21
votes
Google Wallet adds age verification and more government ID support
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- Title
- It's now easier to prove age and identity with Google Wallet
- Published
- Apr 29 2025
- Word count
- 418 words
I hope this does not catch on. Google, you're high up on the list of slimy businesses that I don't want to have more of my data. I don't want the new standard to be to just give you more that I'm sure you'll find ways to use for ever more ads and other invasions of privacy. I don't believe for a second this product isn't yet another attempt to scrape more data. And I definitely don't want that new data to be about the kind of sites that would be interested in age verification.
I doubt it would get traction outside certain niches unless Apple does something similar and they agree on a cross-platform standard for age verification in web browsers. A similar thing happened with passkeys.
It looks like Apple only has API’s for mobile apps so far. Here’s an article about child accounts and about age verification using Apple Wallet.
I noticed that TurboTax was pushing passkeys this year. It seems like they are getting some traction?
From the blog post:
The Digital Credentials API is implemented in Chrome on Android, but most websites can’t use it yet, because it’s an origin trial. There’s a sign up form.
So, it looks like there are some steps towards age verification in web browsers and on Android, but it might be a while before it’s widely supported?
It’s unclear to me what role zero-knowledge proofs play in this. It seems like an implementation detail?
Looks like Webkit will support the Digital Credentials API too.
After witnessing the results of 2 kids grow up to adulthood with unrestricted Internet, I'm lowkey of the opinion that we should turn off the Internet for everyone until there's a reliable age verification process. And the recent years have seriously disrupted my belief that the Internet should be a potentially anonymous free speech zone. So in that sense I'm for this.
But it should be done by something like the UN, which at this time of history is obviously a huge pipe dream, perhaps larger than the pipe dream of shutting the Internet down. So I don't know, better than nothing I guess.
I don't understand how you can come to such a stupidly draconic solution. I know the last few years have been rough, but... really?
Growing up alongside the modern internet I just can't imagine taking anything at face value to begin with. I feel like all it takes is a shift in perspective..
Recent events should solidify the importance of anonymous free speech especially considering people are being persecuted for their expressed beliefs in the US, where constitutional rights were once thought to be infallible. Unless I'm misinterpreting your intent, your viewpoint is wildly misguided and/or your priorities are far out of order.
What I think you're saying is that we need free speech once the civilization has collapsed. But at that point, there will be no free speech anyway.
My point is that we need to suppress free speech (somewhat) so that we can have a civilization that doesn't collapse.
China has been doing this for decades. The reason why they constitute a seemingly "harmonious society" is not because China is a post-suffering utopia, but because the ruling party has instilled a fear of becoming perceived as a dissenter or falling out of line with the Chinese Values. If you want an authoritarian regime where people can only express themselves in the state-approved way that's exactly how you get there.
What? Plenty of people in China complain about plenty of things. If you go on any Chinese social media you'll see the usuals - economic woes, social complaints, the works. If you go on xiaohongshu right now, most of the posts are complaining about the dire lack of time off, causing the "horse and oxen" (which is what they call low level office workers) to crowd into the same domestic tourism hotspots during labor day.
While the CCP is liable to crack down on serious dissent, they neither have the capacity nor the desire to police speech like you're indicating.
Sure, they speak about the low-level issues like their work grievances just like any other country - that's not the same as the CCP's crackdown on anti-CCP sentiment. Western nations generally have the freedom to speak out against the wrongdoings of the administration, whereas China has a tendency to make those who speak out disappear.
And yes, they absolutely do police online speech in a significant way since they're tightly integrated into WeChat and other platforms. It's been well-documented that the CCP's digital enforcement arm will (relatively) quickly and easily censor topics when they detect an undesirable conversation is gaining traction online. The Winnie the Pooh incident is a prime example.
I've lived in China for many years in the past. It's really about how much of a practical threat. There's plenty of complaints about the government, especially on a provincial level, but also at a state level. I see a post right now complaining that the government shouldn't be going into a trade war with the US.
But if it rolls into being seriously threatening, then the censorship will start to occur more and more. That's a somewhat high bar, though.
In general, though, I just find the idea of
just baffling. If anything, everything is just chaos relative to western countries. That's what 1.3 billion people will do.
By harmonious I meant a very broad lack of dissent, not the chaotic factor generated by having too many people under the same metaphorical umbrella.
I think we're talking about somewhat different things, what my point boils down to is the fact that the CCP has very consistently cracked down on peaceful protestors (one notable exception being the lockdown protests) and censored communication in a way that has never happened in a western nation at anywhere near the same magnitude. It is an authoritarian regime by definition.
I wouldn’t say “never happened in a western country” - the countries for which fascism was invented were western countries. There have been no lack of western authoritarian governments.
Moreover, again, the CCP is not omniscient nor has the capability of being so. You know the amount of “dissent” against the US government there is on Reddit and etc? There’s that and more on tieba. It’s just not an actual threat, just like how Reddit is just people spinning their wheels. That’s my point.
You're taking a quote out of context, I said:
And despite there having been no lack of western authoritarian governments, even the Nazi regime did not have the degree of control over speech and protest as the CCP does today.
I don't think most people realise how tightly integrated they are with social platforms and how much power they have, all they have to do is have a single worker perform select keyword searches and they can conduct censorship in real-time, against more than a billion people's public and private digital communications. They are just about as close to omniscient as any entity can reasonably be.
This is the problem and the solution isnt age verification or complete denial of access. It's better parenting and better parental controls.
Of course, some parents don't care and then are angry that their kids can access things they don't like and demand that someone else do something about it.
This is why the UK now has parental controls enabled by default at the ISP level, parents couldn't be bothered to parent and made noise about their kids having too much access.
This is why I believe your suggestion doesn't work, and why we need centralized control over this. It would be kinda ok if only the children of those parents suffered, but unfortunately it's the whole community that suffers.