UK Wants All Mobiles to Block Explicit Images Unless You Prove Age
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/15/uk-pushes-apple-block-explicit-images/
Posted by BillWilberforce
UK Wants All Mobiles to Block Explicit Images Unless You Prove Age
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/15/uk-pushes-apple-block-explicit-images/
Posted by BillWilberforce
44 Comments
> According to the report, Home Office officials want device operating systems to prevent any nudity from being displayed unless users can verify that they’re adults through biometric checks or official ID.
> The proposal is said to target mobile devices initially, but it could extend to desktops
Can The five eyes alliance just be honest and admit they want to know what everyone is doing at all times.
They already can do. You can block it with the mobile network provider and you can set your home wifi router up to block them and prevent connections to other wifi connections….Maybe parents just need to….parent.
If you are an apple family, then child accounts automatically blur anything sexual/nude, and explain why, and send the parent a notification.
Seems to work well.
So they either are unaware of this, or… MAYBE this is nothing to do with protecting kids?
Shrug.
>But neither company offers system-wide nudity blocking that extends to third-party apps like WhatsApp.
Because it would mean running every frame rendered through AI in real time. It’s not possible.
Unenforceable and will never happen, ragebait for clicks.
Parents need to be responsible for their children.
Otherwise they get used as the excuse for expanded surveillance powers
So if a 16 year old takes a dik pix to send to his dear beloved, the moment he takes it Apple just locks down the phone? They are just scanning all photos at all times?
Common sense solution from some reddit bumpkin:
-Make giving access to adult material to someone underage a criminal/ sexual offense.
When the government tells you that something is “for the children” or “to protect the children”, be extremely skeptical of what they’re doing.
We will not rest until every last person in the UK has submitted their photo and ID documentation to a US tech startup called “Checkr” or some shit.
Is uk government really don’t have anything better to do? Like you know- uncontrolled illegal migration, housing crisis, youth joblessness, knife crime and so on? Why don’t we leave parents deal with their horny teens?
And they wonder why so many with the ability to leave are leaving this country. When all of the business owners leave and the job crisis is even worse, give it a couple of years before the leaders are getting strung up on lamposts.
This has always been a thing, its default to block all 18 content unless you log into the account and give them details.
“You will only see what we want you to see unless you give us the ability to track your Internet habits”
I don’t really blame porn and nudity for dangerous in-celibates, there’s genuinely something really wrong with you if you can watch whatever extreme shit you’re watching and correlate that with the real world.
I think these people were much worse back in the day, they’ve just got a name for it and something to push as a cause.
I do think this becomes a lot more existential too, there’s just bad people in this world. More people will continue to be stabbed/assaulted/raped and we should do everything in our power to minimise that, I’m just not sure what wac a mole policy may achieve in the long term especially if it only really benefits FVEY’s.
Little do they know just how easy it is to get around…
this has already happen but reminds me off the black ,mirror epsiode where the child was blurred to indecent images
Yeah, pretty sure this falls on the parents to set up content controls
– plus a lot of network providers do this already; when I first moved to Vodafone I couldn’t even access cocktail recipes!
I feel like a lot of these problems could be solved by parents being better educated in technology, not papping their kids onto tablets, and taking a closer interest in what their kids actually get up to…
Doesn’t that already happen by default?
I’m sure I had to go onto my Vodafone account and ask them to turn the filter off so I could watch hairy grannies from York vol 2
The authoritarians won’t stop until they’re shut down.
I changed network provider and safe search is locked on with 5g by default. I still haven’t gotten round to getting them to unlock it. Fortunately I don’t have much desire to look at tits on my phone when I’m out and about
*”Apple and Google will soon be “encouraged” to build nudity-detection algorithms into their software by default”*
*”device operating systems to prevent any nudity from being displayed unless users can verify that they’re adults through biometric checks or official ID.”*
Great, so now every adult will have to do biometric checks so their corn viewing habits can be logged against their ID number.
So block ALL explicit things?
Thats going to prevent us going to the BBC website (they blatantly pay hush money to paedophiles), any religious site as the bible is quite graphic as is the Quran….etc etc.
It’s getting out of hand, it feels like a huge over reach from the state.
This is a pretty clear example of how MPs are easily bought off by vendors of magic solutions that don’t work.
Also SafeToNet are a registered charity, that seems to exist for the purposes of lobbying for measures that they can meet commercially – we have to strike these organisations of the charity registrar.
Fair enough – but be sensible about these things.
My phone number, email address, iCloud & Google accounts are themselves well over the age of majority.
How much control they trying to get over your smart phone. May as well just get one of them North Korean red OS phones at this rate.
Today it’s pron tomorrow is anything the party doesn’t want you see.
Nope. not possible. This will mean altering all OS and they don’t build separate OS for UK. Besides, figuring out nudity is a computationally expensive task. What if someone’s running iPhone 5? Are they going to do this detection online then? That’s not just surveillance but will also make user experience for everything super bad. And to add, will eff your data bandwidth.
