Robert
Bruce DavieSeems like a good day to revisit this post about privacy-preserving age verification. (tl;dr -> you can't have it) https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08/19/privacy%E2%80%91preserving-age-verification-falls-apart-on-contact-with-reality/
Here is the report on Australia's age assurance trial. I have only skimmed it but the headline conclusions, starting with "Age assurance can be done in Australia privately, efficiently and effectively" are patent crap, contradicted by the data in the report and the woeful history of breaches of private data collected by large companies. https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/department/media/publications/age-assurance-technology-trial-final-report
Here’s a deeper dive by someone with more tolerance for BS than I have, and it’s consistent with my reading of the report: https://eftm.com/2025/09/social-media-ban-age-assurance-doesnt-work-but-the-australian-government-doesnt-want-you-to-know-that-266177
Chickerino@Drbruced i still believe that age assurance online isnt a good idea at all, parents should be educated on parental control tools and should engage with their kids to make sure they only access content when they are ready, and not enforcing what is basically censorship on everyone else
zl2todSome Large Company put my account through what appeared to be an age verification mill a few days ago, but their process appeared to have been vibe-coded. Only yesterday did they clamber through the mess enough for me to use their service again (and for them to feed everything through their AI).
The AI is not intelligent enough to know that an account established in 2001 likely meets their age requirements.
Piotr Smyrak@Drbruced Yes, you can but that would require empowering parents, giving them tools to protect kids.
Nikolai Hampton 💾@Drbruced we have a digital drivers’ license in my state. They had a PKI based system that wasn’t totally aweful. They had a mechanism for signing a proof of age declaration (with your photo), that a pub or bar could scan, check that you are over 18 and admit you without learning any more of your details. That “prove my age” seems to be missing for the latest update; creepy bouncers are learning teen kids’ particulars and rejoicing all over the city.
@Drbruced the fun bit is that the cryptographic protections are not even used by the department of transport themselves! I just renewed my license and they don’t use the [digitally] signed QR code, they rely instead on a “digital watermark”, which is an animated gif that a graphic designer or JavaScript dev could replicate in minutes.