Week 437 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2026-03-09.
Last week, Reddit was fined £14m by UK data watchdog over it's age check verification failings. I get the intention, and as a parent I see value in what everyone is trying to achieve here.
Much like general tracking and analytics, the OS and browsers should be in control here.
If the OS knows your age for when you're buying in the App Store, it should be able to pass on a binary flag for if the user is 18+ or not. That would include apps like web browsers.
Of course platforms like Reddit should be responsible for the content they host, but make each one individually handle age restrictions seems silly when the number of OSs and browsers is much shorter and that in turn would make the integration of age verification much easier to implement.
Tags: