My feeds have been flooded with it over the past 24 hours, and even some prominent privacy groups have been amplifying the hysteria. The panic claims everyone is about to lose full phone access unless they submit to digital ID checks.
While the actual situation stems from recent Westminster pressure on tech giants around device-level age controls and online safety, the viral framing is completely overblown. There’s no law turning every adult’s phone into a brick tomorrow.
That said, the underlying trend of pushing age-verification and filtering hooks deeper into OS-level infrastructure is still a massive red flag for encryption and digital sovereignty.
In the UK for many years your sim card is on “adult content protection” by default and needs ID submission to the mobile operator for adult content access over mobile internet. Sucks, but that’s nothing new.
Haven’t heard of anything about this being done on a device level.
Then you simply missed a few news stories:
This is why countries need constitutions that limit what laws governments are allowed to pass. This is approximately the prototype of something governments just shouldn’t be allowed to ever do.
Thing is all you needed to do to unlock that content was go into a phone shop and show your ID, or a penny charge to a credit card. Not this ridiculous “upload your ID” shit.