this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Online Safety Bill has taken years to agree and will force firms to remove illegal content and protect children from some legal but harmful material.
The bill has had a lengthy and contentious journey to becoming law, beginning six years ago when the government committed to the idea of improving internet safety.
The idea that inspired the bill was relatively simple, scribbled down on the back of a sandwich packet by two experts, Prof Lorna Woods of the University of Essex and William Perrin of the charitable foundation Carnegie UK.
Dame Melanie Dawes, chief executive of Ofcom, called the bill's passage through parliament "a major milestone in the mission to create a safer life online for children and adults in the UK."
"Very soon after the Bill receives Royal Assent, we'll consult on the first set of standards that we'll expect tech firms to meet in tackling illegal online harms, including child sexual exploitation, fraud and terrorism," she added.
There is a lot staked on the success of the bill - not only the safety of children and adults, but also the UK's ambitions as a tech hub and possibly, if things go wrong, continued access to popular online services.
The original article contains 785 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Kinda left out the important bits, quoted below
Platforms will also need to show they are committed to removing illegal content including:
New offences have also been included in the bill, including cyber-flashing and the sharing of "deepfake" pornography.
And the bill includes measures to make it easier for bereaved parents to obtain information about their children from tech firms.
Online safety campaigner Ian Russell has told the BBC the test of the bill will be whether it prevents the kind of images his daughter Molly saw before she took her own life after viewing suicide and self-harm content online on sites such as Instagram and Pinterest.
Digital rights campaigners the Open Rights Group said the bill posed "a huge threat to freedom of expression with tech companies expected to decide what is and isn't legal, and then censor content before it's even been published".
Lawyer Graham Smith, author of a book on internet law, said the bill had well-meaning aims, but in the end it contained much that was problematic.
"If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, this is a motorway," he told the BBC.
He said it was "a deeply misconceived piece of legislation", and the threat it posed to legitimate speech was likely to be "exposed in the courts".
And popular messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal have threatened to refuse to comply with powers in the bill that would force them to examine the contents of encrypted messages for child abuse material.
Wikipedia has also said it can't comply with some of the requirements of the bill.
After royal assent the baton will pass to the communications regulator, Ofcom, who will be largely responsible for enforcing the bill.
It will draw up codes of conduct that will provide guidance on how to comply with the new rules.
Those who fail can face large fines of up to £18m, or in some cases executives could face imprisonment.
I guess I’m an old fuddy-duddy taking crazy pills because nothing in this seems bad to me. Hell, quite a few parents have had their kids commit suicide after viewing suicide content online, this would literally save lives. And the tech companies should take some responsibility for what’s on their platforms.
This seems like the digital equivalent of burning books. Rather than controlling what people can read, shouldn't we be doing more about the underlying reasons that mental health has taken a dive, such as the cost of living, climate change, the cost of further education and, you know, giving people a reason to feel optimistic about the future?
Dude, it’s social media sites being more responsible for what they host, Child Rape, suicide, animals being stomped to death. Like, you get that right?
They still have their encrypted stuff, privacy is mostly intact, all this is doing is forcing the shitty stuff that’s being posted there to be more forcibly removed. Nobody is “burning your books” by holding Meta more responsible.
I think it's one of those things where the intent is good, but the implementation will cause issues. Another risk is if the laws are abused under the guise of protection. At the same time, it's an important issue to try and address.
Encrypted messaging for example. It's impossible to have secure and encrypted messaging while also scanning the contents for issues. The best you could do is local scanning, but that won't be effective at all (it'll block legitimate content and let through harmful stuff).
If you get rid of encrypted messaging, that will make a lot of day to day work impossible, and it would harm those who need the protection of encrypted messages (ex. Journalists, whistleblowers, those under totalitarian/authorative governments)
This seems to be misinformation being spread around? I don’t live in the uk so I can only go by what I research on the internet, and it doesn’t seem to do anything to end end to end encryption. (That was fun to type!)
There will still be apps and platforms you can use encrypted, social media included. They just want ways to access the encrypted information on harmful social media sites, as a way to enforce the safety standards, which makes perfect sense. It’s social media not the DoD.
People can move over to signal or use actual apps meant for encryption. Facebook should 100% be able to see what is going on and being said on their platforms, you have no expectations of privacy there my guy. Same for all social media. It’s a publicly facing service so it needs to be guarded and monitored same as any other, and it’s well past time we started holding the platforms responsible.
Maybe once they start facing fines for not only allowing but pushing through algorithms nothing but horrible and hateful content, they’ll do a better job of moderating their environments.
The apps you're talking about are the ones being targeted - encrypted chat apps. Those apps (including Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, Session etc) have all said they'll pull out of the UK market if this happens.
You guys need to read the article then, you’re freaking out over nothing because those apps are not targeted in the law that’s been passed. They only left in the parts demanding social media take responsibility for what they platform.
Seriously, read the Bill.
Edit: The Verge just published a general overview.
Oh no!
That’s awful!
Won’t somebody think of the corporations!
