The UK’s controversial Online Safety Bill finally becomes law
The UK’s controversial Online Safety Bill finally becomes law
A bill years in the making.
Do want to point out the UK act is such a unworkable mess that it is likely to collapse under its own weight just look at the last UK age verification law that was delayed over and over again until it was quietly scraped. And it's likely Ofcom will struggle to get the OSB up and running
At this point they should just consider disconnecting the UK from the wider internet
I assume that once they try to go after one of the "big ones", geoblocking the UK will happen at a larger scale. Just imagine a country being geoblocked by Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
"Dear UK citizen, due to stupid and malign laws enactet by the Tory party of your country, (Google|Twitter|Facebook|Wikipedia|other) will not be available in the UK for the forseeable future."
For those of you who don't live in the UK and don't keep track of UK politics, well done, don't start it's crap.
But it's important to understand how these things always pan out. The government in its current form are in absolute freefall, the next election is going to be at the absolute latest in early Jan 2025 if not earlier (the UK political system being what it is, it's entirely possible it will be earlier). Current polling shows that if they have any seats left it'll be a miracle for them, basically they're going to get wiped out at the next election.
So they've started doing all this bullshit to make life worse for the new government when they come in, like selling off assets to make future infrastructure projects impossible in a fit of spite. They've also started to pass all sorts of ridiculous laws under the guise of raising taxes or protecting children or counterterrorism, but really it's got nothing to do with any of that stuff and everything to do with just getting as much money out of the system as possible, while at the same time making life as difficult as possible for a new government. This law is just in the vein of that.
They know it won't work, they know it's impossible, and they don't care.
They're just hoping there's going to be some terrorist attack after the new government come in and rescind this ridiculous law, and then they can go and point to it and say, "ah this wouldn't have happened if you still had a good law". And then presumably everyone cheers and then they get reelected.
Of course it won't happen, but these guys are delusional.So honestly I'd advise everyone just ignore it. No one's getting fined because they're not going to bother putting the infrastructure in to actually enforce the law, if they're going to be out in potentially less than 14 months time.
It hurts small providers more than anything. My main fediverse instance has locked everything down in fear of retaliation. They might be paranoid, but at the same time I don't blame them. Not to mention, the smaller providers will find it harder if not impossible to fund for compliance with this. It ironically makes Big Tech stronger.
Oddly enough, another site I frequent - Rate Your Music - separated the main site and the forums at the same time. They blame it on "technology companies", I wouldn't be surprised if it was this exact bill and Ofcom that forced their hands.
I hope you're right. The opposition haven't indicated they're going to rescind anything yet. They've shuttled so far to the right in the last three years in a successful effort to woo the disillusioned "centrists" that it's really hard to get a grip on where they stand ideologically. All that can be said is they will do anything and say anything if they think it will get them more votes, and they won't commit to anything which might upset the centrists.
The law is designed in such a way that it's basically a noose around the government's neck. It will cost an absolute fortune to actually enforce, everyone will hate it, it will achieve nothing because it's fundamentally unworkable, it probably violates human rights, and it makes businesses wary of operating in the UK reducing collectible taxes.
It's no mistake that this be law is being implemented now rather than 16 years ago when the Conservatives first got into power. If they thought they had even the barest hint of actually being in power after the next election and have to deal with the consequences of their decisions they wouldn't have been enacted this law.
Even in Corbyn's Labour they weren't willing to pull the over-reaching surveillance laws. IIRC Corbyn said he wasn't going to pull the Snooper's Charter / Investigatory Powers Act. Actually, if I recall the Lib Dems were the strongest opposition to the Snooper's Charter in 2017.
I'm so hoping they or the Greens say something.
From the article: "The act has been welcomed by child safety advocates."
Same beeing tried for the EU.
The proposed regulation is excessively “influenced by companies pretending to be NGOs but acting more like tech companies”, said Arda Gerkens, former director of Europe’s oldest hotline for reporting online CSAM.
“Groups like Thorn use everything they can to put this legislation forward, not just because they feel that this is the way forward to combat child sexual abuse, but also because they have a commercial interest in doing so.”
If the regulation undermines encryption, it risks introducing new vulnerabilities, critics argue. “Who will benefit from the legislation?” Gerkens asked. “Not the children.”
“So it’s very clear that whatever their incorporation status is, that they are self-interested in promoting child exploitation as a problem that happens “online,” and then proposing quick (and profitable) technical solutions as a remedy to what is in reality a deep social and cultural problem. (…) I don’t think governments understand just how expensive and fallible these systems are, that we’re not looking at a one-time cost. We’re looking at hundreds of millions of dollars indefinitely due to the scale that this is being proposed at.”
This whole article is worth reading despite its length. This is a mess and the UK is only the start, they are aiming for this being implemented world wide.
I hate the "think of the children" excuse for draconian laws like this. It plays with people's emotions to get them to support or be neutral towards it. Disgusting. As is using children as a shield at all.
"… Importantly, we’ll also take full account of people’s rights to privacy and freedom of expression."
While also being pretty much against end-to-end encryption. Good job.
Is this the one they said you'd need to register with a photo id if you wanted to access porn sites? The one opponents said would do the most good for online safety by teaching the nation to use VPN?
No, its different, you now have to prevent kids from accessing harmful content, so its worse.
The wank tickets one (it was proposed that you could go and get a single use ticket from the post office if you didn't want to do ID online) was scrapped after it was passed as it was completely unworkable in practice.
Same will happen here, they simply haven't made the sort of money available to even start to bring this in. This is just more performative bollocks for gullible morons from the party that bought you deportation to Rwanda.
If we have to have an evil government, it's lucky that they are also quite incompetent.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Specific harms the bill aims to address include underage access to online pornography, “anonymous trolls,” scam ads, the nonconsensual sharing of intimate deepfakes, and the spread of child sexual abuse material and terrorism-related content.
The first covers how platforms will have to respond to illegal content like terrorism and child sexual abuse material, and a consultation with proposals on how to handle these duties is due to be published on November 9th.
Ofcom says it expects to publish a list of “categorised services,” which are large or high-risk platforms that will be subject to obligations like producing transparency reports, by the end of next year.
Social media companies will be held to account for the appalling scale of child sexual abuse occurring on their platforms and our children will be safer,” said UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation has said that the bill’s strict obligations for protecting children from inappropriate content could create issues for a service like Wikipedia, which chooses to collect minimal data on its users, including their ages.
In a statement, Ofcom’s chief executive Melanie Dawes pushed back against the idea that the act will make the telecoms regulator a censor.
The original article contains 659 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I actually agree with parts of this law and think they don't go far enough.
Tech firms should 100% be held responsible for the content they choose to tolerate on their platforms.
CSAM is a growing problem on apps like X and Instagram. The latter has particularly been astroturfed by accounts that post links to Telegram channels for the purpose of sharing highly illegal stuff.
Another thing I think the law needs to do is target game publishers who allow toxic, defamatory and harassing behaviour on their platforms. Companies like Riot Games, Blizzard, etc should be held far more accountable for policing their games, especially since kids play them.
There is no excuse for breaking privacy and encryption, though. And there is no way this bill works without doing that.
Hell, bad actors will continue to encrypt things anyways, legality be damned, they're already breaking the law anyways! They'll still have their privacy, it's the average person who won't.