identification isn't a side effect, it's the raison d'être.

In Australia, the law quite specifically says sites aren't allowed to require ID as the method of age verification. It can be one option they provide, but it cannot be the only. Even a sort of sentiment analysis is permitted, and from everything I've heard that seems to be the method most have defaulted to. Social media sites don't want to risk losing users by putting up barriers to them making accounts. People talking about politics and taxes are probably adults. People looking at Bluey videos are much more likely to be children. And it's all based on information they already had used in ways a lot of them probably already did.

So at least here, I think the idea that it's anything other than what they say it is is just an unfounded conspiracy theory. It may not be well-implemented, but it is genuinely well-intentioned. Or if not well-intentioned, the real intent is bad, but not in the same way you suggest—it's just about being seen to do something good and win some good PR for the government, without actually having to go to any effort to implement good policy.

On second thought, I can't think of a way to make that work, without compromising privacy

I'd say check out my top-level comment, and the link to the crypto Stack Exchange within it.

...

Parental control software existing is a terrible idea?

There is insufficient incentive for games like Roblox to provide effective controls for parents to manage their childrens accounts.

That should change.

I was raised by loving and trustworthy parents. It didn't save me from curiosity leading me to things I was far, far too young to see. No amount of love and care can fix that.

You do your kids no favors by sheltering them from reality.

No. You let them learn to swim in he shallows to prepare them. Blind trust is like throwing them into the deep end and seeing if they figure it out before drowning.

Having a supportive, loving and trustworthy environmnet didn't stop me from wanting to kill myself.

I figured out how to swim, eventually. But I should not have had to.

Are you seriusly suggesting that nothing bad will happen to children as long as their parents just care enough?

The short answer is yes, it can.

I actually think the best method is to put the onus on parents to parent in the way they think best, while giving them effective tools with which to do it. Parental controls should be baked into the OS, and sites should be required to hook into these parental controls via an API. The system could even have the capability, optionally, to block based on a crowd-sourced list, so it can still be effective against non-compliant sites. There would be no privacy problems, because no private information is ever shared. There isn't even a middleman who has to see any identification at any point.

However, if the goal is to have specific age verification that actually enforces age, it's still possible. I know of two main ways.

Here's the first: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/96283

It has the downside of requiring a physical device like a passport or some specific trusted long-running locally-kept identity store held by the user. But it's otherwise very good.

Another option does not require anything extra be kept by the user, but does slightly compromise privacy. The Government will not be able to track each time the user tries to access age-gated content, or even know what sources of age-gated content are being accessed, but they will know how many different sites the user has requested access to. And sites requiring age verification will not get access to any information they didn't already have other than the simple answer to the question "is this user old enough?" It works like this:

1. The user creates or logs in to an account on the age-gated site.
2. The site creates a token T that can uniquely identify that user.
3. That token is then blinded B(T). Nobody who receives B(T) can learn anything about the user.
4. The user takes the token to the government age verification service (AVS).
5. The user presents the AVS with B(T) and whatever evidence is needed to verify age.
6. The AVS checks if the person should be verified. If not, we can end the flow here. If so, move on.
7. The AVS signs the blinded token using a trusted AVS certificate, S(B(T)) and returns it to the user.
8. The user returns the token to the site.
9. The site unblinds the token and obtains S(T). This allows them to see that it is the same token T representing the user, and to know that it was signed by the AVS, indicating that the user is of age.
10. The site marks in their database that the user has been age verified. On future visits to that site, the user can just log in as normal, no need to re-verify.

All of the moving around of the token can be automated by the browser/app, if it's designed to be able to do that. Unfortunately a typical OAuth-style redirect system probably would not work (someone with more knowledge please correct me), because it would expose to the AVS what site the token is being generated for via redirect URLs. So the behaviour would need to be created bespoke. Or a user could have a file downloaded and be asked to share it manually.

The AVS could also be private third parties rather than governments, if necessary. Since it probably relies on government ID, I think it's better for the government to do it, but technologically there's no problem with private companies doing it. They would still not gain any information about which sites you access. Only that a user with this ID card tried to access an age-gated site.

