this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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It's that "whatever way" that is difficult. This proposal merely shifts the problem: now the login to that 3rd party can be shared, and age verification subverted.
A phone can also be shared. If it happens at scale, it will be flagged pretty quickly. It's not a real problem.
The only real problem is the very intention of such laws.
How? In a correct implementation, the 3rd parties only receive proof-of-age, no identity. How will re-use and sharing be detected?
There are 3 parties:
The site (2) sends the request to the user (1), who passes it on to the service (3) where it is signed and returned the same way. The request comes with a nonce and a time stamp, making reuse difficult. An unusual volume of requests from a single user will be detected by the service.
Neither 2 nor 3 should receive information about the identity of the user, making it difficult to count the volume of requests by user?
Strictly speaking, neither needs to know the actual identity. However, the point is that both are supposed to receive information about the user's age. I'm not really sure what your point is.
I must not be explaining myself well.
Yes, that's the point. They should be receiving information about age, and age only. Therefore they lack the information to detect reuse.
If they are able to detect reuse, they receive more (and personal identifying) information. Which shouldn't be the case.
The only known way to include a nonce, without releasing identifying information to the 3rd parties, is using a DRM like chip. This results in the sovereignty and trust issues I referred to earlier.
The site would only know that the user's age is being vouched for by some government-approved service. It would not be able to use this to track the user across different devices/IPs, and so on.
The service would only know that the user is requesting that their age be vouched for. It would not know for what. Of course, they would have to know your age somehow. EG they could be selling access in shops, like alcohol is sold in shops. The shop checks the ID. The service then only knows that you have login credentials bought in some shop. Presumably these credentials would not remain valid for long.
They could use any other scheme, as well. Maybe you do have to upload an ID, but they have to delete it immediately afterward. And because the service has to be in the EU, government-certified with regular inspections, that's safe enough.
In any case, the user would have to have access to some sort of account on the service. Activity related to that account would be tracked.
If that is not good enough, then your worries are not about data protection. My worries are not. I reject this for different reasons.
The reverse is also a necessity: the government approved service should not be allowed to know who and for what a proof of age is requested.
Of course not: both intentional and unintentional leaking of this information already happens, regularly. That information should simply not be captured, at all!
Additionally, what happens to, for example, the people in Hungary(*)? If the middle man government service knows when and who is requesting proof-of-age, it's easy to de-anonymise for example users of gay porn sites.
The 3rd party solution, as you present it, sounds terrible!
(*) Hungary as a contemporary example of a near despot leader, but more will pop up in EU over the coming years.