Oh! Won't Somebody Think Of The Children!
3 Years ago the previous government of the United Kingdom passed into law what might possibly the most damaging law for civil liberties to have ever been passed. This is because this is a bill in disguise. Previous acts like the Anti-Terrorism Act 2001 and the Counter Terrorism Bill 2008 where open face and brazen that they wanted the ability to restrict peoples liberties at will but these acts always focused on targeting individuals or at most groups of people the government deemed they had a special interest in Obviously this could still be misused like the recent case with deeming Palestine action a terror organisation for simply disagreeing with the government.
The online safety act on the other hand though is insidious, it used the "oh wont somebody think of the children" strategy to put into place broad sweeping civil liberty restrictions on the whole population, because of this even though I am a fully grown adult I can no longer talk to my friends online, or even play video games without giving up my full identity to some sketchy third party company who defiantly wont leak all that information.
Now some people may think "But Patch you have to show ID at a bar to buy alcohol or at a shop to buy cigarettes isn't this the same thing?" in short no its not the same thing, the crucial difference being that an ID check in a bar is firstly a discretionary check by the bar staff so for instance now being almost 30 I rarely get IDed, even when I was only just 18 I rarely got IDed on account of my beard. But even if I was to be IDed its a one off human check, it is unlikely that person will be able to retain all the IDs they have ever seen even in a single night let along the during a whole month or year. Meanwhile these online checks involve uploading photo copies of your personal information along with your face to a server that you don't know where it is located and if that information is being stored despite them saying its not.
Not only that we don't know for sure who these companies are sharing this information with. Discord has recently been testing a secondary ID screening service, Persona, that is affiliated with Palantir, the same organisation with government contracts both in the UK and the US with law enforcement and military agencies including and most notably ICE. Persona is also already under scrutiny after people discovered security vulnerabilities in their systems.
But we have GDPR, this will protect us right? Right? Well so far wrong, Not only did discord leak 70,000 peoples names, email addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses as a result of the ID checks, there has been no sign of any enforcement of GDPR regulation on discord or their partners for this, despite it happening over 4 months ago at this point. They are not the only company this has happened to though.
This is not where it stops the current government has put in an amendment to this law that will now require phone and computer operating systems to scan all messages before they are sent and when they are received to look for "harmful content" meaning this will then usurp any and all E2EE services like Signal and WhatsApp. Your business is now the governments business.
"So what, if you don't do anything wrong you've got nothing to hide right?" Well that is a logical fallacy dear reader. If you aren't doing anything wrong then I'm sure you wont mind getting having a police officer supervise you at all times. Privacy is a hard thing to grapple with, especially online since it isn't tangible but it is fundamentally the most valuable thing we have as individuals, what we do, where we go, who we talk to, what we buy, where we live make it pretty easy to, even through anonymised data, target you as an individual, to demonstrate this I will use known information on a celebrity, I will use Millie Bobby Brown
- Female
- White
- British
- Early 20s
- Married
- Actress
- Loves animals
- Likes Fashion
- Attended Purdue University
- Home owner
- Lives in Georgia, USA
All of those things seem pretty broad and anonymous if you single them out, but by combining these together in a Venn diagram suddenly things get a lot less anonymous even with just a few of these key factors like your location, ethnicity and gender you can be narrowed down pretty easily.
All of this is to say that this is not about online safety at all, instead this is the government being hell bent on mass surveillance of its citizens and this law does the opposite of what it says in that it will put everyone adults and children alike at risk. Of course I am in favor of keeping children safe but what has been done here doesn't even attempt to do that in reality. Instead there should be effort put into education for parents, educators and children into how to stay safe online, how parents can restrict or monitor their kids using parental controls and web filtering and more robust reporting tools implemented by platforms.
Last Edited: 1 month, 2 weeks ago.