Assuming you’re including debit cards here (as most people do when they say “credit card”): you can get one under 18. In fact a few countries are already going fully cashless, with nobody (including kids) being able to pay with cash. If I open the Revolut app, I get right away on the home screen a banner for “Revolut <18”.
I’m not sure what could be a better solution though.
I’m also not a fan of going cashless. I’m just saying that, in the absence of a better way of verifying age that doesn’t violate privacy, credit cards work pretty well.
Perhaps we can come up with a token-based system where you can verify your age without either the game knowing your identity or the age verification service knowing what’s requesting it. I don’t trust politicians to make such a system properly, so I think the credit card option is a reasonable approach.
But then also many people don’t have credit cards - they’re frowned upon in many countries with a more debt-averse culture.
Whatever the solution is, it seems like it would end up being something country-specific and not something that scales well across the internet. Probably credit cards work for the US, but then we’d need to find something that works for the remaining 95% of the world population.
Cool, then those people need to prove their age another way.
There should also be a law that private companies cannot store personally identifiable information (e.g. your ID details) unless specifically required to by law. So if they want to get people to play a predatory game, they need to find a way to prove age without violating privacy.
Assuming you’re including debit cards here (as most people do when they say “credit card”): you can get one under 18. In fact a few countries are already going fully cashless, with nobody (including kids) being able to pay with cash. If I open the Revolut app, I get right away on the home screen a banner for “Revolut <18”.
I’m not sure what could be a better solution though.
I’m not including debit cards.
I’m also not a fan of going cashless. I’m just saying that, in the absence of a better way of verifying age that doesn’t violate privacy, credit cards work pretty well.
Perhaps we can come up with a token-based system where you can verify your age without either the game knowing your identity or the age verification service knowing what’s requesting it. I don’t trust politicians to make such a system properly, so I think the credit card option is a reasonable approach.
But then also many people don’t have credit cards - they’re frowned upon in many countries with a more debt-averse culture.
Whatever the solution is, it seems like it would end up being something country-specific and not something that scales well across the internet. Probably credit cards work for the US, but then we’d need to find something that works for the remaining 95% of the world population.
Cool, then those people need to prove their age another way.
There should also be a law that private companies cannot store personally identifiable information (e.g. your ID details) unless specifically required to by law. So if they want to get people to play a predatory game, they need to find a way to prove age without violating privacy.