Wouldn’t surprise me if many young people can’t, I’m on the edge between millenial and gen z and reading an analog clock always needs some active effort. I’ve always preferred digital so I never really had to read analog clocks besides the one that hung in our kitchen and that one time I had a watch. Oh and the train stations still all have analog.
Kitchen clocks, if they aren’t just the oven or microwave, are probably becoming rarer, so when your watch is also digital, you’d never really encounter analog if it’s not somewhere in the public space, which will probably depend on where you live.
I’d guess most kids probably still can read one with effort because at least when there’s a second hand (since you can easily see it move) it’s kinda self explanatory, and it probably got explained in school once.
Deleting the tokens after verification, presumably. You don’t need to save the token after verification, you set a flag on either the account or the session and discard the token.
There are, of course, always ways. If the government starts tracking at which times tokens were used, and merchants store a timestamp of purchases of age gated content, which is probably required anyway for all purchases, you could get at least some hints on who bought what by comparing first purchase of account with verification time, since it’s likely for those two to be very close together. And that’s just off one data point.
Of course, the moment you pay with anything other than a prepaid voucher bought with cash in a place you don’t normally frequent, you can do similar things with the payment data. Or, if you pay with card, your info is right there.
That said, a government going that far will find any excuse to lock you up anyway, so I don’t have an issue with the method per se. However I still don’t think it’s very necessary to go this far to lock 18+ content online. If anything I’d rather want to see something like this used for spending limits in f2p games and such.