In 2022, Daniel Pryor, then head of research at the Adam Smith Institute think tank, warned that any tech-savvy teen would likely be able to circumvent restrictions, while adults entering their details stood every chance of being exposed in the event of a data breach.

Can't believe the Tories have got me agreeing with the Adam Smith Institute.

Pretty sure the last thing anyone wants to do is upload a picture of their face to a porn site…

"Ofcom also states that sites must not provide information about or links to Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers." That's every other YouTuber fucked then.

We need age verification for social media more than we do for porn

It's sad that we need to pretend to be french to have equal internet freedom in the UK.

Digital identity wallets and, our favorite, facial age estimation, where the features of a user's face are analyzed to estimate the user's age.

Well that could be "fun". Poor George Dawes - he's just a big baby.

Requiring age verification for porn is such a stupid idea. Firstly, what's the definition of "porn"? Should people be blocked from looking at Michelangelo's David? Where precisely is the line between what's porn and what isn't, and why should anybody have the right to impose that? Secondly, it's unenforceable. On any website where people can submit content, they can submit porn that children might see. Should we block them all, then? That goes for all social media. It goes for anywhere people can leave comments/reviews. It goes for every basket-weaving forum. Since it's obviously impossible to make a dent, why bother at all? And what about Google Images? What about sites with generative AI? Websites aren't the only porn on the Internet either. I torrented porn when I was 13. Discord exists. Video games exist. What's stopping people just making their own and sharing it? Absolutely boneheaded idea. It's so stupid, that it makes me think the real reason is more nefarious, and "saving the children" is just propaganda.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

However, service providers will likely be stuck between a rock and a hard place in implementing the guidance without also falling foul of privacy regulations.

It doesn't take a genius to imagine how a determined teenager might circumvent many of these restrictions, nor the potential privacy nightmare inherent in many of them if an adult is forced to share this level of info when accessing age-restricted sites.

In 2022, the UK government threatened the requirement of handing over all range of personal data to access social media sites.

The previous time around, the idea of allowing certain firms to work as information collaters / age verification service providers was floated, with critics correctly surmising this would create huge jackpot targets of citizen data.

In 2022, Daniel Pryor, then head of research at the Adam Smith Institute think tank, warned that any tech-savvy teen would likely be able to circumvent restrictions, while adults entering their details stood every chance of being exposed in the event of a data breach.

"Regardless of their approach, we expect all services to offer robust protection to children from stumbling across pornography, and also to take care that privacy rights and freedoms for adults to access legal content are safeguarded."

The original article contains 561 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

If they actually do this then a list of people watching will be hacked within days and will quite strongly backfire on MPs...

Ludicrous, authoritarian, outdated bullshit.