The british government has become increasingly involved in regulating tech, I’m not going to talk about their specific implementations because mostly it’s unknown and highly speculative. Considering the public outcry it’s clear the government has no intention to listen to the people on the issue of regulation which considering how technically illiterate the average person is this is not the worst thing in the world, I’m going to work under the assumption that the government is honest about their intentions because anything else requires me to make up completely unsupported headcannon and fanfics about politicians and political parties the other only requires me to believe the government is mostly incompetant.

I am going to advocate strongly for a government digital ID, if done correctly it could achieve several important things.

  1. lowering children consuming adult material.
  2. lowering children/teenagers having access to alcohol and vapes.
  3. making fake ids a thing of the past.

If the government made a digital id app that offers a changing code/qr then a simple api server that just returns valid/invalid it would allow websites to just request a code from the app that then validates they are (likely)1 over 18.

Each time a shop sells alcohol or a vape they scan an dID (digital id) this allows the goverment to easily audit shops and find out if they’re doing anything they shouldn’t using ZK proofs on the digital id system would allow the goverment to be able to track how many different people bought 18+ items at a store without the government knowing who bought what - now you might say whats to stop a shop scanning their own ID then buying a ton of vapes - my answer to that is you are stupid - do you think that would survive an audit? it would happen and some people would get away with it - but people also get away with murder, but we should still have a law against it.

On the problem of trying to regulate VPNs and stop children taking and distributing nude pictues/content the government is simply targeting the wrong vector - make it so that phone manufacturers can make two phone types, adult and child, for a store to sell an adult phone id is needed, for an adult phone to be used digital id has to be provided (ideally on a monthly basis) the childs phone has certain features hardlocked (most parents don’t know iphones have a feature that locally and privately stops the phone from being able to take, send or recieve nude photos) maybe even remove the cameras all together - these phones have to adhere to a government whitelist, apps can apply to be on the whitelist and get reviewed certain categories (social media, gambling, VPNs, AI) are permentantly exempt from the whitelist.

The childs phone also has a scrolling message on the lockscreen specifying it’s a childs device, then the police are given the right to ask any under 18 person to show their lockscreen, if it is not a childs phone the child is arrested, the phone logged and destroyed (with no option to pull data off it) and the parents are issued a fine, parents often claim they cannot control their children but pretty quickly they’d find a way, especially since circumventing this system would more than likely require the parent to cooperate with the child.

This would solve basically everything the government is trying to solve to a much more effective degree and more importantly would have far less collateral damage, the growing pains would lead to people whining but in the long run you would greatly benefit british children and help deal with the issue of anti social behaviour that is mostly created by social media.

  1. if your criticism of a system is “it’s not 100% effective” you are beyond help ↩