this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Lately there has been a lot of controversy about age verification and it's implementation in places such as UK and US.

The main critic to this mechanism is due being done through facial recognition or a government ID which are privacy invasive.

So here is my question as someone who comes from IT, wouldn't it be possible to create a device which just gives out true or false depending if the person is of age, given some kind of piece of DNA (hair, blood, nails) ?

I known there is carbon dating, but from what I understand is a bit of complicated process. The human body however shows it's age visually and I would be interested to know if genetically there are some signs as well that could be somewhat used in a automatic process.

Again I come from IT, just curious about the implications and your takes on the problem.

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[โ€“] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Carbon dating actually doesn't work at all for living humans because it relies on measuring C-14 decay after an organism dies - while alive, we constantly exchange carbon with our enviornment keeping C-14 levels stable, making it useless for age determination (though there are some promising epigenetic biomarkers like DNA methylation patterns that correlate with age, but they're still not precise enough for legal verification).