Apple's biggest trust destroyer in years - and that is saying something.
What's Apple's real reason? If not a spiteful desire to put false blame on a UK law it hates.
I'm actually slightly puzzled everyone seems to assume otherwise. Amongst people I know, most are concerned about kids being ok and none want strange tracking or preparations for world war and such. Is my group odd like that?
I think the issue is the approach to protecting the kids especially when there are so many ways to do so without having to hand out personally identifiable information that will ultimately get leaked, sold, stolen, shared as I believe most of us know will happen.
There are laws in most countries on the books that require parents and legal guardians to shield children under their care from harmful things. Utilizing existing laws and slightly extending them by requiring the most common and default web clients to look for a header is about as simple and safe as it can get. Create a child account on a tablet, phone, PC and require that the child account by default has parental controls enabled. Detect a header or many other triggers and restrict access until a parent puts in a admin password. Simple as.
Requiring people to input sensitive information about themselves and their children is just asking for evil people to use it for evil things and I think most would agree that is what will happen once this current crap show reaches critical mass or somewhere close to it. Someone will implement some thing that uses magical math to obfuscate names but I can guarantee it will ultimately be reversible.
I actually predicted long ago that this would bleed over from adult sites to other platforms and that is what Apple appears to be training or conditioning people to accept. This is a case of one bad Apple spoiling them all.
So to my point legislation could have just as easily required the user-agent to look for a RTA header and utilize existing laws that require parents to be parents. There was never a need for 3rd party age verification at all to cover their asses. Does site have an RTA header? Yes == Ass covered.
