Will Your Phone Allow You to Read This Article?

 How old are you? Sorry to ask such a personal question but I need to check you are old enough to read this article. I can’t remember the last time I was asked if I was old enough for anything, so it was a shock when I was asked last week. But not by a person, by my phone, just after it automatically installed the Apple iOS 26.4 update. It was more than asking, it needed verification: ID, credit cards, the usual list. Why? We all know why, don’t we? Or do we?

Let’s start with what is and is not changing. The most recent iOS update on iPhones and iPads in the UK asks the owner to log in to their Apple account (which means they identify themselves), then “Confirm You are 18+”. It explains why: “to change content restrictions”, so it complies with GDPR (you must plainly state your purpose for requesting personal data) and you cannot just self-certify an affirmative answer, you need to offer what in digital ID circles is known as a verifiable credential: your Apple account, a credit card or government issued ID card. This looks like a requirement from the UK Online Safety Act which requires “highly effective” age verification. You do get the option to not confirm (again keeping it GDPR compliant) in which case you will find in your phone’s settings that the content and privacy restrictions that default to OFF are instead now ON and the web content setting has been set to “Limit Adult Websites”. If you try to change that you will be prompted again to confirm your age. Choosing to not confirm your age and not being able to do so for whatever reason end up with the same status: you cannot access ‘adult’ content on the web. There ain’t no way round it other than verifying your 18+ status. Forget VPNs and forget “privacy preserving” browsers such as DuckDuckGo, Brave or even Tor.

What is going on? Clearly there is a political aspect to this but as this is an article from your IT correspondent let’s start with the tech. How can it affect all browsers, especially ones not supplied by Apple? Despite appearances to the contrary, there are only really three web browsers: Blink with 70% market share which you may know better as Chrome, Edge, Opera or Brave; Gecko from Mozilla in the form of Firefox and finally WebKit, presented as Safari. But on Apple mobile devices outside the EU, Apple mandates all browsers to use their WebKit WKWebView API for rendering and JavaScript. That means Chrome, Firefox, DuckDuckGo even Tor on your iPhone render web pages just the same as Safari under the covers. That gives Apple mobile devices a unique pinch point where all web content can be filtered and the 26.4 update uses it. This pinch point is only on Apple mobile devices, so not in its desktops and of course not in the non-Apple Android, Windows or Linux eco systems....<<<Read More>>>...