The EU’s age-verification application requires a Google or Apple account and Google-approved Android device or iPhone

The European Union is in the process of testing an age-verification application, which people can use to verify their age in a privacy-preserving manner (in theory, of course). There’s countless important discussions to be had about whether or not age verification, privacy-preserving or not, is even something we should want, but that’s a topic for another time and for people smarter than I. For now, several member states are currently testing the application on a voluntary basis, and the application itself is open source, with the code hosted on GitHub.

Aside from the obvious concerns about just how private such an application can even be, and concerns about whether or not we should even want something like this, there’s another major problem: the application intends to make use of and require application and device verification by using the proprietary tools for such functionality from Google and Apple, built into Android and iOS, respectively. Listed as future “features”:

App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation
↫ The application’s GitHub page

This is a massive problem. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with at least six functioning neurons, the European Union, as well as countless other countries, are trying to reduce their dependency on US technology companies. As such, it’s indefensible to then require anyone who needs to use age verification in the European Union to use an application that will only work on Google-approved Android devices and even then, only when installed from the Google Play Store, with the only alternative being, of all things, Apple’s iOS.

This means that the EU will require anyone who needs age verification to have either a Google or an Apple account, and can only use Google-approved Android or iOS. This application would not work on, say, GrapheneOS or any other non-Google-approved Android ROM – in fact, even if you were to compile the application yourself, you wouldn’t be able to actually use it because it wouldn’t be installed from the Google Play Store. Of course, any mobile operating other than Android or iOS need not apply either.

The danger of tying age verification to Google and Apple did not go by unnoticed, and a GitHub issue raised the issue a few weeks ago.

I would like to strongly urge to abandon this plan. Requiring a dependency on American tech giants for age verification further deepens the EU’s dependency on America and the USA’s control over the internet. Especially in the current political climate I hope I do not have to explain how undesirable and dangerous that is.
↫ TheLastProject in the GitHub issue

The comment thread attached to the issue is long, but during the two weeks since the issue was raised, nobody from the application’s team has answered or even acknowledged people’s concerns, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in this being taken seriously. I just hope that with this entire project being in the early testing phases, at least someone manages to realise tying this to Google and Apple is one of the dumbest ideas in a long, long time.