What's wrong with EU age verification?

A defense of the EU's age verification approach, arguing that critics often misrepresent or misunderstand it. The post explains why age restrictions online can be legitimate, then walks through the privacy risks of naive implementations (ID uploads, third-party sign-ins) versus the EU's blueprint, which uses cryptographically signed age attestations and zero-knowledge proofs (zkSNARKs). With this design, a website learns only that a user is over a threshold age, without receiving any identifying information, and the issuer never learns where the credential is used. The post closes with a list of implementation pitfalls that privacy advocates should monitor to ensure the architecture's promises are honored in practice.

Source: https://blog.vrypan.net/2026/06/29/260629-whats-wrong-with-eu-age-verification. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.