It's going to take some more searching to find an article that shows what age verification looks like for newer Apple accounts. According to that article if you have a long-standing Apple account and/or a credit card in your name in Apple Pay it might be enough to confirm you as 18+.
It links to fca.org, gov.uk, and racfonudation.org. I think the goal of this page is activism rather than journalism though, and the donation links are a much more apt way for privacy activism funding than ads like on that news site.
> Ah, the classic "aPpLe cAn dO nO wRoNg" comment from a thread full of nothing but Apple lovers.
Hey, this is an awful comment from someone who has been on HN long enough to know better. That random capitalization thing is a cheap form of sneering, as well as being a tired old internet trope, and the whole comment breaks this guideline:
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
This site is only a place where people want to participate because most people make the effort to do better than this. Please do your part to push the standards up rather than drag them down.
While I agree with the general argument that iOS shouldn’t limit the user’s freedom, it looks to me like Apple actually put in some effort to make this as privacy-preserving as possible.
The article somewhat glosses over it, but you can buy a PASS age verification card at the local post office for 15£. That one is widely accepted and it doesn’t contain unnecessary information that might cause trouble if it leaked (like for example a passport does). And 1 in 3 adults (according to the article) have an Apple account that’s old enough so that they will automatically be unlocked, no further documents needed.
The article strongly accuses iOS of being a walled garden, but I don’t see that as a particularly strong argument after iOS being locked down for ~20 years now.
And as a parent, I know that if child protection is opt-in, there’ll be a huge fight about it, because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
The PASS card features your name and photo, it's an ID by any other name.
You must have a very warped perspective of social reality if you think it should be acceptable to force every adult to show their papers before they can do anything in modern society - and all that just so you can avoid your parenting duties. And I say that as a parent.
I'm not worried about my parenting duties. I am worried about the inequality created for the kids if I am strict about rules, but other parents are not. That's why it is in my interest if other (lazier) parents are forced to comply.
And yes, the PASS card has name and photo. But no adress, no social security number or secret ID or equivalent. If your PASS card leaks, nobody can create a bank account in your name. If your passport leaks, they can. That's the difference in privacy, seen in action.
> I am worried about the inequality created for the kids if I am strict about rules, but other parents are not.
Different families can choose to raise their children differently. Please let other parents make their own parenting choices for their own kids.
There are parents who are more strict with their kids than you are in ways you don’t agree with. I guarantee you wouldn’t be happy if they were lobbying to force your kids to obey their chosen set of rules because they didn’t want “inequality”.
I am not parent comment, and I'm also not in favour of restrictions for all/most people in the name of "the kids" for all the reasons covered in this debate. Invasive age verification feels even worse.
But I gotta tell I am not looking forward to deciding which is worse when my little kids grow up and I either have to:
- let them use TikTok (or whatever it is by then) and suffer what I know to be an insidious poison
- make them be on the outside of the circle and suffer exclusion by their peers because they don't get any of the memes
I've been the only kid in class without the new 18-rated Call of Duty game, or indeed a games console to play it on. At the time, it sucked. In retrospect I totally agree with my parents, young children should not be playing games about shooting each other! (Of course other parents may disagree)
CoD was only the new hotness once every couple of years. TikTok can make something the new hotness every week.
My only real hope to escape this dilemma is that enough other parents in my cohorts realise how poisonous TT is and the problem goes away... I can't say I'm optimistic.
If your passport leaks, they can [create a bank account]
This seems like a country-specific problem. In Japan, even if opening an online bank account, a photocopy of a passport is simply insufficient to pass identity verification. Additionally, most country passports contain an IC chip that can be used for attestation. Any eKYC system that does not attempt reading data from the IC chip is fundamentally broken.
It should be a total non-issue for photocopies of passports to get leaked.
You should be concerned about a government issuing these ridiculous and dangerous controls on what you can do in society. Not whether, within that dystopia it is fair to submit in one way or another.
Also, kids understand perfectly well that different parents have different rules.
I don’t think the government or Apple should be responsible for protecting you from mopey teenagers by blocking free internet access for everyone just so that it “is fair”. Are you even hearing yourself?
But are you not worried about the democratic precedent that treating citizens as de-facto minors and arbitrarily withholding information, with little to no oversight, will set? And your kids seeing the fully realized end of that slippery slope ?
