The UK has recently introduced a legislative amendment seeking to prohibit children under 16 from using mainstream online services, including instant messaging, family photo sharing, Wikipedia, and more. The amendment requires all ‘regulated user-to-user services’ to implement ‘highly effective age verification,’ with an extremely broad scope that even covers self-hosted services. The article points out that this would require ordinary users to provide identification to numerous websites, raising serious privacy concerns. Additionally, this regulation would impose a disproportionate burden on small service providers, potentially leading to malicious compliance. The author believes the amendment is overly broad and severely mismatched with the ‘social media problems’ it aims to solve. The proposal reflects the potential far-reaching impacts of the UK’s Online Safety Act 2023 in practical implementation and warrants attention from the tech industry.
