> "And before you ask: Yes, I’m laying this one squarely down before (and partly on the toes of) the tech bros: We could have designed our protocols to be minimally compatible with “a nation of laws,” but the tech bros insisted that compromise was treason, and, as a result, we will lose more privacy than necessary."

It is getting mighty tiring to be continuously put in the tech bro libertarian camp just because of my sex, choice of occupation and stance on privacy.

That being said I don't see it as being impossible for a privacy preserving system to be put into place where the central certificate authority (state) offers a way of authenticating the age of the individual without leaking further information, and the client not offering up details about what is being viewed.

For example Meta wants to authenticate a users age and simply receives a boolean response indicating that they are of legal age or not, without anything more.

This could be implemented quite easily in some European countries that already use government issued electronic authentication systems (Auðkenni in Iceland and DigiD in the Netherlands spring to mind).