What if your government decides that anything LGBT is taboo for kids[1]? Or that informations about say, ongoing genocides, is deemed too graphic for kids.
Won't that also increase the blast radius to people who didn't bother justifying their age, even though they supposedly also have the right to vote?
Your phone should not have any business whatsoever collecting, checking, or verifying the age of the person using it.
> And as a parent, I know that if child protection is opt-in, there’ll be a huge fight about it, because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
If you cared about your children, you would be against this. Otherwise you're fighting against your children's future; their privacy, their sanity, their ability to participate in a functioning democracy.
I’m a parent and I think all of these arguments are ridiculous. You shouldn’t need the force of government across the nation to set boundaries for your own kids.
It’s also getting kind of silly to pretend that these laws are going to stop those other kids’ parents from simply age-verifying their phones for them. These fantasies where the government passes a law and suddenly every parent and child in the country settle into the exact same social norms are just that - fantasy.
Also parent in the UK - strong disagree, it’s part of our parental responsibilities to set this up, not doing it is the same as not watching a newly walking baby on the stairs (/etc). Compromising everyone’s privacy for a subset of lazy parents is a failing of society.
Relatively few newly walking babies have peers whose parents allow them to use stairs unattended making them feel socially excluded for not also using stairs unattended.
Ignoring the existence of peer pressure and calling parents lazy is a failing of individuals.
This is not going to get rid of peer pressure. That existed long before kids had phones and it will continue to be a problem with this.
Parents should be there to teach rather than just restrict. Kids will need to learn how to recognize and deal with peer pressure at some point.
Also Apple definitely benefits from peer pressure generally. Their devices are seen as status symbols, the dreaded green bubbles, maybe more. I wouldn't expect them to do anything to actually improve things in this area.
Thanks for your comment. It's good to hear from people that want this, as to understand which voters politicians are relying on for support for passing this at a legal level.
However, I fundamentally and ideologically disagree with your views on the matter, and I think your views are incompatible with a free society with checks and balances, and frankly, draconian.
> because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
That’s a strange argument. The government or anyone doesn’t have a mandate to ensure everyone has the exact same experience. Differences in upbringing are normal. I didn’t have a TV growing up while most of my friends did. It might have felt unfair at the time, but it wouldn’t justify the government forcing my parents to get one -> overreach.
iOS is a walled garden and it will be as strong an argument as ever, regardless of how long iOS has been a walled garden for. Also, don't you see how having to buy your privacy for 15£, even for 0.01£ is ridiculous? And to your last point - a parent can easily bypass all that bullshit if they wanted. They could let their kids use a normal computer without any walled gardens. What's to stop them from seeing 4chan or motherless or anything like that? Nothing. And nothing will unless you force all of society into your dystopic vision of a safe world for kids.
> you can buy a PASS age verification card at the local post office for 15£
If there's one thing the UK internet has taught me is that some brits will throw a fit for every minor inconvenience they face
"Dole appoint at 10am 30min from home!?" Means it's an unsurmountable challenge from them as they might be hangover from the previous day and what do you mean I have to pay the bus fare to get there?
Of course the privacy point stands. But their complaint is not about privacy, is about the effort
I think this is trying to fix the wrong problem. As a soon to be parent I am not that worried about supposedly adult content, but I am genuinely concerned about peer pressure into joining various social media platforms and 4 year old with phones streaming cocomelon to my kid.
This will probably be sneaked in, in more countries under the banner of age verification since more countries are proposing laws than ban children younger than 16 from social media.
I am all for the ban of social media. But I am afraid that it will give us more government meddling and interfering on our devices. And that Apple and google are “forced” to do it. They of course have their own gains.
The west believes "Data is the new oil". The west can't compete with China or India in the amount of data their citizens can generate because they are the world's most populous country. China already has a huge head start because it has already been collecting and data-mining its citizen's data. Attempts to make stronger privacy laws and sovereign data laws in many western countries will also impede data collections. But state sharing of data - through 5 Eyes, 9 Eyes and 14 Eyes - along with BigTech data could give the west an edge. (The west already has partial access to indian data because it leaks through lax data privacy laws, ill-thought indian government policies and BigTech. But Chinese data is truly firewalled.)
