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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

The proposed solution though is that all adults going into the store have to provide their full name and address and have it recorded by the store to buy alcohol - or any other +18 product they want to buy. These things are not equal.

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And that is where details matter. You can implement age verification in such a way that no data gets transmitted anywhere. Ofc I wouldn't expect Meta to not take a chance of collecting even more user data and blame a law for doing it, but if the law is written well enough, it won't mandate a specific method. If it does, definitely oppose it imo.

Age verification implies that some authority, usually the tech company, checks your age. It's mandatory personal data harvesting. A method that doesn't require data to be transmitted anywhere is just local permissions and filtering. The tech company should broadcast the metadata of the content they're serving, then the decision to filter it should be made on the client-side according to the device owner's preferences. But big tech is constantly trying to sabotage this permission model by removing root from phones, mandating cloud accounts to use your computer, etc.

You can - but currently it’s all just done with random private companies that I would not trust with my email address never mind my passport or adult preferences.

Again - apple’s on device verification is a good idea for this. Apple just sends a ‘yes this is an adult’ message to reddit for example and now I can again participate in chrome up discussions.

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