this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
190 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
71995 readers
3182 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How do you verify someone is 18 without your information?
By verifying with a central age verification system.
What has been thrown around, and what should hopefully be the solution, is that a government agency (as a last resort) or a independent trusted authority makes a system where you create an account and verify your age with your documents with them. Then they have public APIs for sites to hit - you give the site a unique key (preferably you would generate individual keys that are tied to your account for every site) and all that site does is hit that API going “Is the person that this key belongs to 18+?”, and the response is yes or no.
Simple, secure, private. The site you’re accessing doesn’t know who you are and doesn’t get your details. The age verification site also doesn’t necessarily know the site you were using, and this should not be logged either.
Lmao. Yeah, the government is going to implement this? Assuming it is actually secure, when do you expect this to release? A decade from now?
Would be incredibly easy to make secure, as it wouldn’t even need to store the verification documents or anything personally identifiable once your account is set up.
I think if the government is actually serious about doing this they will need to do it, or outsource it to someone who will. I don’t actually think these laws will take effect in December.
This could even be done incredibly easily via myGov for example. It has everyone’s information including DOB. I could build an age verification API for that in a night with time for a good snooze.
Do you agree that it is possible without all of the porn sites getting your information now at least?
Theoretically possible? Sure. Though I don’t trust the US government with this information either.
Then there a completely different problem to be concerned with: https://chinamediaproject.org/2025/06/04/chinas-slow-march-toward-cyber-ids/
The government already has access to what sites you visit btw. They already know if you’re a big booty fan or a gagging kinda guy. They’ve got their fingers in every ISP
I think that a few independent secure age verification services will pop up soon enough. Wouldn’t surprise me if the parent company of pornhub or one of those sites makes it themselves. There’s huge money to be made in it.
Hell I might start asking around with my lawyer friends to see what would be required. Could knock it out in a weekend. The hardest part would be finding the consequences/legal issues of verifying based on fake documents.
And yes countries like the US, UK, and Australia are all fast approaching a digital id that will be used to access the internet. Australia will be the first. We’re basically the testing ground for authoritarian tracking and control laws, and our population are too dumb as a whole to understand what is going on. We’re already getting a Digital ID system soon, and our banks are going cashless. Currently whenever you try to take cash out of more than a few hundred bucks you get a free game of 20 questions and they will refuse to give you your own money if they don’t like your answers.
Less button clicks to just use a free online vpn