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There’s something ominous about the speed with which the entire world has marched to require identification on platforms and, as I expected, begin the process of banning anonymous VPNs.

Do you know who/what is leading in terms of cryptographic, privacy enhancing identification technologies?

Unclear on what you’re asking here. “Privacy enhancing identification” seems like an oxymoron. Identification, in the sense of tying activity to a real world identity, is inherently an information-disclosing / privacy-reducing activity.

Bad terminology, maybe, but I mean something like: can you verify age to access social media without uploading a photo of your passport?

Anonymous credentials is possible, but the infrastructure needed for it is complicated and it gets defeated entirely by one person acting as a proxy

Also it's stupid to demand that websites demand extreme degrees of evidence of age when we could do the CD / DVD labeling approach and let device owners opt into local filters

Unfortunately if that’s the thing you mandate in law, you’ve now killed open source software. Can’t have a kid compiling their own Firefox fork that skips the age checks.

You're not supposed to mandate enforcement. Just ask that the device owner can enable it. And then let them just no do so.