So yes, you are right that we will see our democracies embrace more and more control over us citizens, limiting our rights, while our governments emulate China. This is unfortunately because the west believes that being a leader in technology is essential to retain its powers.
It competes with China. But it's not like we can easily switch countries because of stupid laws, so what remains is to challrnge them. It only gives the wrong ideas to other wannabe autocrats.
I can get you residency in a number of countries in about 30 to 60 days. It’s remarkably easy to change countries an American friend of mine has over 15 residencies leading to over 10 passports. No citizenship by investment non sense either.
Will this really do any good when this kind of legislation magically appears through lobbyists simultaneously across the West? Let's not forget that blocks like the EU also have significant bullying power via trade policy.
I can only speak for the USA, but the first-past-the-post voting plus a very strong bias towards rural areas and former slave-owner states, results in a government that poorly represents any of its constituents.
I don't know if even right-wingers like this age verification crap, maybe they put up with it from Republicans so they can vote against abortion and I put up with it from Democrats so I can vote for abortion.
Of course, if you vote for a third party, you're spoilering your side. Every country is a group project run by underpaid people to try to please millions of uninformed haters. Still better than dying of dysentery, I guess.
Many of the red states are passing age verification laws to view porn sites. However 100% of the sites are either ignoring the laws if they are not in the US or easily accessible via a VPN.
Vote with your feet, with an American passport you can choose from a multitude of countries each offering the politics of your choice. You can even mix and match.
I activated ADP as soon as it was available here, and I was hoping things would work out, and friends and family who missed the opportunity would be able to use it by now as well.
I’m not pleased with this move, but its implementation has me wondering. I barely keep up with anything these days so I was taken by surprise after I updated. And, probably due to the decrepitude, I was annoyed for a few days that my phone had been nerfed and I had to roll back, before trying probably the first thing any younger person locked out would.
I’m curious, if there’s anyone who hasn’t verified a spare account, if they would point their phone at things? It might take a moment, and there’s no real feedback until the phone accepts your evidence. People have said it takes other people’s credit cards and ID, but I’m wondering if it’ll accept a pet passport too, or really what the limit is.
The real problem was never just checking age imo. It was deciding who deals with mistakes, who gets blamed when access is blocked wrongly, and how a normal user is supposed to fix it.
Moving that to the phone makes it look cleaner, but mostly just pushes the mess into a layer people have even less control over.
As much as I'd like to see Apple fight this, shouldn't the blame be placed on the governments for compelling this, rather than on Apple? What is the alternative, pulling out of the UK?
While I'd love this hard-line approach, as it might make other countries think twice, the stockholders probably wouldn't love it.
> Laws like the Online Safety Act 2023 apply to websites and online services — not to entire phone operating systems.
Doesn't this go back to companies like Meta lobbying to push the responsibility to the OS instead of taking it on themselves? I read they did that in the US, I can only assume they did it in the UK as well.
Frankly, I'd rather have Apple qualify me as over 18 one time, and pass a simple boolean to a site vs having to upload proof (an ID, photos...) to every website I want to use. This may be the lesser of two evils.
So this is interesting. Apple's an incumbent, not some new disruptive company. What I mean to say is this isn't like a rideshare company that goes in burning money to build public sentiment while lobbying the politicians.
Everyone knows who Apple is. I'm certain UK gov has been in constant communication with Apple on how this is to be rolled out. They would have communicated intent and received feedback from Apple as to how they'll ship it. It's within their capability to lobby/advertise opposition to laws like this but logical option in Apple's position is to insist on a common framework countries could use so they don't need to build a different verify for every country.
I really do think Apple's primary opposition to not having E2EE is they didn't want to deal with the cost of complying with requests and the liability of hosting illegal content. That's the real pushback, because it's ongoing cost/liability to them.
One silver lining this is finally going to push me to switch to a dedicated camera and some niche unrestricted Linux or graphene device as a phone. Goodbye iPhone. (I say this as someone with an Apple account old enough to auto “qualify”, how lucky).
