It sounds like you are assuming that the wallet needs to re-validate each session and I don’t see why this would be needed. Each user account would just need to validate their age once then the website operator could store this in their database. If you’ve validated once you can be sure the user keeps being old enough.

I believe something like this is supposed to be a use-case of the digital EU Wallet. A website is supposed to be able to receive an attestation of a users age without nessecarily getting any other information about the person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Digital_Identity_Wallet

Apparently the relevant feature is Electronic attestations of attributes (EAAs). I’m not really familiar with how it will be implemented though and I am a bit afraid of beurocratic design is going to fuck this up…

Imo something like this would be magnitudes better than the current reliance of video identification. Not only is it much more reliable, it will also not feel nearly as invasive as having to scan your face and hope the provider doesn’t save it somewhere.

For now, BMW is defaulting to a more traditional approach. If it requires a data package of some sort, it will probably have a recurring fee—and BMW says its customers are already comfortable subscribing to such add-ons.

Sounds like a fairly reasonable position imo, and that they listen to the outrage about heated seats (which tbh was ridiculous). I get the feeling that everyone who commented on this didn’t actually read the article, lol.

Full disclosure: I own a fairly recent BMW and do like it a lot. Would I have bought it with subscription based heated seats? Maybe not, but I do appreciate other things like having a physical button to go into battery save mode and not having to dive 3 touch screen menus down… or that it’s one of the most powerful hybrids in electric only mode (though not anymore I think)… or being generally more dialed back when it comes to driver assist features.

That said I will admit that it has a physical button that tells me to pay up when pressed, to enable automatic high beam control… though it’s not like it was an advertised feature (got it used).