> The Tories are obsessed with weakening privacy and data protection laws

True, but from the quoted article:

> I'm not sure I've seen anything by way of potential legislation that's had as broadly based a political consensus behind it.

I'm afraid I don't expect anything to change if Labour win the next general election.

I'm not saying you're wrong and Labour will change anything, but those quotes refer to different versions of the bill. Your second quote is for the initial draft, from 2019, while the first refers to the revised, recently passed, bill (among other things).

That makes me think about the app that starting to get publicly available in France. France Identité, that allows you to use NFC to communicate with your ID and generate a single use, verifiable proof of identity, as well as having a valid digital ID on your phone you can present to the authorities.

I assume it will also be possible to provide a single use proof of age without revealing identity with this kind of system.

I do not get at all why 3rd party companies would be allowed to do something like this. If I need a way to give a digital proof of something like this, I'd much rather have my government handle it.

> I do not get at all why 3rd party companies would be allowed to do something like this

Governments increasingly use services from private companies: they have specific capabilities and they get access to specific personal information.

> If I need a way to give a digital proof of something like this, I'd much rather have my government handle it

Your government, and your view of your government, and your guesses about your future governments, may vary.

I don't think EU goals are very much different - there is European legislation underway to make all messenger app providers scan all messages for signs if child abuse indiscriminately, effectively prohibiting end-to-end encryption

The EU one is on hold.

Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory. I maybe not that good in British politics, but googling reveals that the bill's text was prepared by a committee involving members of Conservative, Labour, LibDem, and Scottish National Party. The UK parliament's website is an ugly mess, so I couldn't find voting stats, but there are claims in media that it garnered cross-party support. Also it's hard to buy "pro-business ideology" in this particular case when Facebook is against the bill. Bureacracy is by nature always tries to extend its power, I guess that's what happening here.

Every bill is drafted in committee, but the ruling party(majority in the House of Commons) also gets to fill most of the roles in the committee- which makes sense because it would be wasted effort if the committee made a change that the ruling party would not support.

It's pretty trivial, and really doesn't require much explanation. It doesn't contradict to what I wrote: there's no sign for the bill to be one party push over others opposing it (as stated by the comment I replied).

> The Tories are obsessed with weakening privacy and data protection laws.

Labour has pledged to "toughen" the "weakened and gutted" online safety bill [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl...

> They plan to have 3rd party companies that do verification.

I'm sure this will be run by unqualified buddies of politicians with nice juicy contracts