“Won’t somebody think of the kids?!” while they admit to using the data to squeeze more money from ads (translated making your experience better). They don’t deserve the communities they have anymore.
Soon any company you interact with will have enough information to ruin your life because there’s always a way for some employee to get the data even of you really do what you promise and don’t save anything.
As GLaDOS said - it’s been fun, don’t come back.
Surely some mathematician knows some magic cryptography to do age checks with zero trust and no data shared?
EU has some controversy RN over trying to do this.
They want to make an app that does this basically.
It loads/verifies your ID/passport and creates a signature /key valid for some time. Then if some app wants to verify your age it derives a key/signature/whatever with your age bracket attached and the app is happy knowing that you’re e.g. 15-18, that the app used a valid signature and apparently nothing else.
There’s supposed to be a FOSS implementation of it somewhere too.
I do feline it one bit and I don’t remember the exact mechanism it’s supposed to be, but at the very least this appears to try to be actually for the kids. However someone might still be able to bakr in calling home (the app is the trusted party here) so a government might be able to log that person xyz logged into pornhub or something.
Zero-knowledge proofs and anonymous attestation - the problem is you still have to prove your identity and age to some trusted entity using a certificate, similar to a physical ID. But if you can get that, you can then anonymously prove your age. Assuming the verifying site trusts your issuer. Also assuming they trust you didn’t borrow somebody else’s device. Also assuming they don’t ask for more and more proofs until they can identify you anyway.