Coming to a website near you this summer: the European Commission is close to a ‘solution’ that could force people to use their government-issued ID to get online. EDRi and EFF’s concerns about threats to everyone’s privacy and data protection, a chilling effect on access to information, and digital exclusion – harming the already most marginalised in society - remain unsolved.
So I’ve actually looked into the EU wallet stuff quite a bit. The article talks about age verification. The way the EU wallet works is that you can share individual attributes, you don’t need to share your identity at all. When you load your government ID into the wallet, one of the fields is
over_18which has a boolean value (true or false). Any service that requires you to be 18+ would only need to request this single attribute, nothing more. No names, no other personal information, just the fact that you’re over 18.