Well, how do you expect a website to know that you are 18+?
The technical solution offered earlier was to have a trusted third-party only be willing to answer the "is this person 18+?" question. Of course, the same works for banks. The trusted third-party can answer "does this person own this account?" without needing to reveal to the bank any other information about you.
Now, that still leaves open the question of who you can trust. If you can trust a business run by people then that allows you to trust a bank, sure, but it also allows you to trust a tech company, so why not just give the tech company your ID and skip all that technical complexity? Understandably the broader idea presented earlier was that you cannot trust businesses operated by people, but then that includes banks, so...
For the sake of discussion, if we accept that technical solution and the need for a trusted third-party that is a business run by people, surely it should at least be a business that does nothing but offer profile trust to minimize the blast radius? For what reason would we want that business to have their hand in other activities like chat or banking?
> Now, that still leaves open the question of who you can trust. If you can trust a business run by people then that allows you to trust a bank, sure, but it also allows you to trust a tech company
Banks are subject to much stricter regulation than any tech company is or ever will be (IMO, I could end up surprised).
I trust my bank to know who I am and keep track of my money. I trust big tech to lose or misinterpret my data, to close my account for no reason, etc, and to face zero consequences for those failures -- not even fines.
> Banks are subject to much stricter regulation than any tech company is
That's true, but remember what we're talking about: Using banks (or another trusted third-party) to assert your age instead of having big tech collecting your personal information themselves. There is context here. Writing comments in a vacuum makes no sense.
In that context it is understood that only incentive for big tech to follow the proposed is regulation, but if you are going to push regulation on them then you can regulate them just as much as banks.
Your broader point that, in the real world, there isn't much political will to push any of that regulation is also no doubt true, but, again, writing comments in a vacuum makes no sense. The hypothetical of big tech adopting a third-party attestation system was already understood to be just that: hypothetical.
The technical solution offered earlier was to have a trusted third-party only be willing to answer the "is this person 18+?" question. Of course, the same works for banks. The trusted third-party can answer "does this person own this account?" without needing to reveal to the bank any other information about you.
Now, that still leaves open the question of who you can trust. If you can trust a business run by people then that allows you to trust a bank, sure, but it also allows you to trust a tech company, so why not just give the tech company your ID and skip all that technical complexity? Understandably the broader idea presented earlier was that you cannot trust businesses operated by people, but then that includes banks, so...
For the sake of discussion, if we accept that technical solution and the need for a trusted third-party that is a business run by people, surely it should at least be a business that does nothing but offer profile trust to minimize the blast radius? For what reason would we want that business to have their hand in other activities like chat or banking?