this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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Any examples?
There's lots of cryptographic type approaches where the entity validating you is air-gapped from the entity certifying your age.
But if you don't trust them it's not hard to figure out a scratchcard system where for, say, £1 cash your local newsagent checks your ID and lets you pick a card that you scratch off to get a code that you can then use to obtain a cryptographic token online signed by a recognized CA. Neither the newsagent nor the card issuer have any way of tying you to that code, and if you don't like the idea of using the same token on multiple sites you can always buy more. Of course you'd also have the option of obtaining codes online, but there's something I think people would find reassuring about the existence of a visible physical gap.
In my country if you want to buy booze online, you verify your age by logging into this id check service the banks have set up. The bank will only send if the buyer is 18+ or not to the store. So no identification data is send to the store not even the actual age.
You'd have to rely on your country's banks not relaying all info anyway, pinky promise, but it's an interesting model.
Banks know your age anyways, so it stops the system from sucking more than it already does
Not necessarily the best approach but a widely and officially recognized one:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification
People are using VPNs to circumvent identity verification, so this solves nothing.
Yeah thats why theyre now pushing tmfor verification to allow use of VPNs. Im not techy enough to know how this could actually be enforced, but if they pull it off using a VPN to gain access to a VPN sounds tricky.
What does that have to do with this discussion? If you can bypass this EU system, you can also bypass the less private British one. No reason to promote the less private one unless age verification is not your true goal.
I could ask you the same question.
You want to ask what does the existence of a widely accepted privacy-preserving solution, while the government is pushing a privacy-destroying one, have to do with the original comment of "the people pushing it being suspicious"? Now you are just trolling.
Jesus fuck, I'm so tired of this "everyone who disagrees with me or I don't understand is 'trolling'" nonsense. I can't even be bothered to discuss anything further. Goodbye.