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
    37·
    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.

    • r00ty@kbin.life
      2·
      1 year ago

      I wouldn’t compare new labour to labour. They were far closer to the tories than labour ever has been I think. And blunkett et Al wouldn’t have stopped at the id I’d bet.

      The two party system we’ve effectively been left with puts me off mainstream politics. That is I can’t get behind enough policies from either party to emphatically want to vote for them. That’s before you get to the reality of how much of the manifesto suddenly gets dropped or changed once they gain power.

      Having said that. WhatsApp and other E2EE messengers leaving the market is only going to increase hacking/finance crime as people side load untested versions of WhatsApp/signal onto their phones.

  • Th4tGuyII@kbin.social
    30·
    1 year ago

    Exactly. Online safety my arse.

    Putting a backdoor onto people’s phones to bypass encryption and forcing them to upload photos of themselves doesn’t do shit to keep them safe. If anything it endangers them!

    And for what exactly?? Do they not think that criminals will just find other ways to communicate, just like they always have? Are they that desperate to catch the stragglers left behind? This will literally only hurt the common folk just trying to get on with their lives, nobody else, just like every other mass surveillance law.

    • jpeps@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      This is something that really bothers me about this law. Are they making maths… illegal? What’s stopping me from encrypting a message before sending it in a messaging app manually? And if that’s illegal, what if say I just sent something base64 encoded, or with a ceaser cypher for some treasure hunt game, am I now breaking the law too? What about a child talking in code to avoid their parents knowing something? Will that be illegal? It just seems so general.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        No, none of those things will be illegal because the government are full of idiots and they haven’t fought literally any of this through.

        The criminals will do what they always have which is to continue to use different services for their criminal activity. As in they already use those services so they’ll continue to use those services.

        Anyone remotely techie will essentially not be affected by this dumb law other than to be minorly inconvenienced by it, this is only going to expose the technologically illiterate.

        If they want a photo of me that’s fine, but I’m uploading an AI photo. I bet they don’t have checks for that.

      • EngineerGaming@feddit.nlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        And also… How does it stop you from using an open-source, non-spying messaging solution or (if it’s done on OS level) an open source, non-spying OS? I consider the mainstream messengers fully compromised already, so nothing changes for them anyway.

  • emptyother@programming.devEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Who names these bills though? They could just as well name it “Wont-take-away-more-of-your-privacy-jk bill”. Would be a lot more fair for everyone and less likely to mislead if we only refered to such stuff by a neutral and boring unique id.

  • pret2xyz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    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
    4·
    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.