The UK wants your phone to police nudity at the moment of sending, betting on detection algorithms that have never reliably worked.

The government has handed down a three-month ultimatum to build device-level age verification for sharing nudes, leaning on nudity-detection that fails about as often as it succeeds. Calling it 'crossing the Rubicon' is apt, just not in the way ministers mean. Shifting the compliance burden from porn sites onto your handset is a quiet gift to Aylo, which stands to gain if its sites are no longer the chokepoint. Ask who benefits and the answer is not children.

It lands the same week as another entry in our image-based abuse arc, the 45th, a reminder that the real harm here is non-consensual sharing and deepfakes, not consenting adults texting. Policy that targets the latter while struggling with the former is the recurring UK pattern.