The UK Is Poised to Force a Bad Law on the Internet
www.wired.com
WhatsApp and Signal have threatened to shut down services in Britain if the Online Safety Bill includes restrictions that undermine encryption. The government is pushing it through anyway.

I believe the “Online Safety Bill” should be renamed the “Online Exposure Bill,” and here’s why:

  1. Age verification likely involves estimating age based on biometric data – essentially, using an algorithm to scan a photo or video of the user." making our identity transparent in the digital world.

  2. “Client-side scanning, where a phone or other device would scan the content of a message before it’s encrypted and flag or block violating material.” This effectively renders E2EE (End-to-End Encryption) useless!

  • thehatfox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    1 year ago

    Unfortunately this is nothing unusual or new for the UK, an authoritarian streak has long existed in both of the countries major political parties. The Conservatives had already passed the Investigatory Powers Act, AKA the “Snoopers Charter” which introduced a wide range of digital surveillance. The Tories have already had a crack at trying to introduce porn age verification laws. During the New Labour era the Labour Party tried to introduce a new ID scheme involving a sprawling government identity database with never-ending feature creep.

    Many in Westminster are ignorant of the technological reality these bills collide with, and much of the UK public are (often wilfully) ignorant of the dangers they pose.

    I hope Meta follows through with their threat to pull WhatsApp from the UK market in response the to Online “Safety” Bill. WhatsApp is very popular in the UK, and seeing it and many other online services withdraw from the UK could be the wake up call my country has long needed.

  • pret2xyz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    What concerns me most is that biometric data is permanent and cannot be changed. If we share it with the digital world, it could lead to lifelong privacy risks. And I believe that the risks and threats to privacy brought by the UK’s Online Safety Bill far outweigh the protection it can provide us with.

    I don’t know how the government plans to enforce the Bill, but as far as I know, some decentralized encrypted messaging apps are unstoppable, because every user who using the app jointly creates the social network that avoids a single point of failure.

  • Dasnap@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I recently got Canadian citizenship through my dad. How are things in Canada currently? I feel like this country economically and socially is just gonna keep spiralling downwards so I’m curious what my backup is like.