Comment on EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google
iii@mander.xyz 2 days agofrom a single user
Neither 2 nor 3 should receive information about the identity of the user, making it difficult to count the volume of requests by user
General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Strictly speaking, neither needs to know the actual identity. However, the point is that both are supposed to receive information about the user’s age. I’m not really sure what your point is.
iii@mander.xyz 2 days ago
General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The site would only know that the user’s age is being vouched for by some government-approved service. It would not be able to use this to track the user across different devices/IPs, and so on.
The service would only know that the user is requesting that their age be vouched for. It would not know for what. Of course, they would have to know your age somehow. EG they could be selling access in shops, like alcohol is sold in shops. The shop checks the ID. The service then only knows that you have login credentials bought in some shop. Presumably these credentials would not remain valid for long.
They could use any other scheme, as well. Maybe you do have to upload an ID, but they have to delete it immediately afterward. And because the service has to be in the EU, government-certified with regular inspections, that’s safe enough.
In any case, the user would have to have access to some sort of account on the service. Activity related to that account would be tracked.
If that is not good enough, then your worries are not about data protection. My worries are not. I reject this for different reasons.
iii@mander.xyz 2 days ago
The reverse is also a necessity: the government approved service should not be allowed to know who and for what a proof of age is requested.
Of course not: both intentional and unintentional leaking of this information already happens. Additionally, what happens to, for example, the people in Hungary(*)? If the middle man government service knows when and who is requesting proof-of-age, it’s easy to de-anonymise for example users of gay porn sites.
The 3rd party solution, as you present it, sounds terrible!
(*) Hungary as a contemporary example of a near despot leader, but more will pop up in EU over the coming years.