In general, we accept that the Government already knows who you are, how old you are, and where you live. That’s already a given. The purpose of a zero-knowledge age verification scheme is to allow a third party (not the Government) to be confident that a person is an adult, without being given any additional information or being able to deduce any additional information from what they’re given. So essentially, they get only 1 bit of information: whether the user is an adult (true/false). In practice, a perfect system is not possible, since the fact that you receive a response also means you get the answer to related questions, like whether the user possesses a Government-issued ID (obviously “true” if they can successfully complete the verification).

So, here’s how such a scheme might work. There are many possible implementations.

In the United States, we have (optional) digital ID cards. These are added to one’s digital wallet in a similar manner to payment cards and can be used for things like buying alcohol, getting through airport security, and driving. This digital infrastructure can be re-used.

1. An organisation which wants to perform digital identity verification generates a cryptographic key pair and registers the public key with a Government server ahead of time. The public key is published to a Government-run public keyserver.
2. A website who wants to verify a user’s age sends a verification request to a Government server, digitally signed with their private key. The server responds with a request ID, which is a random, but unique, string of characters.
3. The website provides this string to the user. The user copies the string.
4. The user opens their digital wallet, selects their ID card, and then opens the age verification feature. The user pastes the request ID into their digital wallet, which fetches information about the request from the Government server. Because the request which the request ID is associated with was signed using the organisation’s private key, the Government can tell the user who initiated the request.
5. The user is asked to confirm/deny the age verification request. If the user confirms the request, then a biometric will be required to access their private key (these are stored in the device’s keystore), sign the approval response, and then sent that response to the Government server. The Government server checks that the signature is valid and tied to the key associated with that ID before marking the verification request as completed.
6. After confirming, the user returns to the website and clicks a button which says “I’ve completed the verification.” The website then queries the request ID with the Government server (again, signing the request with their private key). The Government server responds with “completed” if the user has accepted the request, or “not completed” if the user has either not yet accepted the request or denied it.

It’s not a guarantee, but generally, digital ID systems live on the phone of one person only and require a screen lock to use. You’re right though, that there is nothing preventing someone else from borrowing another’s identity.

It is possible to construct a zero-knowledge proof using cryptography and adapting existing digital ID infrastructure. A user can prove that they have knowledge of a private key tied to an adult’s identification card without having to reveal the key, or the associated public key.

But that being said, whether something is possible and whether it is a good idea are two different questions.

It’s possible to construct an age-verification system that allows a user to verify they are over the age of 18 without divulging any other information whatsoever.

But that would defeat the point of “age” verification for these goons.

They should make a “Firefox Core” which contains only the browser with basic features, and then make another version which contains all the “fun” stuff.

The collection of texts today known as the Bible were not written at once. There’s actually a lot of interesting history about how it came to be, but the short of it is that there were a multitude of maybe-canon Christian texts floating around during the early period of Christianity. These texts were written decades or even centuries apart, and often falsely attributed to authors who did not write them. There was also the Septuagint, a Greek text which was a translation of various Jewish scriptures, many of which now form the Old Testament.

The early Christian church decided which of these were deemed to be canon and which were non-canon. The canon texts were compiled together to form what is now the Bible. Everything else that was deemed not canon is called the Apocrypha. Many of these texts were also deemed heretical or blasphemous to read, publish, or teach by the various ecumenical councils.

Each Christian denomination has a slightly different version of the Bible depending on which decisions and ecumenical councils they accept.

The most interesting difference would be the Bible of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church), which has an additional text called the Book of Mormon. That was written in the 19th century by a guy named Joseph Smith, an American religious leader who founded Mormonism. According to Mormon theology, it contains the revalations he received from God about various other unknown saints who lived in America and other holy happenings which took place, making the US a second holy land of sorts. His group travelled to the western United States to find their own promised land and establish a Mormon theocracy (they were successful; it’s now the US state of Utah).

There’s no historical evidence that any of these texts were intended to be read as anything other than religious scripture, but keep in mind that in Biblical times, people seemed to have had a really difficult time differentiating texts written by people having fever dreams versus actual genuine accounts of observed events or legitimate attempts to write scripture. If you want a fun time, you can read some of the Apocrypha, which are often similar in style to the canonical gospels but are slightly… weirder. The line between religion and insanity was not so easily found back then. Regardless of their authors’ original intent, the Apocrypha certainly can be read for entertainment in the 21st century.

