Paper: Deployability First: Making Age Verification Work at Internet Scale
slides-agews-paper-deployability-first-making-age-verification-work-at-internet-scale-00

Heather Flanagan and Leif Johansson

The urgency to develop reliable, privacy-respecting mechanisms for age verification has collided with the realities of standards development and deployment. Technical architectures are being proposed with insufficient regard for whether they can be deployed in real-world environments— across jurisdictions, across devices, and at scale. This paper focuses on the foundational architectural and protocol properties needed to make any age verification system viable, drawing on RFC 5218’s criteria for successful protocols and Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity.

We do not address every aspect of age verification. Instead, we concentrate on deployability, because without it, even the most elegant privacy technology will remain theoretical.