this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Why can't people just go down to their local shop, show their ID like when you buy alcohol, and buy some kind of age verification token/code which can be used with online services?
Cause the goal has never been to prevent underage access it’s to create a database of troublemakers and brown people
They very literally could not possibly care about protecting children less. They just want as much of your data as possible so they can neutralize you if you ever become a problem to them.
because that would be sensible and privacy-friendly, and our governments are controlled by fascist pieces of shit that want to have full control over us.
my id has an nfc chip built in, I can scan it with my phone to confirm my identity. if only online services could implement an identity check that way.
Outside of banking and taxes, I can't think of a single online service that I want verifying my identity. Ostensibly, these services just want to verify if you're of legal age. The small, binary question of "Are you over 18?" should require much less private data than would be needed to verify my identity.
They can! In fact, in the UK some government services do this already however there's a couple of drawbacks:
They'd need to use some kind of companion app for each device since the web APIs won't give them access to this.
For us at least the NFC chip still contains a digital copy of the photo so it's not really any better since I don't know what data is going to be sent by the app.
Maybe I'm wrong then, but I just kinda assumed that when I log into some government platform by scanning my ID with an official app all it does is it confirms my identity and sends some kinda encrypted token to the api of whatever platform I'm trying to access.
Although if that's not the case then yea, I guess that wouldn't be very anonymous either.
My point wasn't one of convenience, but more one of privacy. What's the difference between someone demanding a photo of your ID (and then storing it) and someone taking the same information from an NFC scan and then storing it?
I don't know about other countries, but the german e-ID for example is more sophisticated than that. It can actually limit access to the information that is necessary for the given application (your terminal or app shows you what specific information is requested before you confirm via PIN). So it can just return "yes/no" to the question "is this person an adult?" Almost no company uses it, likely because they can't steal data that way.