Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't trust governments, today or in the future, to keep such a system private and I don't see a foolproof way of building some kind of audit mechanism into it to make sure the data is always truely private. I've also always been curious how a truely anonymous identity verification could possibly work. At best for age verification, I could be given some kind of token that would still have to verify my age and be…
> I've also always been curious how a truely anonymous identity verification could possibly work. You go to a store. You show the clerk your id and give him a quarter. The clerk pulls a scratch-off ticket from the front of a ticket tape. The ticket contains a token identifier. It's anonymous. The clerk or his POS system knows your name and age, but doesn't know your number. The vendor providing the tape doesn't know…
Eventually this becomes common knowledge and "something must be done". Facebook (the corpo sponsoring these age verification laws to absolve their own liability) and their ilk decide that the token system no longer meaningfully proves age. They switch to demanding full government ID in cleartext, as there is still no comprehensive privacy law that would prevent such a thing.
Every single approach that puts the onus on the company to verify age falls apart this way, possibly including a de facto mandate for remote attestation (ie say good bye to libre operating systems and browsers that aren't MSIE, Safari, or Chrome). The only workable systems are ones in which the onus remains on parents giving their kids networked computing devices to enable parental controls and/or otherwise monitor their kids' usage, with those parental controls based on information flowing strictly from the website to the user agent (eg a content tag that asserts "this page is suitable for kids").
(and I say this as a parent who is staring down having to deal with this problem in a short year or two)