America really has a litigation culture, not because people are particularly fond of lawsuits, but because problems which are generally solved by legislative enactments or actions by regulatory bodies in other countries, aren’t in the US, and thus the only way to find out who is right is to go to court.

I’m guessing what you’re suggesting is that Google’s proposal is the same as requiring all packages be signed and accompanied by an Extended Validation or Oragnisation Validation X.509 certificate.

While that would technically work, the problem with using the existing PKI is that it’s still very expensive to get EV/OV certificates. And the most common of these certs (those for TLS purposes) will soon only last 47 days which is, to put it mildly, would be a pain in the ass to use for package-signing.

Even if you do not use Google, if you don’t have something like uBlock Origin (which I highly recommend), you’ll still see advertisements on other sites which are served by Google.

Yeah, this is unfortunately why, immediately after the election, there was a surge of posts on Lemmy and elsewhere telling transgender people to rush a passport application or renewal while Biden was still in office. Basically within weeks of Trump assuming power, dealing with the federal government has been Hell on earth for transgender people.

They have a database of trans people. If you were ever issued a passport with an F gender marker, they would know you changed it.

If you try to renew, you’ll get the passport back with two holes punched in it with a letter telling you to apply again with an F gender marker.

Edit: Some transgender people have been issued the passport anyway with the gender they were assigned at birth. This causes problems because your appearance would not match the gender stated on the passport and thus would subject you to additional scrutiny at checkpoints. That’s not even mentioning the countries where being transgender is just illegal, although I don’t imagine you have many plans to visit those places.

It’s a good theory but it isn’t true. Google doesn’t show it to anyone.

Google says it doesn’t sell your personal info to third parties. While you would be well within your reason to suspect this isn’t true, it is actually legally relevant because it means, as a consequence, Google doesn’t provide a “do not sell my personal information” opt-out link which would otherwise be required by California law (where Google is headquartered).

I think the idea is that you are interested in a topic, and so they show you an advertisement that says “Product A does X!” You might not think about it nor click on it, but maybe later on, you need to do X, and then you remember, “hey, Product A does X, I should check it out.” And then that maybe turns into a sale for them.

Assuming I’m reading the abstract correctly, it’s about twice as effective.

Advertisers pay by the click. Click the Chick-Fil-A advert and waste more of their money.

You can use uBlock Origin (browser extension) to block all advertisements. Then in the event you visit a site you want to support, turn it off.

Uh, do you know what a “travel document” is? They’ve been required for international travel since the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The “travel document” part of it has nothing to do with ethnicity.

You’re confusing two statements:

1. A passport card is a travel document. Nothing wrong with this.
2. A passport card can help you get out of situations with ICE if you appear Hispanic. This one is the one which is fucked up.

Yep, I found the evidence. It supports my point of view. I’ll paste it below.

I have managed to create a statistic for this. There are 22,000 agents which work for ICE, although this number was 12,000 prior to Trump’s hiring surge (source). ICE claims they made 26,600 arrests in 2025 (source). This means each agent makes about 2 arrests per year on average at most. So unless you believe that most agents are checking only three or four people a year, this would indicate most people are being let go.

Look, I came into this expecting people to understand that most (arbitrary percentage greater than 50 but less than 100) interactions with anyone, ICE or not, are reasonable. You don’t hear about these, because they’re not interesting enough to get posted on the Internet. If your information comes from the Internet only, you will think everything is extreme. I don’t like to use the term “terminally online”, but it’s a problem common with people typically described as being “terminally online”—not realising that real life is a lot more boring than it would appear from clips that people share of ridiculous interactions.

It’s always difficult to deal with these types of comments because despite it being obvious that they show an extremity bias because the person who made them has a viewpoint influence by an extremely cherry-picked data set, they technically are logically sound.

Edit: I have managed to create a statistic for this. There are 22,000 agents which work for ICE, although this number was 12,000 prior to Trump’s hiring surge (source). ICE claims they made 26,600 arrests in 2025 (source). This means each agent makes about 2 arrests per year on average at most. So unless you believe that most agents are checking only three or four people a year, this would indicate most people are being let go.