The UK has eliminated cookie pop up requirements. However, they have introduced other legislation that requires websites to establish the ages of all visitors via checking legal ID so that adult content can be restricted. This is expected to be done by integrating with (paid) third-party APIs that will keep track of users’ legal identity across websites. This will be both privacy-invasive for users and expensive for website operators. The UK has also axed many of the EU-based data protections that users have.

The postscript has a reasonable summary:

« in their professional experience, age verification is only ever invoked in discussions around what we might call explicit adult content: pornography, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. So that’s what they assume this discussion is about, here, in the UK. They don’t realise, until I explain it to them, that the UK legislative discussion is not just about preventing children from accessing those four kinds of content. It’s about mandating age verification for anything and everything, for every user, of every age, in front of access to all topics, all subjects, all sites, all service providers, all opinions, and all content. The whole public open web. Everything. »

The UK legislators want to replace GDPR with a watered down version that only applies to the UK. Their claim is that this will allow businesses to save money on compliance. (Me: Companies in Brazil, Australia and the US comply with GDPR, so realistically British companies will have to abide to both regulations and so costs can only increase)

Furthermore the British government is planning to force all websites to verify their visitors’ age (allegedly using government approved providers), which is orders of magnitudes more onerous than GDPR (me: which is actually almost free unless you abuse your users’ data).

Indeed this is overly editorialised and the author very much assumes the reader is of the same opinion of them from the outset. The author seems to believe that web browsers will just ignore UK legislation and not bother to implement the necessary changes.