Fuck the bureaucrats responsible for this. I’m so sick of being completely powerless to fight any of this, being forced to sit and watch. Writing to my MP changes nothing. Signing petitions does nothing. The Government doesn’t give a fuck. They’ve had so many golden opportunities to differentiate themselves from the Tories and all they’ve done is carry the torch.
I will vote for any party that promises to rewind this crap, I don’t care what other policies they have. Enough of the nannying.
Could there not be a reason that Apple made this choice involving their own legal risk? Sometimes what a law actually requires is up to what happens in court in the future.
I'm guessing Apple made the calculation that doing this was cheaper than litigating it. The slop submission in OP makes the claim that the law doesn't apply, but I skimmed it already and came to the conclusion it could apply and it will be up to the courts to make the precedent.
'internet services' is extremely broad and could include apple's own appstore, icloud services, maybe even their browser could be considered software acting on behalf of a provider.
With all this being said, I do think Apple probably could have fought it and even if they had to leave the UK market, they'd still be fine. They rely on China and South Korea to manufacture their devices so they would not be fine without these markets.
It's probably related to the fact that Apple doesn't see itself selling devices, you don't really buy and own the phone. You rent a device from them and the Apple account is the doorway to that subscription plan.
The comment that you are replying to is saying that it's not exclusive to Apple and gives a non-Apple example. Your link has zero instances of the string "Apple". What am I missing.
> The law is about platforms that deal in pornography, self harm, etc
Apple isn't doing shit except for following the law. If you don't like the law, change it.
I will edit this to say, since I'm sure people are out there who will make this point: yes, I read the article. I disagree with it. "Not required by the OS" Well that isn't going to matter much when Apple gets hit with a big fat fine for "allowing" underage users on social media.
You can blame the government as much as you like, but this is actually has to do with british nature, they have an obsessive need for control, and if you worked with some you will immediately notice how they will try to make all sort of policies and shit to control the other party, all while they pretend they are open about hearing other’s opinions. So it kinda backfired, what goes around comes around.
My favourite example of this was when Thatcher passed a law banning the broadcast of Sinn Féin. The BBC responded by dubbing the audio with actors’ voices. So you would watch the news and see an interview with Gerry Adams, but you would be hearing an actor speak his words, meaning the BBC were complying with the law by not broadcasting his voice.
And I would rather have the _choice_ whether to prove my age to Apple or not. I think if it were optional, with the additional option of "share my age with websites & apps", nobody would have an issue with it.
What do people expect when handing over their computing to a for-profit company? You can use various services where you knowingly hand over some of your data or offload a computational load, but with Apple it's like you're handing off the keys to your house, the plumbing, the electric wiring, the bricks, the alarm system and everything else to 1 entity. And you get upset when you realize you're just renting a property with less assurance you'd get from a slumlord in the ghetto. And for a lot of people that Apple property is their main computing property. Not a vacation home away from their desktop. Once they're evicted, once the slumlord disables the heating, increases the price of water or forbids you from inviting people, you have no other recourse.
This has more to do with the UK government than a "for-profit company". Apple has been one of the biggest forces pushing back against this kind of thing forever, at least in the US where companies still have rights.
No it doesn't. The UK government instituted age checks for social media, Apple didn't like the UK government and enabled age checks for the OS, wanting to blame the government for it. It's done this sort of thing before.
I found this Apple Insider page with more information and an actual description of how it works, from someone doing journalism instead of soliciting donations and subscriptions: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/02/25/how-age-verificat...
It's going to take some more searching to find an article that shows what age verification looks like for newer Apple accounts. According to that article if you have a long-standing Apple account and/or a credit card in your name in Apple Pay it might be enough to confirm you as 18+.
An article about the age restrictions should at least have some supporting evidence, or at minimum some screenshots like the article I linked.
I can confirm that is the case.
Hey, this is an awful comment from someone who has been on HN long enough to know better. That random capitalization thing is a cheap form of sneering, as well as being a tired old internet trope, and the whole comment breaks this guideline:
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
This site is only a place where people want to participate because most people make the effort to do better than this. Please do your part to push the standards up rather than drag them down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The article somewhat glosses over it, but you can buy a PASS age verification card at the local post office for 15£. That one is widely accepted and it doesn’t contain unnecessary information that might cause trouble if it leaked (like for example a passport does). And 1 in 3 adults (according to the article) have an Apple account that’s old enough so that they will automatically be unlocked, no further documents needed.
