People tend to be a lot more reasonable in person, and also if you listen to them first.
The UK has a strong tradition of safeguarding privacy while ensuring that appropriate action can be taken against criminals, such as child sexual abusers and terrorists. I firmly believe that privacy and security are not mutually exclusive—we can and must have both. The Investigatory Powers Act governs how and when data can be requested by law enforcement and other relevant agencies. It includes robust safeguards and independent oversight to protect privacy, ensuring that data is accessed only in exceptional cases and only when necessary and proportionate. The suggestion that cybersecurity and access to data by law enforcement are at odds is false. It is possible for online platforms to have strong cybersecurity measures whilst also ensuring that criminal activities can be detected.
Working with startups, I've signed up for 100s of sites. My password manager lists 550. Those signups are currently low-risk: just my email (already widely public) and a random password. But it would put a big chill on my work if I had to upload government age verification docs to each one.
I can tell you that isn't entirely true. When they get a lot of messages about the same thing, or better still you meet them in person, they may keep giving you the 'party line response', but they will also be feeding back that there is discontent to the whips.
This undermines the entire point of the process and only further degrades public trust.
A politician is like ROM: Once it's written, that's it, you have to swap it out with a different ROM if you want even one of its lines of programming changed.
Legislation like this does not make children safer, it makes everyone else less safe.
To stop it now we need a majority of MPs who are willing to take a political risk to reject it.
Which isn't going to happen.
Except the Lords can send back a law indefinitely until the Commons accepts it. There have been cases in which laws were sent back 60 times until what the Lords wanted was added. A house with hereditary posts with infinite veto power.
The UK is not democracy. It never was.
It is an utter waste of time. MPs already know about the concerns. They don't care. I wrote to my MP about many of these concerns in the past. You either get ignored, told you are enabling pedos, told there will be protections put in place (ignoring the whole point is that I don't trust the government), or you get a boilerplate reply.
Moreover The vast majority of people (unfortunately this includes people in my own family) have been propagandised to agree with all iffy censorship, monitoring and other spooky nonsense the UK state engages with.