@SirHaxalot@nord.pub @asklemmy@lemmy.ml

it will also not feel nearly as invasive as having to scan your face and hope the provider doesn’t save it somewhere.

Even when anonymized, the information may still ship with some PII (Personally Identifiable Information). That's how the user can be checked as the one requesting access (because a kid could be using their relatives' account, so the age check checks not just the age, but also who's checking the age). For age checking systems without direct PII (name, social security numbers, etc), there's still some kind of UUID that will persist across requests, so it'll essentially work as a tracking cookie.

The result from the age check, anonymized or not, still needs to be saved, and once saved, it's already a slippery slope: it will be used for "better" advertisement, it will be used for "better" algorithmic recommendations, it will be used to keep track of users behaviors online.

Alongside AI (not the LLMs we, the "mortal people", have access, but things way more "sophisticated" in that regard), they could keep cross-reference an "anonymized age check token/UUID" to a real person solely by relying on the increased digital footprint: then, all of a sudden, the health insurance gets to know the sexual habits of someone and can promptly raise prices when they detect the imminence of sexual problems/complains, the renting corp gets to know their tenant got "frequent sexual activity" (or, even worse, some specific kinds of "kinks") that could (in their bigoted minds) do some damage to the walls, so they can suddenly change the renting contract or raise prices to cover for wall painting, both parties can now know the political preferences (do we wonder why the US branch of TikTok is now asking for "immigration status" for US citizens? How could they possibly know the SSN for an USian TikTok user? The age checking, be it something already being done in the US or something that will become a reality soon (I'm not updated in this regard), is part of the "how").

That's the "Big Data" in action: crossing swathes of information across systems and databases, and corp-grade AI is another mechanism to achieve this.

Imo something like this would be magnitudes better than the current reliance of video identification

To some extent, indeed it is. But, in practice, it just delegates the video identification to the government (the citizen info is tied to biometrics, and authentication using things such as "EU wallet" may need 2FA with face biometrics within the government-backed app). There's still going to be face recognition somewhere down this "age checking" road, be it corp-backed or government-backed.