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Apple brings age verification to UK users in iOS 26.4 beta - Users who don’t verify their age may not be able to download or purchase apps.
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Why is there no privacy respecting solution for age verification? Like the government giving you some sort of token that says you’re over 18 and that’s it?
What if I told you that by regulation, the EU age verification system has to be anonymous and that it’s only the AUKUS countries that are moving forward in a way where anonymity is “a nice to have”.
Denmark’s system, which is a front-runner implementation in the EU, is going to be fully ZKP.
And yes it’s basically built with tokens.
You identify with a government system in an app. The services issues you signed tokens that are anonymous. You hand these anonymous tokens over to the sites that demand proof of age.
Anyone have a more in-depth technical description of how that works? I'm interested.
https://digst.dk/media/5gybwsaq/implementing-age-verification-with-danish-digital-identity-wallet-dktb-09.pdf
That sounds great. I don’t follow the topic closely (probably I should), so wasn’t aware of these developments. This should be brought up in all discussions about age verification, so everyone knows there are better options.
Some people will feel that it’s not ideal, as you still have to trust the government, opposed to full anonymity, but that is a bit of a separate problem.
Ultimately someone has to vouch for “yes, this person is 18+”. People can’t self-attest, except through crappy biometric, so at some point a government ID has to be involved.
I’d trust my government over a credit reference agency that literally makes revenue from selling access to your private data.
Because its not about age verification, its about tracking and controlling you and making a privacy respecting solution isn't compatible with that.
So there should be a rebuttal demanding a privacy respecting age verification token, instead of just arguing against age verification, which technically does have a point. This way it’s disabled as excuse to sneak in the other things.
No, we still need to be against it. I said tracking and controlling, not just tracking.
They are already blocking resources that shouldn't be blocked from youth, and even a privacy centric method would still let them do that, and then expand it to anything at a whim in the future.
We don't want the internet built on this infrastructure, it would br a disaster.
Because then you can share the token and everyone can use it
I'm sure a more robust solution is possible though.
Personal ids can also be used by non-owners, not much different than this theoretic age verification token. But yeah, ideally it would have a security layer to sufficiently confirm ownership.
Ah tbh I just realised that with the tokens being unique you could still limit accounts per token to 1, achieving the same effect as using real ID.
There is!, one of the officially recognised and approved ways is credit card verification, however afaik only steam is doing that.
i’ve seen screenshots of ios users being verified due to having their credit cards as payment methods tied to their name, which is a hell of a lot better than an ID
I mean a dedicated, government issued age verification token that doesn’t reveal any data to the third party other than you are allowed access age wise.