Comment on I'm struggling to think of any online services for which I'd be willing to verify my identity or age
billwashere@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Age verification wouldn’t be a problem if there was a service I trusted that could verify my age, generate an anonymous one way hash or public/private key pair that could verify my age, and then dispose of all information that would could tie me to that info, I’d be ok with it. The problem is there isn’t a group that I’d trust (well that would be willing to do it) and everyone wants to hoard information and create a central repository that will be broken into. It’s not that there is a possibility it could be, but a certainty that it would be. This isn’t really an unsolvable technical problem, but an unsolvable trust problem.
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Age verification if intent was to make it not tied to real ID would be a system where you could go into any store and buy a card you can scratch off for a code to put in.
But, governments want to track and get rid of anonymous accounts. They don’t actually care about age requirements. They want a 1984 type control of citizens to know what they are thinking or at the very least scare off people from expressing thoughts like politicians should be held accountable for fear of current or future consequences from a government that may decide it is treasonous.
Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
The EU actually was working on a system described above based on some sort of zero knowledge proof (so verification via your gov’t id, but without the verifying party being able to assert anything other than age > 18 or whatever data you want to verify)
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
So being able to get a token without even the government knowing?
Because if it’s the alternative of the government itself issuing the token and it being only the receiving site not knowing, but the government being able to link it back to you I wouldn’t be happy with that either.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
I think that’s the idea of zero-knowledge proofs. Nobody ever knows anything about the other party. Monero uses them (among other things) to be truly anonymous.