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.
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.