There’s no law turning every adult’s phone into a brick tomorrow.

give it time

Good luck with that on a GrapheneOS phone.

Is it better people think this is entirely true if it gets them to take their privacy and data sovereignty more seriously at a large scale? The average person already distrusts big tech and governments. What's to say half truths don't help us all overall?

Time to get a dumbphone

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.

How is it locked down? Does that mean websites can't track me because I'm using a child locked phone? Sounds like a nice feature, depending on how locked down it is.

the viral framing is completely overblown

still a massive red flag

There you go.

shit, looks like I would have a cellphone then

I'm not familiar with UK legislation in particular, but considering approaches taken by other legislative bodies, their works effectively require online services to serve "age-appropriate experiences" based on age signals; which includes websites, applications and application stores. So unless an adult is content with just experiences deemed "appropriate" for all users (even children under 10), the user is extremely limited in their access. So I don't think "bricked" is necessarily an overstatement.

Is it not accurate? That's exactly what happened in Australia with similar laws. I was able to use a fake ID to bypass it but without that I wouldn't be able to use any iOS/macOS device without restrictions

When I was in Scotland, I purposely brought an old iPhone that was passed down to me with an EU account to see if Apple will show this prompt in Settings. Nothing ever appeared in the Settings, only the Apple prompt urging you to set up Apple Pay.

Interestingly, when I signed in to Instagram account I only use for our class group chats (to which I rarely write messages because of CC1.0 in force) and had my VPN set to London, no age verification prompt ever appeared. Tbh it was before the Meta settlement, but still.

So yeah, it's overblown to high hell.

I'd say good luck extending this to desktops, but MS might beat them to the punch if this becomes standardized and apps/sites start blocking alt OSes like Linux or BSD and start vendor-locking to Windows for age-gate DRM purposes.

There’s no law turning every adult’s phone into a brick tomorrow.

Is anyone making that claim? Based on what I see in that image, phones will have limited functionality. I don't know enough about the situation to know if that's overblown, but I certainly don't interpret that as saying "bricked".

It’s crazy how quickly a policy debate gets compressed into online panic. Between people assuming their phones are about to become expensive bricks and others leaning entirely into the time to buy a dumb phone comments, it's hard to separate the real threats from the noise.

Looking past the viral posts to see what’s actually being pushed, why the panic overstates things, and why privacy advocates are still right to be uneasy about the push toward OS-level age checks

https://unknownuniverse.uk/privacy-security/smartphone-id-panic/

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!