It might give momentum to age-verification schemes like Apple Wallet [0]. Apple gets the state ID in wallet and exposes an age verification API to apps like Discord; Discord queries the API and relies on Apple's age verification without ever getting access to the personally-identifying information.
Maybe not wallets but regular "sign in with X" SSO.
If all the X's can agree that one of the claims in the SSO is "is_adult", then at least you limit the exposure of your government ID to X getting breached, while all the "sign in with X" sites won't have access to the ID itself, just the claim.
Of course, pretty much every X gets breached anyway, and the walled garden shenanigans are not attractive, but it's better than ever site getting your ID.
That's why Apple's Wallet might be better: it depends on device-level security including elements stored on-device that Apple does not have and without which Apple cannot decrypt the information. There is obviously some sort of syncing between devices, but each device is authorized separately, and apparently Apple cannot view the Wallet data on its servers. Yes, it's a walled garden, but I trust Apple more than Facebook, Google, or X.
This makes me hate the Twitter rebrand even more. I'm reading your use of "X" as generic name to be filled in as needed vs the poorly rebranded Musk owned platform. Then again, I could see that platform actually promoting its services to do this very thing.
Might that be a business model for an enterprising Secretary of State? They carefully verify your real ID, the fake ID's trivially tie back to that if the cops ask (not so useful for committing crimes), there are upcharges for multiple fake ID's, or tweaked ages / weights / photos. More upcharges for "vanity" names...
"Really, your honor, it's hardly different from an author getting a DBA or LLC for his pen name."
So many were issuing IDs for illegal immigrants. I was like, why can't I have one? I'd love to erase my past arbitrarily and be unidentifiable. I decided that it was for the same reason that I couldn't get a civil union for a heterosexual partnership; politics and control.
Don't we still have states and countries issuing new IDs for trans people that don't link to their old identities? Do I have to threaten to kill myself because people won't treat me like a pretty girl in order to get one; or should erasing your past, anonymity, or at least pseudoanonymity be a right that we all get?
> "Really, your honor, it's hardly different from an author getting a DBA or LLC for his pen name."
This is the worst, really. The only way to be truly anonymous is to open corporations, because corruption relies on laundering money through corporations.
I'm aware of the culture war battles around ID cards for illegal, trans, etc. people. A reasonable, business-like SoS - trying to boost revenue while protecting people from data breaches and other such hazards - would stay far away from those minefields.
Also, it'd only be a DBA/LLC depth of "identity". Those do not give you a citizenship, nor clean police record, nor new gender, nor legal adult status, nor marriage, nor SSN/EIN, nor voting rights, nor ...
