It’s too early to know how this law will settle into full implementation, but its implications are clear: For determined kids, it’s relatively easy to cheat; for everyone else, suddenly required to prove their ages, it’s a major privacy setback. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it:

The U.K.'s Online Safety Act took effect last Friday, putting age gates on content deemed unsuitable for minors, including pornography and content about suicide and self harm. While some sites have pulled out of the country rather than comply with the new rules,

However, as the Internet Society's Senior Director for Internet Trust, Robin Wilton, points out, the UK's current age checking solutions force internet users – both adults and children – to over-disclose personal data, including sensitive personal data, while not guaranteeing such data is kept safe and used only for the intended purpose.

The UK's Online Safety Act comes into force today, marking a shift in internet culture that is being felt around the world.

You might be familiar with the process of verifying your age in the UK. There's no shame in that. Age verification is hardly limited to just those sorts of sites—it turns out all manner of content is now age-gated,

Following a yearslong political push to make the internet safer for kids, age verification has started seeping into online spaces across the globe. Lawmakers in the US, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere have all passed age-gating rules,