The impending July date for the UK Online Services Act is terrifying TBQH
If you don’t know, the Government wants to ensure that all websites with user-to-user content (ie pretty much anything online) has a way to stop children looking at explicit content. This also includes mandatory age checks.
Enforcement action is going to be taken mostly against large sites. I highly doubt Ofcom will go after Fediverse instances. But there’s always that space, especially since our clearly illiterate politicians seem to not understand the bureaucratic nightmare that they have forced all websites to undergo for no real reason.
Now you’re going to have to trust that a website is going to handle your proof of age documents appropriately? In fact almost any website, at this point…
The wild thing is that there is literally no guidance from the Government on how smaller websites should handle this at all!!
Proving your age offline is simple: you hand over something, the other person looks and you get it back. It is proportional. However, proving your age online is like if the bartender took your ID, photocopied it, and stored it forever, and you have no idea how secure their safe is or if they’ll let anyone else access that safe.
This is a disproportionate overreach by the state.
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