The article strongly accuses iOS of being a walled garden, but I don’t see that as a particularly strong argument after iOS being locked down for ~20 years now.
And as a parent, I know that if child protection is opt-in, there’ll be a huge fight about it, because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
You must have a very warped perspective of social reality if you think it should be acceptable to force every adult to show their papers before they can do anything in modern society - and all that just so you can avoid your parenting duties. And I say that as a parent.
And yes, the PASS card has name and photo. But no adress, no social security number or secret ID or equivalent. If your PASS card leaks, nobody can create a bank account in your name. If your passport leaks, they can. That's the difference in privacy, seen in action.
Different families can choose to raise their children differently. Please let other parents make their own parenting choices for their own kids.
There are parents who are more strict with their kids than you are in ways you don’t agree with. I guarantee you wouldn’t be happy if they were lobbying to force your kids to obey their chosen set of rules because they didn’t want “inequality”.
Or are you worried about your kids getting an unfair advantage over unrestricted ones?
But I gotta tell I am not looking forward to deciding which is worse when my little kids grow up and I either have to: - let them use TikTok (or whatever it is by then) and suffer what I know to be an insidious poison - make them be on the outside of the circle and suffer exclusion by their peers because they don't get any of the memes
I've been the only kid in class without the new 18-rated Call of Duty game, or indeed a games console to play it on. At the time, it sucked. In retrospect I totally agree with my parents, young children should not be playing games about shooting each other! (Of course other parents may disagree)
CoD was only the new hotness once every couple of years. TikTok can make something the new hotness every week.
My only real hope to escape this dilemma is that enough other parents in my cohorts realise how poisonous TT is and the problem goes away... I can't say I'm optimistic.
You don't need to worry about "lazier". I don't think that exists in the context of your concerns.
It should be a total non-issue for photocopies of passports to get leaked.
Also, kids understand perfectly well that different parents have different rules.
I don’t think the government or Apple should be responsible for protecting you from mopey teenagers by blocking free internet access for everyone just so that it “is fair”. Are you even hearing yourself?
What if your government decides that anything LGBT is taboo for kids[1]? Or that informations about say, ongoing genocides, is deemed too graphic for kids. Won't that also increase the blast radius to people who didn't bother justifying their age, even though they supposedly also have the right to vote?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Parental_Rights_in_Edu...
> And as a parent, I know that if child protection is opt-in, there’ll be a huge fight about it, because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.
If you cared about your children, you would be against this. Otherwise you're fighting against your children's future; their privacy, their sanity, their ability to participate in a functioning democracy.
One can always get a dumbphone without this.
Rinse and repeat until you break
It’s also getting kind of silly to pretend that these laws are going to stop those other kids’ parents from simply age-verifying their phones for them. These fantasies where the government passes a law and suddenly every parent and child in the country settle into the exact same social norms are just that - fantasy.
Ignoring the existence of peer pressure and calling parents lazy is a failing of individuals.
Parents should be there to teach rather than just restrict. Kids will need to learn how to recognize and deal with peer pressure at some point.
Also Apple definitely benefits from peer pressure generally. Their devices are seen as status symbols, the dreaded green bubbles, maybe more. I wouldn't expect them to do anything to actually improve things in this area.
However, I fundamentally and ideologically disagree with your views on the matter, and I think your views are incompatible with a free society with checks and balances, and frankly, draconian.
That’s a strange argument. The government or anyone doesn’t have a mandate to ensure everyone has the exact same experience. Differences in upbringing are normal. I didn’t have a TV growing up while most of my friends did. It might have felt unfair at the time, but it wouldn’t justify the government forcing my parents to get one -> overreach.
If there's one thing the UK internet has taught me is that some brits will throw a fit for every minor inconvenience they face
"Dole appoint at 10am 30min from home!?" Means it's an unsurmountable challenge from them as they might be hangover from the previous day and what do you mean I have to pay the bus fare to get there?
Of course the privacy point stands. But their complaint is not about privacy, is about the effort
Just sad that Western citizen are throwing hard earned privacy rights so easily out of the window. Giving in to the most trivial emotional blackmail.
