> "and having offshore porn sites or any other third parties collect IDs from adults and becoming a repository of potential blackmail material comes with its own risks [...] A more technically sound approach would be content controls directly implemented on the devices parents chose to give their children" said the company's (Proton's) spokesperson While I agree with their second point, the first argument sounds a bi…
Their proposed alternative is even worse IMO. Even if you can figure out some privacy-safe way of doing on-device age verification, the end result will be a web that only works if you are browsing from an "approved" client - i.e. a platform controlled by Apple, Google or Microsoft.
The risk becomes "kids loading their parents' ID into their phones" but with decent digital ID that shouldn't be a problem.
Yivi already solves this problem. It's being used as a basis for an implementation of a European digital ID of sorts, though I'm still sceptical of the European side of things.
The app works on any device because the device doesn't do anything special. All it does is POST some signed token if the user clicks "approve".
I suppose this can be a problem in the US where people hate the idea of digital government ID for some reason, but that's a political problem, not a technical one. France already has a digital ID equivalent for use with government services, as do all other EU member states in their own way, so the source of these tokens is practically ready to go.