This can work, but with cryptography instead of the porn site connecting to a government service.
The swiss government wanted to introduce electronic id a few years back which was a complete clusterfuck, every party would get all your private data even if they just needed ‘older than 18’, it was supposed to be implemented by various private companies that then sell it to the individual states, not really with gov oversight, so you have like 20 companies all with all the data, each of which could be hacked at any point etc.
we forced a public vote on it in 2021 and rejected it with 65%.
the use cases are pretty valid, like online pharmacies, ordering booze online, though of course you never know what they would require it for in the future.
so now it’s 2025 and a new proposal, this time much more privacy focused, developed by the government, open source, seems like they did listen to a lot of the criticism.
this blogpost goes into a bit of details on why unlinkability matters and that one-time-pads are one potential solution. And the whitepaper with more detail.
i saw a presentation from the digital society on it earlier this year and from what i remember, you get a set of keys (and can create new ones if you run out) from which you can create derived keys that only contain relevant information. The other party can verify this directly, without a gov service. And since you use a new key each time, the porn site also cant crossreference with your booze site that you’re the same person, that kind of stuff. It all sounded pretty reasonable and like it would adress your points.
This can work, but with cryptography instead of the porn site connecting to a government service.
The swiss government wanted to introduce electronic id a few years back which was a complete clusterfuck, every party would get all your private data even if they just needed ‘older than 18’, it was supposed to be implemented by various private companies that then sell it to the individual states, not really with gov oversight, so you have like 20 companies all with all the data, each of which could be hacked at any point etc.
we forced a public vote on it in 2021 and rejected it with 65%.
the use cases are pretty valid, like online pharmacies, ordering booze online, though of course you never know what they would require it for in the future.
so now it’s 2025 and a new proposal, this time much more privacy focused, developed by the government, open source, seems like they did listen to a lot of the criticism.
this blogpost goes into a bit of details on why unlinkability matters and that one-time-pads are one potential solution. And the whitepaper with more detail.
i saw a presentation from the digital society on it earlier this year and from what i remember, you get a set of keys (and can create new ones if you run out) from which you can create derived keys that only contain relevant information. The other party can verify this directly, without a gov service. And since you use a new key each time, the porn site also cant crossreference with your booze site that you’re the same person, that kind of stuff. It all sounded pretty reasonable and like it would adress your points.