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.
Remember when the Snowden revelations came out?
Not only it showed that the UK was even more intrusive in their surveillance of their own citiziens than the US, but after those revelations, whilst the US walked back on some of the surveillance, the Government of the UK simply retroactivelly legalized all of it, the editor at The Guardian who published the Snowden revelations got kicked out and the entire British Press went quiet about it since then.
The chances of this being genuinelly about protecting children rather than about facilitating the identification of British internet users by the GCHQ, are pretty much zero.
Personally I lived in the UK back when the Snowden revelations came out, so switched to being behind an always on VPN and since then never lost that habit. (And yeah, it’s of course not a foolproof mechanism, but it sure makes it way harder to be caught in the broad trawling done by the surveillance apparatus, plus it’s also pretty useful for “sailing the high seas”)