I think there are many pros and cons to be said about age verification, but I think this method solves most problems this article supposes, if it is combined with other common practices in the EU such as deleting inactive accounts and such. These limitations are real, but tractable. IDs can be issued to younger teenagers, wallet infrastructure matures over time, and countries without strong identity systems primarily undermine their own age bans. Jurisdictions that accept facial estimation as sufficient verification are not taking enforcement seriously in the first place. The trap described in this article is a product of the current paradigm, not an inevitability.
These massive privacy issues have all been raised on their Github, and the team behind the wallet have been ignoring them.
> It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering".
Maybe worse, it encourages the push of personal computers to be more mobile like (the fact that we treat phones as different from computers is already a silly concept).
So when are we going to build a new internet? Anyone playing around with things like Reticulum? LoRA? Mesh networks?
EUDI wallets are connected to your government issued ID. There is no "highly invasive age verification".
We are literally sending a request to our government's server to sign, with their private key, message "this john smith born on 1970-01-01 is aged over 18" + jwt iat. There are 3 claims in there. They are hashed with different salts. This all is signed by the government.
You get it with the salts. When you want to prove you are 18+ you include salt for the "is aged over 18" claim, and the signed document with all the salts and the other side can validate if the document is signed and if your claim matches the document.
No face scanning, no driver license uploading to god-knows-where, no anything.
> to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months
This is the fallback mechanism. You are supposed to use bbs+ signatures that are zero knowledge, are computed on the device and so on. It is supposed to provide the "unlinkability". I don't feel competent enough to explain how those work.
> jailbreaking / "prevent tampering"
This is true. The eidas directive requires that secret material lives in a dedicated hardware / secure element. It's really not much different than what a banking app would require.
> You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked
This is not true, the law requires core apps to be opensource. Polish EUDI wallet has been even decompiled by a youtuber to compare it with sources and check if the rumors about spying are true. So you can check yourself if the app tracks you.
Also we can't have a meaningful discussion without expanding on definition of "tracking".
Can the site owner track you when you verify if you are 18+? Not really, each token is unique, there should be no correlation here.
Can the government track you? No, not alone.
Can the site owner and the government collude to track you? Yes they can! Government can track all salts for your tokens, site can collect all salts, they can compare notes. There are so called policy mitigations currently: audits and requirements for governments to remove salts from memory the moment stuff is issued.
Can they lie? Sure.
Can the site owner and the government collude to track you if you are using bbs+? No. Math says no.
Can they lie if you are using bbs+? Math says no.
The inherent problem with all zero knowledge identity solutions is that they also prevent any of the safeguards that governments want for ID checking.
A true zero knowledge ID check with blind signatures wouldn't work because it would only take a single leaked ID for everyone to authenticate their accounts with the same leaked ID. So the providers start putting in restrictions and logging and other features that defeat the zero knowledge part that everyone thought they were getting.
IIRC that was only for a prototype or reference implementation.
There's some clever kids out there but come on.
The EUDI spec is tech neutral.
What the EUDI mandates is a high level of assurance under the eIDAS 2.0 regulation and the use of a secure element or a trusted execution environment to store the key.