There's also a potential exposure of information due to timing. If site X has a user begin the age verification flow at 8:01, and the AVS receives a request at 8:02, and the site receives a return response with a signed token at 8:05, then the government can, with a subpoena (or the consent of site X) work out that the user who started it at 8:01 and return at 8:05 is probably the same person who started verifying themselves at 8:02. Or at least narrow it down considerably. Making the redirect process manual would give the user the option to delay that, if they wanted even more privacy.

The site would probably want to store the unblinded, signed token, as long-term proof that they have indeed verified the user's age with the AVS. A subsequent subpoena would not give the Government any information they could not have obtained from a subpoena in an un-age-verified system, assuming the token does not include a timestamp.

Yes, that's what the California and Colorado (not sure about the others) implementations accomplish. Bare minimim exposure of data to consumers who want to verify you, without any need to expose additional data to trusted third parties. The burden of trust is placed on the device owner.

That'd only work if legal sex acts were the worst thing a kid could find online. As someone who went spelunking online as a kid. I assure you theyre not.

And the Roblox issue is hardly that of exposure to normal human biology.

That said this stuff should be up to parents, and instead of verification requirements, we should have parental control requirements (as in, the tools for it should exist).

On a lot of devices, I couldn't make them safe to hand to a kid without coding the tools myself.

However, it's a one way change.

How would you implement this? It would require devices so locked down you could never replace or even update the OS on them.

The idea seems sound, but to implement this, hardware and software would have to go down a path they really, really shouldn't.

This idea is essentially incompatible with FOSS.

This is the precise question that Soatok discussed here: https://soatok.blog/2025/07/31/age-verification-doesnt-need-to-be-a-privacy-footgun/

Google recently published an open source library that proves a user’s age in a way that preserves privacy. This library is undergoing two independent security reviews, but should be production-ready in the near future.

If we’re going to force websites to implement some kind of age verification for adult content, we should demand the governments that pass these laws provide the zero-knowledge proof technologies to satisfy the law.

Full disclosure, I'm not a full time dev, but am in IT and do some minor software development work.

Here's my proposal:

Reverse the verification. Don't verify adults. Have extra actions to allow children to access the internet, and make it the legal responsibility of those adults that purchase the devices verify that a device given to a child can only access the child-friendly internet. We already have laws constructed like this and they work pretty well. Cigarettes and alcohol are largely out of the hands of young children. No its not perfect, but no system will be.

The default behavior of any device is full adult access. However, devices will have a service menu that you can put the device in child-friendly mode. However, it's a one way change. Once its in child-mode, there's no going back.

Then, sell devices that are able to access the internet only to 18 year olds and older. An adult can put the device in child-friendly mode and give it to a child. An adult can also let the child use their adult mode device when it is under the supervisor of the adult. Any child found unsupervised with an adult mode device will be treated the same way as if they were found with a fifth of whiskey or a carton of cigarettes. Any adult found giving adult-mode devices to children will be charged the same way as if they were giving alcohol and tobacco to children. Perhaps a repeat offender adult will have their ability to buy electronics capable if internet access made illegal for a time as punishment.

hardcore christians disagree

I think this is the best possible solution, great write up and explanation. A minor improvement would be to make the card some kind of OATH device to generate TOTP tokens rather than a single ID number, so that you can reuse the same identifying token in multiple places with no way to connect the token.

Edit: On second thought, I can't think of a way to make that work, without compromising privacy, and I can think of a few possible ways that the original idea could potentially go wrong, too. Still, I think this is the closest possible solution.

I agree with others here when they say that age-verification laws aren't about children at all, and identification isn't a side effect, it's the raison d'être.

But if I were to earnestly try to solve the problem, I might look to the physical (non-online) world. In every part of the world I've been to, buying alcohol requires one thing; to be of age. So if you very clearly look of age, you are allowed to buy it. If you look younger, you may be asked to provide ID proving you are old enough. While some vendors may take additional precautions such as scanning your ID, it is not a requirement and most do not. They simply look at your ID to verify, then allow the purchase.

One could buy a physical verification token, like one might buy a gift card currently, and the purchase requires the same verification as buying alcohol. Imagine you buy a plastic gift-card-like item branded Roblox and they verify you are of age, when you sign up for Roblox you enter in the details of the gift-card-like item. You are verified to be of age, and no-one has any other details.

Yes, kind of. In a similar way that we can currently authenticate with OpenID. Basically something like a passkey could be issued by your government that would let you prove your (pseudonymous) identity (and thus age range) through their API to a website.

