this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Key signing maybe?
You get a cert which is cryptographically signed by your government. They can prove its signed with the governments root cert, showing that its someone over 18, but not who.
That being said the key identifiers will probably still be attached to you in some government db, just not on the porn site.
Though the government could force the pornsite to hand over any logged ids. Some people would say that's private, as they trust the government not to do stuff without a judges warrant.
As a trans woman relying on HIPPA to not be put on a list of those on HRT, lmao yeah fucking right. The christian taliban will connect the dots the first chance they get.
This is generally a pretty decent system in concept, but it has some unique flaws.
A similar system is even being developed by Cloudflare ("Privacy Pass") to make CAPTCHAs more private by allowing you to anonymously redeem "tokens" proving you've solved a CAPTCHA recently, without the CAPTCHA provider having to track any data about you across sites.
They know someone who had solved a captcha recently is redeeming a token, but they don't know who.
This type of system will always have one core problem that really can't be fixed though, which is the sale and transfer of authenticated tokens/keys/whatever they get called in a given implementation.
Someone could simply take their signed cert, and allow anybody else to use it. If you allow the government to view whoever is using their keys, but not the porn sites, then you give the government a database of every porn user with easily timestamped logs. If you don't give the government that ability, even one cert being shared defeats the whole system. If you add a rate limit to try and solve the previous problem, you can end up blocking access if a site, browser, or extension, is just slightly misconfigured in how it handles requesting the cert, or could break someone's ability to use their cert the moment it gets leaked.
And even if someone isn't voluntarily offering up their cert, it will simply get sold. I've investigated sites selling IDs and SSNs for less than a dollar a piece before, and I doubt something even less consequential like an ID just for accessing online adult content would even sell for that much.
I've seen other methods before, such as "anonymous" scans of your face where processing is done locally to prove you're an adult, then the result of the cryptographic challenge is sent back proving you're over 18, but that would fail anyone who looks younger but is still an adult, can be bypassed by the aforementioned sale of personal data to people wanting to verify, and is often easily fooled by videos and photos of people on YouTube, for example.
Who under the age of 18 will have money to buy these, and who would be willing to sell them for the pittance teenagers would be willing to spend?
Especially if these get rotated out regularly via a system wide program.