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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Enforcing laws against porn companies distributing porn to minors seems reasonable. It's already illegal many places, such as the US. It is then their responsibility to gate by age. It has always worked this way for liquor stores or basically anything else age-gated, including some online services like poker. If you dont want to provide age verification you don't have to.

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There is a difference between a liquor store checking your ID, and a liquor store scanning your ID, appending it to a record of your purchase, and uploading it to a service to be processed by third parties (such as insurance companies, perhaps).

(In the US, the latter occurs more often than you may expect.)

Well, and that service then inevitably being hacked and your ID being distributed and/or sold to miscreants online.

I'm in the UK, I'm normally connected through a VPN these days.

It’s possible to build mechanisms for this. Not perfect or foolproof ones. Maybe your phone stores a digital ID for its owner and sets a cryptographically signed “IsAdult” header. If you pull the signing key from the phone you can spoof that, but you can bring a fake ID to the bar too.

The problem is that the people who want age verification don’t really care about the technical details of how it’s implemented and the people who oppose age verification just want unfettered online pornography out of principle, so no one is actually thinking about how to implement age verification in a way that protects privacy.

When I buy liquor (well, I don't drink anymore, so THC seltzers), the liquor company isn't saving my ID to my profile and then following me around everywhere I go for the rest of my life shouting "This is MALFIST, he's 42! He buys alcohol! He also visited X Y and Z last week and had interests in A, B and C. He's annual income is six figures and buys expensive bourbon."

Not yet anyway. But there's nothing much stopping Google to offer a "verification" service to "help combat fake IDs" using a web connected camera at the till.

And Google then selling a service to insurance companies, employers or law enforcement letting them know you occasionally buy alcohol.

The incentives aren't aligned yet. Not enough people browse the internet with ID verification yet. So knowing Malfist bought liquor isn't enough, you have to know which browser is Malfist.

Likewise, incentives aren't there for liquor stores. They make money by allowing fake ids to work.

You can absolutely buy for instance tobacco, cannabis by the pound ("CBD" but actually ~20+% THC[a]), explosives(tannerite), alcohol (wine), and guns (black powder, or perfectly functional cartridge pre-1898) completely legally online without ID check. It's really not a problem, which is why most people probably haven't heard of it being one or even realize all can legally be bought online without ID.

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