"Email-based age assurance" has been deemed to be (capable of being) "highly effective" under the UK's #OnlineSafetyAct

Annoyingly, this means data sharing and only works if someone uses the same email address with multiple third parties.

My email address is well above the age of majority in the UK, but surely "Neil likes to reply in-line and signs email with GPG" is a good enough indication of grey-beardedness anyway.

@neil I don't use my Gmail account much anymore, but I see that the settings page says that POP3 is enabled for all mails received since May 2007, so I guess I'll probably be okay. If I was willing to use it with a third part verification service.... that account must predate 2007 because it was during the invite only phase. I suspect my yahoo email address has been an adult for 10 years!
@neil It's that magic word "email" again, isn't it?

(drifts off into Ofcom reverie...)

If only everything could be email again.
Like in the good old days.
None of this nasty app stuff.
Or that terrible social media, whatever it is.
You knew where you were with email.
It was reliable and trustworthy.
I used to get several emails every day...
The widow of the late General Sani Abacha.
Winning the Green Card Lottery.
There was nothing quite like it.
I replied to every single one.

@tony

> I don't see how email tells you anything

Leaving aside spoofability (which I presume a provider should be verifying by checking that the user can receive an email at the given address), the gist is that the email-based age assurance provider checks with a third party (e.g. a bank) who has already done age/ID assurance of the user.

@tony @neil I’m guessing (hoping?) it’ll be hash-based. Services that do their own AV provide a “Hey is this email hash owned by someone over 18?” API to (presumably paying) services. So some measure of privacy is retained…

Buuuuut, we all know it won’t be done like that. It’ll be done in whatever way collects the most data and extracts the most value from customer information.