I think the problem is exactly that one possible solution is a third party that everyone has to trust with their personal data.

The way thinks work in this country that might mean that a friend of an influential MP sets up a new company as we speak that then will be chosen as the one and only service provider for this verification. For a considerable fee of course. This friend will then find an acquaintance who has worked for a consultancy at some point who will then hire a (maybe British) company to implement the service, they will outsource it to a much cheaper (probably not British) company to implement it. Provided that no one except for the outsourcing company has any idea what they are doing and the money is siphoned off to the Virgin Islands already it might take a while to get the service started and then it does not work.

At this time the government will notice that not only their money is gone, they have to pay more to even get it started and from then on the long chain of contractors need a lot of money on a yearly basis to keep it running.

This is the moment where they turn and explain to the public that from now on they have to pay to use the internet.

Remind you this is a country that only since one year requires identification to vote in elections. But everyone is now supposed to register with a third party probably non government institution to access the internet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They only consolation is that they probably won’t get it off the ground in the foreseeable future.

Wait, you could have internet connection (land line or mobile) without IDing yourself in the UK before? But how would you pay for it?

But just use same logic, surely you can similarly ask someone else to validate age for you when you register just like you could use someone else's connection. Maybe even there will be grey market for this

When you finance the source you relatively openly promote the source.

The two activities are dissimilar.

Since when, in human history, was this an implicit critical assumption in anyone's mind?

> The two activities are dissimilar.

Yes they are different activities. The point is still: Wikipedia doesn't worry about integrating with systems that require you to be identified. (Actually, internet is another such system, you can't use it without providing some form of ID in probably most countries.)

Since we discovered Dignity, that has been a fundamental tenet.

(Yes there are also many occasions «in human history» when the principle got instantiated for protection against the ignorant and the malevolent.)

> The point is still: Wikipedia doesn't worry about integrating with systems that require you to be identified

The point is not with the occasional use of those systems in special cases (e.g. donations), but with systematic use in fruition.

So unless you are trolling you would be able to give a rough year or decade when it became an implicit assumption and why exactly, right? ;)

> The point is not with the occasional use of those systems in special cases (e.g. donations), but with systematic use in fruition.

No, the point is "But if Wikimedia is taking broad approach to enforcing their principles, they would refuse to interface with such a privacy destroying service anyway" and frankly your new goalposts are not of much interest to anyone

«But if Wikimedia is taking broad approach to enforcing their principles, they would refuse to interface with such a privacy destroying service anyway»

You replied

«Wikipedia don't refuse to interface with privacy destroying payment systems required to collect donations. They will be fine»

You were replied with observations that attempt to explain to you why your comment is out of context, and try to show you the point:

-- normal people, i.e. dignified people, and prudent people, refuse to be tracked in their consumption of information.

-- Wikipedia seems to be aware of the above.

-- Wikipedia seems to be unavailable to enforce «privacy destroying service[s]», there where relevant: consumption of information.

-- Wikipedia also accepts donations, and the process may involve tracking that somebody promotes Wikipedia financially. This is completely different from tracking individuals in their consumption of information, so it is irrelevant in that context. That an entity accepts non-anonymous donations does not imply anything about the approach such entity holds about the treatment of privacy of its users, of the fruition of its specific services.

You seemed to advance that «Wikipedia don't refuse to interface with privacy destroying payment systems required to collect donations» as in «They will be fine [in employing other «privacy destroying service[s]»]»: no, they may not, that is not good reasoning, because one thing is accepting donations, another is revealing which specific services your customers used - for example, whether they read a page about Kennedy or about Oswald.

Spend the required effort when reading posts.

If you authenticate with OAuth, the OAuth server doesn't get to know what particular subresources you visit. It only gets to know which URL initiated the authentication (and whether it tracks even that is an open implementation question).

In other words sure Wikipedia can tell government what pages you visit, but to say that this law does enable that or require that even as a side effect is pure FUD.

Then the Identity Provider would have information about personal identity (to verify age) and information about who is requesting it. This is still www access without privacy.

> too quick to claim victory

What are you talking about. There are good reasons to guess that readers may be generally reading these as ghastly news, far from any sense of "victory".