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You don't need an ID of any sort to conceal carry a gun in AZ, but you need one for an app?
The days you move between categories can establish your birthdate, which is a lot of bits if you are doing this on an individual level (basically it's a great start at a supercookie).
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In my ideal world a law would:

1. Require device manufacturers to allow the device owner (which covers parents of minors' devices) to set policy for the device, including allow/blocklist for apps and sites, and allow/blocklists for content categories.

2. Require browsers to respect the device's policy for site allow/blocklist

3. Require browsers to set a certain header for allow/blocklist of content categories

4. Require websites to respect that header.

No need for age verification, no need for the government to decide what is/isn't allowed and for free you allow gamblers to prevent gambling content being shown to them etc.

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This AZ law is frustrating because by targeting the app store it's actually taking a step towards my vision... but in a way that multiplies the harm of age verification instead of diminishing it.

Who do they think they are? The UK?
One thing to keep in mind is that every session has crazy proposals in AZ. (Not clear how many of them get anywhere.)
This is a bait-and-switch that will be used to roll in an internet ID for all people. I believe this is why M$ is trying to force people to log in to their local machines with a microsoft account.
What would be interesting to know is which age verification services are popular these days?
It's clear these "age verification" bills will just keep coming and it's a losing battle to try and oppose each individually.

Instead (or rather in addition to) activism we should go at it from the other end and request the introduction of a verifiably independent authority and zero knowledge protocol that will deliver a cryptographically secure boolean bit (isOver18) with no way to correlate from either end the ID or which website the bit is used for.

The alternative is IDs get collected by all these horrendous privacy fiends and sold / leaked / monetized across the board, which sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Curious, what is driving this "you need permission to use the internet" bills suddenly ?

Really miss the old internet.

Look at any HN thread about social networks. It's the good old "why won't anybody think of the children" thing.
Remember when children weren't even supposed to use the internet unsupervised? What happened? The internet hasn't gotten any less filthy.
All of a sudden various governments and tech companies want to do age verification. Co-incidence?
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Serious question: why can't Meta, Google, and friends just decide not to serve Arizona? I get logistically it would be tough, but if they built that capability, they would have a very robust lever to pull anytime a government pulls this schtick.

I would imagine the backlash from the people would fix this pretty quickly.

This seems like one of those "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" situations. I'd fully support big tech saying, "Alright Arizona. Build your own technical infrastructure."

And letting the fools in government who don't understand how the world works figure it out the hard way.

What am I missing? (beyond perhaps being overly optimistic!)

Could the unwritten motivation be to kill some of the internet and boost sales at local brick and mortar stores? trying to think like a state government critter... Privacy risks aside, people are averse to added friction.
They should just require people to answer a dynamic set of random history questions.
Since I'm in AZ, I had to look about the sponsor. Here's what Michael Way has on his campaign website :

"Michael is NOT a politician. He has spent his career in business, not government. We need bold, conservative outsiders to shake up business-as-usual."

https://michaelwayforaz.com/about/

The bill sure sounds contradictory to his campaign statement.

This whole pile of bullshit is just to end anonymity. Decentralizing things, including finances seems like the only real path forward to keep the world sane.
Reclaim the Net is not really a reliable source
It'll certainly be interesting to see how age verification works for Notepad