To be clear, I’m not advocating for online age verification. I’m very much against it in any form. I’m just curious from a technical standpoint if it’s possible somehow to construct an accurate age verification system that doesn’t compromise a user’s privacy? i.e., it doesn’t expose the person’s identity to anyone nor leaves behind a paper trail that can be traced to that person?


Yes, it is, see quark ID as an example of decentralized open source project by the city of Buenos Aires, in Argentina, which leverages zero knowledge proofs:
https://quarkid.org/
https://github.com/ssi-quarkid