The U.K.’s Online Safety Act came into effect recently and went on to immediately cause a storm, doing little to help the country’s perceived love of licenses.

From the increasingly archaic TV license to the need for accreditation to own and use a fishing rod, the Online Safety Act effectively introduced a need to provide identification to access "not safe for work" (NSFW) content.

Now, users who log onto sites like Pornhub or RedTube are met with a choice: provide their details to prove they’re over the legal age to access such content, or find some other way to goon.

Understandably, the change was met with derision, with a petition calling for it to be repealed amassing more than 500,000 signatures at the time of writing.

The Labour Government has channelled its best impression of Helen Lovejoy from "The Simpsons" in defense of the legislation – "Won't someone think of the children!?"

Technology secretary Peter Kyle went so far as to suggest that those against the bill are on the same side as child abusers such as Jimmy Savile (OK, he was referring to one Nigel Farage, but still).

Sites like those mentioned above were admittedly easy to access, with previous mechanisms simply requiring users to click on a box stating that they were over the age of 18. Hardly foolproof stuff – there are even clankers that can beat those tests now.

But where the Online Safety Act makes it harder to access porn sites, its broad oversight extends its tendrils across the internet. Now, any platform that labels content as NSFW, such as videos that contain copious amounts of swearing or violence, would be covered by the Act, meaning sites like Discord, X, or Reddit have to more stringently verify user ages.

The petition calling for the Act’s repeal mentions sites like online hobby forums being impacted – hardly the place where a kid might find hardcore pornography.

Suddenly, groups talking about everything from trains to tabletop miniatures are facing the prospect of having to upload images of their faces or forms of identification just to interact with their passions.

I write this having been locked out of a Reddit post on one of my myriad special interests: "Star Wars." In an attempt to determine the canon fate of one particular Jedi Master (for those who care, it was Shaak Ti, whose fate in the saga is the subject of speculation, given her many non-canon deaths), only to find myself having to verify my age as the post talked about violence.

And there within lies the problem.

The only people benefiting from this are the platforms themselves. The likes of Aylo, formerly MindGeek, which owns platforms like Pornhub, are likely rubbing their hands at the prospect of forcing users to have to sign up for an account to use their platform.

If you’re sick of hearing people say "data is the new oil" at industry events, well, guess what? That stuff is valuable. And having a means to gain access to a trove of new emails and user data is a pretty lucrative prospect.

But do we really want these people to have our data? I sure don’t.

Sticking with Aylo (MindGeek) just as an example: The digital porn baron has been hacked a heck of a lot of times.

In 2012, one million users had their email addresses and passwords from its YouPorn platform leaked following a coding error that went undetected for years. Three years later, malware advertising attacks hit both Pornhub and YouPorn. 2016 saw almost 800,000 premium account holders of the porn site Brazzers have had their details breached owing to a vulnerability in the vBulletin forum software.

And let’s not forget the infamous Ashley Madison data breach, where a group calling themselves "The Impact Team" stole user data from the extramarital affair site due to the platform failing to delete personal information from its database. That breach was so bad, there were reports of suicides as a result of the hack – it was even the subject of a Netflix documentary.

These are the platforms we’re trusting our personal data with?

Our continental neighbors tried this already. France imposed similar rules earlier this year, which prompted Aylo to take down its sites in the country out of protest. A French court went on to suspend the government decree, though that case is set to be appealed.

Aylo’s suggestion to solve the problem? Have operating system owners like Apple and Google verify users’ ages at the level of individual devices. Sure, because those companies have never been hit by hacks – oh wait, they were among the platforms that were part of the massive 16 billion breach earlier this summer that stole login credentials.

I realize this might seem like a tirade against any form of sharing personal information with anyone ever, but what I’m trying to say is the U.K. government’s Helen Lovejoy impression does the bare minimum to address actual harms online.

While recently published policy documents from Meta suggest the social media giant’s chatbot rules would allow users to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” Labour has gone for the bare minimum with a blanket attack on anything even slightly naughty.

You know its efforts are working when a study published this week found more young people admitting to being exposed to pornography before the age of 18 than when the Online Safety Act became law back in 2023.

I’m an advocate for a free and open internet (but not on the level of one so-called free speech advocate Elon Musk). I also agree that it’s increasingly easy for young people to access lewd content. Gone are the days when you’d find a copy of Hustler in the woods. But harmful and violent content is incredibly easy to find if you have the tools.

Kids are smarter with technology than those drafting laws like this. Remember the Tory MP who claimed he "accidentally" ended up on a porn site when he was looking up tractors while sitting in the House of Commons chamber?

If the people making these laws don’t even understand the technology and the platforms that kids (or Tory MPs) are inadvertently accessing, how can they hope to legislate them?

The Open Rights Group argues that regulators like Ofcom should have platforms incorporate “tests of necessity and proportionality in their content enforcement practices,” not a blanket application.

Any change is better than putting our personal data in the hands of platforms that have been breached time and time again – especially for those using facial recognition tools to verify user ages.