RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pqu2e7tcsysxrlkarhfm3z5u/post/3mgaal5ij6i2n

Gatekeeping and Age Attestation
Privacy Wonks will hate it, but Mark Zuckerberg is correct that the proper place for prescriptive Age Verification is in the App Store of a mobile device; yes, that means Google and Apple will “find out more about you” but that can be minimised if they choose to implement a privacy-preserving protocol a-la what happened over COVID tracking.

The reason people are angry about this is that they don’t understand that the App-Store-and-Google/Apple-Account approach to AV is a degenerate form of what we should have been doing all along: age attestation, not age verification.

The user should be signed up with their own preferred provider of private age-attestation services which they can enmesh into whatever transactions they require an age test for; this puts the user in control of provider choice and information protection, and the reliant parties — vendors, porn sites, forums, whatever — should be obliged to accept attestation tokens.

But we don’t do that, probably because (a) it makes less money for the industry and (b) because Governments get more ID tracking metadata with the age verification approach.