL that allows you to obtain a digitally signed mobile driver’s license that can be used in your smartphone. This is only supported by a few states for now but it’s not hard to imagine this expanding to many more states in the near future, especially now that both Apple and Google are starting to support it. TL;DR we may not have a national ID, but it sure seems like pretty soon we’ll have an effective “national ID” that does most of the same stuff.
Not saying it’s good or bad. Just that it’s intentional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID
Need to buy "toys", vape products, alcohol... anything adult online?
There's a 3rd party web app (you rightfully don't trust) as an age check in the shopping cart / user account of any of these adult shops, and this has multiple ways of verifying your age - and one of them is the bank's api, you pick it, your bank's identity sharing page loads, you log in, it shows exactly what information will be shared in a bullet point list, you tap OK, immediately a request like "this app wants to know your age, please verify" pops up in your smart banking app on your phone, you tap ok, fingerprint scan, DONE.
Problem solved. The 3rd party app knows just what it needs to. All of this takes maybe a minute and your personal info is perfectly safe (unless you don't trust your bank at which point you have bigger problems to worry about...)
There is no centralized ID number, the closest is your social security number but this is basically only outbound for PAYE tax and haphazardly correlated to your pension payments in late life.
Everything operates on a “trust system” where you often present paper (!) with whatever address you claim to be living at as proof you are real (e.g. opening bank accounts).
Passport loss is rectified by seeking out “professionals” with government-approved occupations that are not related to you that can vouch you are actually the person you are trying to replace a passport for.
The entire thing is a mess and living in digital-identity-native Europe is a dream come true that you should be extremely thankful for.
Until you find out that due to a cock up years ago the National Insurance numbers are not guaranteed to be unique, and you realize that somehow the best proof of identity British people have is a humble driving licence because DVLA is at least somewhat competent.
It's not that it was hard to fake before if you wanted to, but when you can just get a real PDF as a starting point, and edit it slightly it's just theatre.
Two of the well-used solutions to identity in the U.S. are login.gov (government-managed) and id.me (private, but used by government). Basically to get setup, at some point you have to have physical presence to get an actual government-approved physical ID, which can still be a barrier to some, but it doesn’t require a bank account.
Just don’t implement your own like Discourse and Tea.app.
Another victim of auto-correct!
FWIW discord did not implement their own (sensibly), but since the british government does not provide this service it basically mandates possibly dodgy middlemen.
My understanding is that discord uses (contracted?) https://www.k-id.com/
This right here. Just look at what happened with visa/mastercard this week, private institutions can and will cave to special interest groups advocating to block access to legal content.
Everyone that have worked on passwordless authentication is ultimately responsible for this death of internet anonymity.
For example, our id's have a qr on it that contains some basic info. Why not provide a platform for age checks with that qr? Anyway, fuck them. Education goes a lot further than trying to force identity verification on private companies when there is no real life threat in play.
Here’s Google’s doc:
https://developers.google.com/wallet/identity/verify/accepti...
Looks like it will support zero knowledge proofs?
I, for example, couldn’t add my driver’s license even if I wanted to.
And sometimes kids will put fake ID's on their phones, or borrow a phone, but that's not your problem.