this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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This is likely to be the case in practice, but technologically, it does not have to be the case.
If the age verifiers (which IMO should be the governments themselves[^1], but could also be a private third-party, as long as it's not the same as the social media company) only ever receive a blinded token representing the user, verify the user's age, and then the user brings that token back to the social media site, unblind it, and present them the signed token, there is no way for the age verifier to track which sites a person visits, and no way for the sites to have any detail about who their users are (other than what they already have).
[^1]: obviously, it actually shouldn't be anyone at all: parents should be put in charge of their own kids, and maybe given the tools with robust parental control software to handle it client-side. Government server-side age verification is just not a good option. But if we assume they're going to do that, we should at least discuss the way it could be done in the least-bad way.
And for anyone actually bothering to read the legislation instead of joining the band wagon, that’s is literally exactly what the EU proposal calls for: Zero Knowledge Proof.
https://youtu.be/ULFTrTznG7Y
Scan your biometric proof (passport, id card or log into government issued service), get a set of ZKP tokens which the app can release on demand. These tokens are not traceable back to your identity.