The Wikipedia entry on Chat Control doesn't go into enough detail on what exactly it does, only the history of its legislative process. Can someone update it?
Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.
The existing paradigm is on-device parental controls. It's worked for the past 30 years, and the alternative is forcing everyone to show government ID to use websites.
I vaguely recall a story about an employee who discovered that their company's sales department was acquiring a lot of new customers to hit some metrics, but rarely actually closing the deal. The employee spent months chasing up incomplete sales orders, and discovered that the sales department's apparent success was illusory.
Most VPN companies won't implement age verification, because their purpose is privacy. This is really an attempt to ban VPNs. This won't be popular when 70% of the population uses VPNs.
UK government has been talking about digital ID for a while now. The existing verification methods are too vulnerable to cheating (fake beards, fake ID, borrow dad's credit card, etc...), so the logical next step is direct government ID numbers. The goal is to link all online activity to a unique identifier to make it easier to punish dissent.
Exactly. A little at a time. First it's adult sites, because if you need to show ID to buy alcohol, shouldn't you need ID to buy pornography? Once that's accepted, expand the sphere of control to non-adult sites too by redefining everything as 16+.
I suspect something like this is on the way, in the long term. Every site has some Cloudflare captcha or the like to guard against the AI scraper bots. Eventually, we may need some kind of token which is only issued to real humans.
I wonder why the rating code is so complex. Pornhub.com has this code enabled, but it also uses a simpler <meta name="rating" content="adult">. 4chan also uses the latter.
We have parental controls on devices. The change forced by the UK government is to give control to corporations, instead of the parents.
Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.
About 2 million adults in the UK don't have government-issued photo ID. Certainly many 16-17 year olds will have trouble verifying their age. They're blocking huge sectors of the UK population from being able to use the internet normally.
Indeed. I don't see why the verification process has to be done once per user per website, instead of once per user. That maximizes costs, inconvenience, privacy risks, and compliance failures.
This is bizarre, then, because the on-device Apple system just enables the existing parental controls by default, while the online verification systems are easily cirvumvented.
There's still the issue of how to verify the user to give them that 1 bit. The current tools do not trust the user or the user's device, because the user could lie or modify the software on their device. But once my ID leaves the device, it becomes a privacy issue. You also have the problem that every pre-2026 device no longer functions with any site that requires the 1 bit.
Quite right. Around 2 million UK adults don't have photo ID, mostly concentrated among poorer and less educated people, and many of those have difficulty getting credit card for the same reason. The UK is violating their basic ECHR rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assocation, and the peaceful enjoyment of their property, and it's unnecessary because we already have parental controls.