I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?


At least the Wikipedia page is not detailed/technical on step 8, but if you were to attempt to man-in-the-middle, you could not because you can’t fake identifying as a valid ID document, which is ensured by the challenge and private/public key cryptography.
I’ll need to look into it a bit more, but I’m skeptical that this will work in practice:
How can they confirm that I’m the owner of the passport? How do you prevent them from selling the fields they requested, that have been uniquely linked to you? How do you prevent the government from keeping track of all the services you’re using?