Technology

You show your ID and a notary enters their credentials to allow you to create an account

The problem then lies in how whoever (likely the government) can ensure that verified accounts are indeed verified by real people.

If any notary can create these accounts by just claiming they saw a proper ID/biometrics, then even one malicious notary could make as many "verified" accounts as they want. If they're then investigated, that would mean there'd be monitoring in place to see who they met with, which would defeat the privacy preservation method of only having them look at it.

This also doesn't solve the problem of people reselling stolen accounts, going to multiple notaries and getting each one to individually attest and make multiple accounts to give out or sell, etc.

with your fingerprint or FaceID Your ID doesn’t get saved. Your biometrics are only saved in the way that your iPhone saves them for a password.

If your biometrics are stored, then there's one of two places they could be stored and processed:

1. On your own device (i.e. you just use your existing fingerprint lock on your phone to secure your account, say, one that's made via a passkey so as to make fingerprint verification possible)

This can just be bypassed by the user once they log in with their biometrics, since the credentials are then decrypted and they can just export them raw, or just have them stolen by anyone who accesses their device or installs malware, etc.

This doesn't solve the sale, transfer, or multiple creations of accounts.

2. A hash of your biometrics are stored on a government server, then your device provides the resulting hash of your fingerprint scans to unlock your account to the government server when logging in.

The scanner that originally creates the hash for your fingerprint must be trusted to not transmit any other data about your fingerprint itself, and could be bypassed by modifying network requests to send fake hashes to the government server during account creation, thus allowing for infinite "verified" accounts to be created and sold.

This also doesn't prevent the stealing or transfer of accounts, since you would essentially just be using your hash as a password instead of a different string of text, and then they'd just steal your hash, not a typical password. This also would mean the government would get a log of every time someone used their account, and you could be instantly re-identified the moment you go to the airport and scan your fingerprint at a TSA checkpoint, for example, permanently tying your real identity back to any account you verify with your biometrics in the future.

The fundamental problem with these systems is that if you have to verify your identity, you must identify yourself somehow. If that requires sending your personal data to someone, it risks your privacy and security going forward. If that doesn't require sending your personal data, then the system is easily bypassed, and its existence can't be justified.

What’s a solution that would be acceptable for you?

I've said it before, and I'll continue advocating for it going forward:

• Parental controls and simple parent-controlled monitoring software on young children's devices
• Actual straightforward conversations between parents and kids about adult content
• Sex ed classes.

We already know these things do the most we can reasonably do to prevent underage viewing of adult content. We don't need age verification laws, because they either harm privacy or don't even work, when much simpler, common sense solutions already solve the problem just fine.