Summary
Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, all websites hosting pornography, including social media platforms, must implement “robust” age verification methods, such as photo ID or credit card checks, for UK users by July.
Regulator Ofcom claims this is to prevent children from accessing explicit content, as research shows many are exposed as young as nine.
Critics, including privacy groups and porn sites, warn the measures could drive users to less-regulated parts of the internet, raising safety and privacy concerns.
The UK has a History of intrusive civil society surveillance which the Snowden revelations showed was even worse than in the US, and whilst the US actually walked back on some of it back then, the UK Government just retroactivelly made the whole thing legal.
Also, lets not forget how the UK has the highest density of CCTV cameras per inhabitant in the World (or maybe it’s just London: it’s been a while since I read about it).
Their track record on the subject heavilly indicates that this specific measure with the characteristics it has, is extremelly likely to have been purposefully crafted to extend civil society surveillance and information access control.
So - the people abusing policies are often not the people writing policies. We’re both making lots of assumptions but the way I see it is that the “well meaning but stupid MP” wants to make their constituency happy by passing laws to show “I’m listening to the needs of parents!”. Later that law is then used by other agencies to do things with your data you would rather them not do. Government is “people” not a “person”.
And for that matter there are laws passed to explicitly give agencies power. Government doesn’t often need to hide it, they just say the magic words “national defense”.
If by that you mean that some out of touch MPs can be easily swindled by members of the security apparatus working together with other MPs and higher level politicians who are smart enough to know what they’re doing, I don’t disagree with that.
What is less likely is that a majority of British MPs, repeatedly and over the course of 2 decades, have been deceived like that.
Maybe I’m wrong, but most British MPs don’t come out as stupid (though some definitely do) - incompetent at anything but salesmanship and power-games, crooked, greedy, ethics-free, unprincipled salesmen types and people driven by objectives which do not at all match what they state, sure most of them come out as that, stupid, not most.
I mean, your point would make a lot of sense if this was some kind of one-off event rather than a repeating pattern of measure after measure increasing surveillance of Civil Society, for the last 2 decades, and if Civil Society (or at least the Media) had been silent about it or even supportive of it, but as things stand the theory that a majority of MPs are stupid as an explanation for this bill passing Parliament really stretches the laws of probability.
As the saying goes: “You can deceive some people all of the time or all people some of the time but you can’t deceive all people all of the time”.
PS: I accept that I might be wrong. I just don’t think that given the Historical track record the odds favor the “they’ve been swindled” (a majority of them and again on a subject that has been steadily going in just this direction and with not so long ago exposés on the press of how previous legislation has been abused for surveillance) explanation over the explanation that at least the ones in leadership positions acted with full awareness and possibly the active intention and purpose of crafting and passing a bill that expands Civil Society Surveillance in Britain.
It’s fair - we’re both coming from different starting assumptions.