This wouldn’t allow for anonymous browsing, since the website would have to identify you, but it could allow for pseudonymous browsing, since the website’s identification of you could be just an ID number that is specific to them. They already track you with cookies, so it wouldn’t be any worse than we have now, except that it’s more unnecessary bureaucracy.

https://gist.github.com/JWally/bf4681f79c0725eb378ec3c246cf0664

Very easy: create a law that if minors are caught where they shouldn't be the parents and the minors are going to be held responsible, because raising kids is parent's responsibility.

However, absolutely ZERO percent of the age verification laws are being put in place to protect kids. They are pushing that with sole reason to invade your privacy and monitor your activity, so any mean that doesn't accomplish it missed the point.

Honestly I can't think of any way you could verify age accurately without something identifying being provided.

You could try age based trivia, but anyone could Google an answer.

If you want to know how Google specifically does things, search for "TeraGoogle"; it's not a secret name although I don't think it has a whitepaper. The core insight is that there are tiers of search results. When you search for something popular that many other people are searching for, your search is handled by a pop-culture tier which is optimized for responding to those popular topics. The first and second pages of Google results are served by different tiers; on Youtube, the first few results are served from a personalized tier which (I expect has) cached your login and knows what you like, and the rest of the results are from a generalist tier. This all works because searches, video views, etc. are Pareto-allocated; most of the searches are for a tiny amount of cacheable content.

There's also a UX component. Suppose that you dial Alice's server and Alice responds with a Web app that also fetches resources from Bob's server. This can only be faster for you in the case where Bob is so close to you (and so responsive) that you can dial Bob and get a reply faster than Alice finishes sending her app. But Alice and Bob are usually colocated in a datacenter, so Alice will always be closer to Bob than you. This suggests that if Alice wants to incorporate content from Bob then Alice might as well dial Bob herself and not tell you about Bob at all. This is where microservices shine. When you send a search to Google, Youtube, Amazon, or other big front pages, you're receiving a composite result which has queries from many different services mixed in. For the specific case of Google, when you connect to google.com, you're connecting to a machine running GWS, and GWS connects to multiple search backends on your behalf.

Finally, how typical of a person are you? You might not realize how often your queries are handled by pop-culture tiers. I personally have frequent experiences where my search turns up zero documents on DDG or Google, where there are no matching videos on Youtube, etc. and those searches take multiple seconds to come up empty. If you're a weird person who constantly finds googlewhacks then you're not going to perceive these services as optimized for you, because they cannot optimize for the weird.

At massive scale, indexing is done by distributing the data rather than relying on a single machine. The index is split into shards, each holding a subset of the data, commonly partitioned by hashing IDs or dividing term ranges. Every shard is replicated to multiple machines so reads can be load-balanced and failures do not take the system down.

Search queries are handled by a coordinator that sends the query to the relevant shards in parallel, collects their partial results, merges and ranks them, and returns the final result. Because all shards work at the same time, query latency depends on the slowest shard, not on total index size.

This setup is built on search engines based on inverted indexes, usually derived from Lucene, either via systems like Elasticsearch or via custom implementations. Metadata and related data are stored in distributed databases or key-value stores, while index updates are streamed asynchronously so writes do not block reads. Caching at multiple layers keeps frequently accessed data in memory, and the whole system runs on large clusters that automatically handle placement, scaling, and failures.

idk where you are, but where I live anybody can go to the university lectures for free, as long as they are not full. Or the library and browse the relevant section. Personally I learned everything IT related from uni courses and searching for my topics of interest in the uni lib. So thats my shitty recomendation, I'm sure there are online resources and courses on it though.

Often it's distributed databases like Google spanner, amazon aurora, cockroach db, etc. Google has a public whitepaper on spanner you can read.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf

Some super high level references around eventual consistency, database sharding, edge computing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventual_consistency?wprov=sfti1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shard_(database_architecture)?wprov=sfti1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_computing?wprov=sfti1

Linux supports Unicode usernames. However, bidirectional rendering is application-specific. I have not tried this myself, so I'm not sure what happens. Also, I'm not sure whether the bidirectional markers are canonicalized away, so the input method likely matters too.

yes

Yes, if you support Unicode fully you’ll support Arabic automatically. There are RTL code points that will switch text direction automatically. Browsers support this at the html and css level. There’s a bunch of different ways.