The US refuses to do this, so we get a mess. Every state has different drivers license, Social Security numbers aren’t secure at this point, most people don’t have passports.
But if there was a true national ID, the government could provide APIs to verify those. Then these kind of things would be easy for the apps/sites.
All of that obviously ignores the problems in privacy from doing any of this in the first place, etc. i’m starting to think I’m on the side of our national ID given how much of a mess everything is with our current patchwork. But I certainly wouldn’t want to be giving it over to random sites.
We have sort of accidentally set up a system in which verifying someone’s age is a really really hard problem. If a credit card number or trying to use a photograph are the best tools we have it’s clear this doesn’t work.
