> the problem that I have here is if we don't provide a sensible middle ground, we will get a terrible solution imposed (ie the age gate spyware, instead of the rollingo ut of the mobile block lists the UK already had)
The problem here that if every year you're asked to make a new compromise between where you are and a fascist police state, you're only traveling in a single direction on the road to hell.
To actually stop them you need to turn around and go the other way. Dedicate your efforts to removing the existing authoritarian surveillance apparatus so that they have to spend their resources to stand still instead of you, so that failure is "it stays the same" and success is "authoritarianism declines" instead of the unacceptable premise that the only options are making it worse or making it worse even faster.
> Now, because the person extorting them is not taking the pictures they had a defence of "they were sent to me, I didn't know what to do so deleted them blah blah blah"
Any kind of sensible court is going to both take evidence of the extortion as an invalidation of that defense and also convict them of the extortion.
Moreover, "it's sometimes hard to punish the perpetrators" is a ridiculous rationale for punishing the victims in their place.
> But we can't get to that yet, because Ad tech/meta/google doesn't like that.
We can't get to that because that doesn't actually work, for multiple reasons in this context:
The first is the same reason every piece of Hollywood content is in the hands of pirates despite Disney et al demanding useless DRM. It simply doesn't work; a single vulnerability allows every piece of content to be extracted and once extracted by any one person it can then be distributed to an unlimited number of others forever. The entire premise is snake oil. The reason Hollywood wanted it to begin with, and Google and Apple adopted it to use against them, is the same -- it's hopeless at preventing copying but it enables the monopolization of devices because then unapproved competing devices are illegal.
The second reason is that the person in an image is not necessarily the person who owns the device, and the device has no way to know that. It does you no good for the "owner" of the image to control it when the device thinks the "owner" is the predator.
And the third is the pragmatic issue. People expect to be able to take a picture and share it with whoever they want. You take a picture of yourself and text it to your mom, both you and she expect her to be able to email it to friends and family etc. You take a picture of a defective mannequin to file for RMA and you expect the customer service rep to be able to upload it into their internal RMA system or forward it on to the manufacturer in another country. If the default doesn't allow this then people will justifiably object. But if it does then 99% of people will never change the defaults or even realize that they can, and then the proposal is worthless because the default everyone wants for the common case is exactly the thing you don't want in the problem case, since then the default allows the picture to fall into the hands of a thousand strangers and devices that aren't in the authoritarian ecosystem and you can't get the cat back in the bag.