Outside of better parental controls and restricting accounts based on self declared age, there isn't a way to perform age verification anonymously or privately.

> isn't a way to perform age verification anonymously or privately

Totally, no. Better than having users upload IDs with no use restrictions on the social-media companies? Yes. The harms justify, in my opinion and the opinion of lots of Americans (and importantly, those able and willing to call their electeds), a little bit of privacy encroachment for using a totally-voluntary product.

Age verification isn't free. If you sell age verification services then you can get obscenely rich off the government forcing people to use services like yours.

Sam Altman owns an identity verification company for example.

In terms of censorship, it is impossible to confirm that every hash in the database is what the database owner claims it to be.

Its also completely unacceptable for encrypted/private messages, according to some of the top experts on the subject, "Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning": https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450

There are attempts make it almost mandatory through mandatory age verification. Which would mean that you'd have to submit to privacy violations or be cut off from a sizeable portion of the internet.

That just puts the power to allow/ban rooting and operating systems in the hands of a different set of companies. Its still unacceptable.

They are also trying to shoehorn in age verification with it.

Why not explicitly forbid the German version of the eDIAS from being used for things like age verification then? That'd solve a ton of privacy issues with the implementation.

The German version of the eDIAS app should be completely banned from being used for age verification, if they wish to continue the project. Otherwise it effectively bans you from a sizeable portion of the internet, unless you accept unacceptable privacy violations.

In the UK, Apple recently restricted web browsers, private messaging, and other stuff on IOS devices unless you let them violate your privacy with age verification. They weren't required to do this by law in the UK, yet they did it anyways.

Basically the EU had voluntary scanning, but that wasn't enough for "child safety" idiots who wanted to spy on everyone, all the time. They got greedy and tried to go full authoritarian by targeting encrypted messaging. The resulting backlash has resulted in these wannabe authoritarians having nothing, which is pretty funny.