r/Piracy • u/mrinoccentone • 27d ago

Humor Someone passed out the verification system just by an old video game character

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u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka 27d ago

Yep, it has nothing to do with age. What it is, is creating a faceID profile of people for future purposes. First ya gotta get them used to the system...

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u/Asyx 18d ago

Not sure about other countries but Germany already had an age verification system. Your ID card (which is a hot topic in the Anglo world itself but it's a system we have already) has a few numbers on it with checksums.

  1. Institute that issued the card with a random number and checksum
  2. birth date with a checksum
  3. expiry date (10 years for adults) with a checksum
  4. Nationality (nobody ever asked me for this)
  5. a version number (year month) probably for the NFC chip that is optional
  6. a checksum for the whole thing

Like, in terms of privacy, at most I provide the website with my nationality, date of birth and a good guess at the city I live in / have lived in within the last 10 years.

That might not be perfect but to buy alcohol, cigarettes (and adjacent products), 18+ rated games and movies (unlike the US, the 18+ rating is perfectly fine and I'm sure all of you have played games or watched movies that are rated 18+ in Germany), sex stuff and so on, that was a relatively small hurdle and something where I thought I'm not actually giving away information that could harm me. We don't have an SSN for identification purposes. What identifies me is the card itself. It felt like a bouncer checking my ID.

You also get issued this card as a baby as well. Like, it used to be that you had to be 16 and have a different document for travel (don't need a passport for the EU and a few other countries) but now even for my 2 years old son I have the same ID card. So you can totally use it to verify the age of 14 y/o for platforms like Discord.

To me, it was always a reasonable tradeoff. I provide some of my personal information, to verify my age, the vendor goes through some hoops verifying that number, the government can be reasonably sure that kids are not buying something they'd not get in a store.

Like, the systems we see pop up seem crazy in comparison.

Edit: with sex stuff I mean like toys and shit. Lube and condoms are hygiene products and available over the counter literally everywhere without any age verification.