Absolutely disgusting overreach!
Now the president of signal is onboard for some reason?!? He must have been a privacy poser this whole time!
….. yeah thanks for linking that article, it really cleared things up on the imminent danger policing the internet for the first time with consequences will hold for us all. Jesus Christ, there might be less death, violence, gore, csam, and hate on The Internet for once, absolutely appalling. /MASSIVEFUCKING-S
Good job on purposefully misunderstanding absolutely everything there. Quite a feat of tortuous logic.
Why are you even posting in a privacy related community? Or are you new to the whole thing?
They may be the equivalent of arguing with a dude that drinks pee for fun. If he cannot understand the intracusy of what it means to truly lose privacy by looking at other controlling countries, he's already lost.
Sorry for disrupting your echo chamber, I was browsing the Hot content when this aggregated up and tickled my fancy.
Got curious what the bill was actually about, not just what the hyperbole was saying, so I researched it myself and found the middle ground between the provocative takes and reached a grown up conclusion for myself.
I know that must be confusing for you, but here we are!
You've reached a conclusion on a 300 page Bill based on reading two short articles. You've performed no further research on the subject whatsoever and now you're here parading your ignorance like its something to be proud of.
When encrypted apps get backdoored or they remove themselves from the market two things will happen.
Firstly, all the sickos and crims will simply move to darkweb based communication or self hosted solutions or no-memory solutions. This will make them twice as difficult to detect and capture.
The other thing that will happen is that non-techy people who rely on private chat apps like WhatsApp or Signal, such as those supported by various charities and victim support groups including abused wives, rape victims, young people struggling with sexual or gender identity, mentally ill people and sexual abuse survivors will suddenly have nothing to use that they feel safe using. Here's a few quotes from a response paper for very similar EU proposed legislation:
"As an abuse survivor, I (and millions of other survivors across the world) rely on confidential communications to both find support and report the crimes against us – to remove our rights to privacy and confidentiality is to subject us to further injury and frankly, we have suffered enough.” – An Irish survivor of child abuse
“Using the veil of morality and the guise of protecting the most vulnerable and beloved in our societies to introduce this potential monster of an initiative is despicable.” – A German survivor of child abuse
“Especially being a victim of sexual abuse, it is important to me that trusted communication is possible, e.g. in self-help groups and with therapists. If encryption is undermined, this also weakens the possibilities for those affected by sexual abuse to seek help.” – A French survivor of child abuse
People like you and the people who dream up legislation like this aren't really interested in preventing abuse. You're interested in not seeing it and therefore being able to ignore it's happening - because nothing in this Bill will prevent a child from being abused. It seems to me that we'd be far better off as a society if we 'd spent 6 years and millions of pounds on researching and proposing laws on preventing the abuse itself.
It’s neat you’ve invented a bunch of horror stories while citing anecdotes that have nothing to do with this bill. It’s definitely working wonders for your knowledge and veracity on the subject.
Anecdotes that have nothing to do with this Bill? Are you trying to add blindness to ignorance to your list of character traits? Those quotes are taken from a EU response paper to the proposed Chat Control EU legislation. In respect of encrypted chat messaging, the two Bills are virtually identical. But, again, I wouldn't expect you to know this as you've performed no research on the subject whatsoever.
And those are not invented horror stories, they are lived realities for people who are in very difficult life circumstances. But you don't need to care about their lives do you? All that matters is that you can go on living in ignorance.
Because nobody is taking encryption away from your therapist app, jfc.
They want the companies themselves to be able to read the content to check for illegal activity. That’s not the same thing as ending encryption and thus allowing me and you to read each others messages.
I can't explain it to you again. At this point you're either simply choosing to not understand or you're actually stupid. Either way, go troll somewhere else, I'm done with you.
I got that from the article though, it's in the bit I quoted as well
I'm not from the UK so I was using the articles
That was the original intent - that sole thing. Stop kids accessing harmful content. It's now morphed into a legislative tool for mass surveillance.
Citation from a non-biased source badly needed.
*ends up linking an article that counters nearly everything he said was bad about this bill but then smugly continues on posting as if it didn’t
Yeah you’re totally grounded in reality and not emotionally invested in this. Carry on, b.
Read the Bill?
If you want a brief overview, lawyer and legal author Graham Smith spoke to the BBC about it, all of which was taken from his pocket guide
Or, The Verge just published a general overview.
Oh no!
That’s awful!
Won’t somebody think of the corporations!
Absolutely disgusting overreach!
Now the president of signal is onboard for some reason?!? They must have been a privacy poser this whole time!
….. yeah thanks for linking that article, it really cleared things up on the imminent danger policing the internet for the first time with consequences will hold for us all. Jesus Christ, there might be less death, violence, gore, csam, and hate on The Internet for once, absolutely appalling. /MASSIVEFUCKING-S
You don't know anything about how technology or even communication works then.
Oh, that’s rich! You guys are like Reddit Jr with your hilariously ignorant takes! I could be a leader of the tech sector for all you know about me. Please, assume more.