The OSA is nothing to do with kids or parenting and everything to do with further developing surveillance of the UK and controlling what we can access.

I guarantee you, at some point after this will come prohibiting content deemed terrorism such as mentions of the word 'palestine' and 'action' in the same paragraph for example.

Sooner or later we'll have our own pseudo or real great firewall. I expect them to come after VPN use at some point too.

I think the issue there is the k-ID software asks you to do things like open your mouth, then close your mouth - so you'd need to find stock photos of the same person doing stuff like that. Which, now that I think about it, I imagine there will be an influx of selfies of people with closed and open mouths available on google images very soon.

You can't use a picture of me eating noodles to open a bank account.

Whether or not that's the case, I think the proposed technical implementation above is a better way of enforcing the actual law than what's been applied so far.

Yeah, I'm not getting involved in the politics or reasoning of the assumed end goal, I'm just talking from a technical standpoint.

I mean, great? Most mainstream devices do however, whether it's an AppleID, Google account or Microsoft account.

Jesus Christ, no, I'm not suggesting that nothing changes from exactly what we do now. I'm suggesting a new, more secure, less intrusive method, and it's not even an original suggestion. Just try a little bit of thought.

If it's going to be implemented by law anyway, the age verification should be at the device level. The device accounts already do ask your age - directly or indirectly - although it's not stringently enforced, however each of the big 3 already have a minimum age requirement to set up an account as per their terms and conditions.

It's not a big leap to suggest that true age verification is done at that point seeing as you already often have to provide an age or payment information to set up on-device payment details, meaning there's no need to involve a third party at any other subsequent point.

As we've seen, the current system is incredibly easy to bypass. There are plenty of ways to game or avoid the age checks.

The current implementation also uses multiple different age verification services, on a per-site basis. This proposed one reduces data exposure vulnerabilities to a fraction.

I think that credit cards are unambiguously tied to you, whereas a photo could be a bunch of people. I appreciate that having someone take a photo of you before you go to a porn site isn't exactly anyone's idea of a utopia.