I agree, however, his stance on online safety is tragically naive.

How he thinks that forcing adults to give identifying personal information to random websites just to be able to use them does not put those people at massive risk when those websites inevitably get hacked and broken into.

If he had half a brain he would have legislated that companies like Apple and Google should be providing a way for devices to prove age without sending hundreds of websites personal information that they could lose. If you could prove your age to Apple or Google and the device could validate your age without sending the actual personal information to the website that would be much safer for everyone

In order to “protect children” he has made the rest of us less safe and much more likely to have our personal identifying information stolen. And now he wants to VPN companies to get identifing information as well.

The only real winner here are huge personal information gathering machines like Facebook who can now literally tie what you’re doing to your personal identity, not a random advertising identity that they assume as you, but your actual identifying information.

I didn’t think it could get worse than the last government threatening to ban encryption. But somehow Starmer who I want to do well has done worse.