Why not do the novel thing of stopping the baiting of sex to sell ads? Make platforms change their algorithm.
All the platforms here know that sexualised images sells more clicks, products, links and the platform opioid of ad revenue. The more clickbait and attention holding reels of near nakedness holds users on sites and steal attentive n and keeps that all important retention numbers high for ad ROI. So they’ve no intention of stopping it.
Every government concerned about child protection then takes an action to stop and filter content, there’s comments about ISP blocking, parenting tools etc, but this is the bandaid on the open sore. Stop the bleed. Tax the platforms, force them to demote and limit sexual content on none 18+ websites so parents are the backstop.
I don’t fully agree nor disagree agree with UK age verification, or that parent should be the sole bastion of parent and child behaviour, but when everyone is staring into the internet hosepipe controlled by a few tech billionaires, the tap needs turning before you reach for a mop and bucket.
How soon before this is extended to I don’t know, footage of war crimes by us or allies policing misconduct or MP scandals
Please can they focus and what we actually want them to fix? FFS.
Unemployment, economy, crime, underfunded NHS, peace in middle east etc.
So now the terrorism scape goat no longer works for expanding the surveillance state we’re now using children as the scape goat
Imagine if they could stop propaganda, trolls, bots , fake news, rage bait….
All over europe, paid for by Russia…
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/13/fake-anti-labour-video-billion-views-youtube-2025?
I heard about this a few days ago, it is an ideology of everyone is guilty unless they can prove otherwise in order to catch a tiny minority.
They are also passing legislation for databases to be kept on children and their details. It is really deep dystopian Orwellian stuff. Being fielded in us Brits by a truly psychotic liberalist ideological mindset.
I expect they only reason they made it voluntary is because the manufactures told them where to go if they made it mandatory, and that they would leave the UK market squarely pointing the blame at UK government.
Oh they also want those ‘protection’ systems to be implemented by service prefers too of cellular and fibre networks.
But the end goal is to have total digital ID control of the citizens, your EVERY move WILL be tracked by Ai, and you will only receive money in digital form and part of the punishment for you doing thinking or saying ANYTHING not State approved, will be restriction of your money or services to you. It is in the WEF plan.
They want to desperately copy Chinas socialist system and take it a step further.
They only care about kids when it suits their agenda
Pretty sure all major networks do that by default anyway. Not on WiFi, thats separate l, but using 4g or 5g mobile network data typically has 18+ content locked by default.
Source: have worked for various mobile network stores in the past and have helped many many people remove the automatically applied 18+ restrictions because they want to “go on gambling sites” – usually you have to go in store with ID or use a credit card to lift the lock.
Why are they fixing a problem thats already fixed?
ffs the authoritarian puritans are on a right high these days aren’t they? There’s always been a nagging nosy nanny attitude at the heart of British culture; this weird holdover from the long gone days of aristocracy and feudalism that the powers that be know what’s best for the serfs and that we can’t be trusted.
/rant
Is anyone falling for this think of the children bullshit? There have been online safety measures for almost as long as there’s been an internet and there have been phone apps that do this for almost as long as there have been smartphones. All it takes if for parents to care enough to actually protect their own kids.
This has never been about anything more than handing personal information, including facial recognition, to third party corporations. Considering facial recognition tech is increasingly present in the streets it really doesn’t take much to join the dots and see what their motives are.
Why is labour actually obsessed with kids looking at porn? There’s far more harmful stuff out there and if the content of the porn is the issue maybe they should regulate that instead e.g. stop pornhub putting out anything with violence in it
No internet laws would have protected Madeline McCann
No internet laws would have saved anyone at the Manchester Arena
No internet laws would have saved James Bulger
No internet laws would have prevented the Grenfell Tower fire
No internet laws would have prevented Lucy Letby
No internet laws would have stopped the grooming scandal
No internet laws would have stopped Jimmy Saville
Every single horrific event that has unfolded involving children in this country could not in any way have been prevented by even the strictest internet censorship laws possible so why are we entertaining the ridiculous notion that more censorship is how you safeguard children?
The threat isn’t the internet, it isn’t the video game, the movie, the song or the TikTok video. The threat is and always has been the person and that person will always do what they are going to do
End the OSA, stop the ridiculous internet control laws and accept, for the first time in history, that responsibility for protecting children begins AND ENDS with the parent
“The government reportedly explored making the controls mandatory for devices sold in the UK”
Oh please just F- off at this point. Why the hell should anyone need ID to look at their own files, especially if the photos were for medical reasons. This just becoming an absurd overreach.
How much more are they going to hide under the guise of child safety?
I look forward to them spinning this into needed access to our bank accounts and transactions in real-time because protect dem kids!!!!
Labour looked at the term “nanny state” and took that as a challenge.
Honestly, the Tories are bad for it as well sometimes but Labour seems to think it’s a competition now.