See, I think, you're not supposed to continue using those services as before. They want them all gone, and so-called age verification is a means to chase away users that are less dedicated.

What I think must result is, a monotonic cultural erosion and deprecation of such platforms and regions implementing those restrictions, and continuous replacement with engineered and packaged foreign imports from venues and regions from psychological "upstream" where there aren't such restrictions. But I guess that's what they explicitly desire.

> I haven’t been asked to verify my age for a DVD purchase (online or offline) in a very long time.

Offline there is a reason for that, online are enough countries where it breaks the law if you sell without verification at least for NC-17 titles

People don't like these checks. Ok. But. Parents worry about their kids being exposed to porn and social media. They want someone to do something about it. That political force is real, and someone is going to take advantage of it. What tools can they ask for if not these checks everyone agrees they hate? That's what I hope for in these types of comment threads.

The way that it would make sense for age verification is if there was some federal system that verifies your identity and then it would use a public key crypto system to allow a third party to check whether or not this person is over the age or not.... common systems I see being used right now that could be integrated for this purpose would be login.gov or id.me... they could allow a token-based authentication system for verification of age without having to divulge any other information about the person. these systems are already being used by the IRS, VA, SSA and other Federal systems.

Age verification is quite bogus. Parents can stand over their children's shoulder and force them to do or not do one thing or the other (and maybe not even them); but some website dictating which content young people can watch or not watch - not acceptable. And if you want to make a "protect the delicate mind of children" argument - let's first see some censoring of all of the ads, sponsored content, and state and corporate propaganda as unfit for viewing by underaged people; which is, of course, never going to happen.

I simply do refuse such systems, so far using decentralized or distributed socials like Nostr, Lemmy (self-hosted) and VPNs as glorified proxies and that's just because there aren't enough co-Citizens to impose a significant change with a national general strike enduring as much as needed to makes the government RUN, literally, to avoid lifetime jail...

These are the times, even renewing a nmfta scac code in the US may require government ID, social security number, and biometric profile check. Save yourself $5 and use a smart-phone, as a webcam will not work... There are no refunds after 3 failures to scan ID.

In general, a social security number is extremely sensitive, and should never be shared outside your home country tax system.

Verification is indeed a perverse invasion of privacy, and a liability to those with financial holdings. I guess the credit-lock service is now a must to deal with the circus that is modern logistics. =3

I initially thought, well, we can implement it with zero knowledge claims, just a yes/no from a government app: am I allowed to use this app? I.e. is my age above let’s say 16 or 18?

But then I remembered the game 20 questions, and how few yes/no questions you need to guess pretty much any concept.

I am no longer willing to share anything, not even a yes/no question.

Age and identity verification can and should be done at the country level.

France has an ID service to pay taxes, and they have a network of possible ID verification systems. Like, you can ID through the tax system, or through the healthcare system. It works fine.

Implementing an API that uses the same to provide age verification is not rocket science.

If you need age verification for a website, say "smedia.fr", then you go there, then it makes you get an age verification token to "franceid.gov.fr", that guy gives you back a token, you send the token to smedia.fr which checks the token with franceid.gov.fr

I don't understand how this is even an issue.

the fight for privacy was lost in the 90s, it's time to move on