this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Lately there has been a lot of controversy about age verification and it's implementation in places such as UK and US.

The main critic to this mechanism is due being done through facial recognition or a government ID which are privacy invasive.

So here is my question as someone who comes from IT, wouldn't it be possible to create a device which just gives out true or false depending if the person is of age, given some kind of piece of DNA (hair, blood, nails) ?

I known there is carbon dating, but from what I understand is a bit of complicated process. The human body however shows it's age visually and I would be interested to know if genetically there are some signs as well that could be somewhat used in a automatic process.

Again I come from IT, just curious about the implications and your takes on the problem.

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

A few users (or maybe the same user and I just didn't notice) have laid out a pretty good way of doing age verification via tokens so the site needing verification gets a token that just says you're cool to enter the site, and you would get the token via the government who already has your ID and personal info anyway. The government doesn't know what the token will be used for, and the things taking the token won't know who you are.

Seems reasonable enough for me. However, I personally feel like the government shouldn't be sticking their fucking noses in what is morally acceptable. If a horny 13 year old wants to see some titties online, why the fuck not? They'll only end up weird about sexual stuff because you try to keep everything from them instead of teaching them anything.