I am all for the ban of social media. But I am afraid that it will give us more government meddling and interfering on our devices. And that Apple and google are “forced” to do it. They of course have their own gains.
A “ban” is literally government interference.
Pick a lane.
You are either with us or against us.
Problem solved, and with minimal government meddling.
So yes, you are right that we will see our democracies embrace more and more control over us citizens, limiting our rights, while our governments emulate China. This is unfortunately because the west believes that being a leader in technology is essential to retain its powers.
I really do.
Unlikely, considering most places require you to fulfill the granted residency by actually physically being there.
And are these even places you'd want to live?
I don't know if even right-wingers like this age verification crap, maybe they put up with it from Republicans so they can vote against abortion and I put up with it from Democrats so I can vote for abortion.
Of course, if you vote for a third party, you're spoilering your side. Every country is a group project run by underpaid people to try to please millions of uninformed haters. Still better than dying of dysentery, I guess.
“The west” is now the global north, it’s mostly 3rd world countries dying of old age and going bankrupt in the process.
I’m not pleased with this move, but its implementation has me wondering. I barely keep up with anything these days so I was taken by surprise after I updated. And, probably due to the decrepitude, I was annoyed for a few days that my phone had been nerfed and I had to roll back, before trying probably the first thing any younger person locked out would.
I’m curious, if there’s anyone who hasn’t verified a spare account, if they would point their phone at things? It might take a moment, and there’s no real feedback until the phone accepts your evidence. People have said it takes other people’s credit cards and ID, but I’m wondering if it’ll accept a pet passport too, or really what the limit is.
Moving that to the phone makes it look cleaner, but mostly just pushes the mess into a layer people have even less control over.
While I'd love this hard-line approach, as it might make other countries think twice, the stockholders probably wouldn't love it.
> Laws like the Online Safety Act 2023 apply to websites and online services — not to entire phone operating systems.
Doesn't this go back to companies like Meta lobbying to push the responsibility to the OS instead of taking it on themselves? I read they did that in the US, I can only assume they did it in the UK as well.
Frankly, I'd rather have Apple qualify me as over 18 one time, and pass a simple boolean to a site vs having to upload proof (an ID, photos...) to every website I want to use. This may be the lesser of two evils.
Everyone knows who Apple is. I'm certain UK gov has been in constant communication with Apple on how this is to be rolled out. They would have communicated intent and received feedback from Apple as to how they'll ship it. It's within their capability to lobby/advertise opposition to laws like this but logical option in Apple's position is to insist on a common framework countries could use so they don't need to build a different verify for every country.
I really do think Apple's primary opposition to not having E2EE is they didn't want to deal with the cost of complying with requests and the liability of hosting illegal content. That's the real pushback, because it's ongoing cost/liability to them.
Not long till complete authentication of the human at every level is required to use a computer.
I will vote for any party that promises to rewind this crap, I don’t care what other policies they have. Enough of the nannying.
Part 5 is too broadly written: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/part/5
'internet services' is extremely broad and could include apple's own appstore, icloud services, maybe even their browser could be considered software acting on behalf of a provider.
Now of course they could be stretching, but OFCOM has their own overview that digs into just how broad they consider the legislation: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli...
With all this being said, I do think Apple probably could have fought it and even if they had to leave the UK market, they'd still be fine. They rely on China and South Korea to manufacture their devices so they would not be fine without these markets.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfukJ6uVHXs
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/126788
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...
> The law is about platforms that deal in pornography, self harm, etc
So...not exclusive to Apple.
The narrative that people have a right to privacy and we should prevent government overreach?
I will edit this to say, since I'm sure people are out there who will make this point: yes, I read the article. I disagree with it. "Not required by the OS" Well that isn't going to matter much when Apple gets hit with a big fat fine for "allowing" underage users on social media.
Brits are masters of malicious compliance.
My favourite example of this was when Thatcher passed a law banning the broadcast of Sinn Féin. The BBC responded by dubbing the audio with actors’ voices. So you would watch the news and see an interview with Gerry Adams, but you would be hearing an actor speak his words, meaning the BBC were complying with the law by not broadcasting his voice.
I think that’s what Apple is banking on. They sell privacy as a feature of their products, and I’m grateful for that.
So it’s not optional. At least in Australia.