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
    28•2 years 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.

  • Th4tGuyII
    23•2 years 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
      9•2 years 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.

      • CampaEnglish
        2•2 years ago

        Try this: https://www.alchemy.com/dapps/wiremin

        It allows users to remain anonymous by only asking me to create a username and set a password. And all of the messesages or feed are E2EE.

        This network can’t be stop by anyone, as it operates on a P2P decentralized network. As long as there are active users, it can continue to function and is self-sustaining.

  • @Dasnap@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3•2 years 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.

    • @Redderthanmisty@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      5•2 years ago

      Not spiralling downwards over here… plummeting.

      Hell, we didn’t even get to vote for our last two leaders, both of whom did more damage individually than Thatcher.

      As for the alternative when we do get a chance to vote, well they’ve abandoned just about every principle and policy they had now that victory is practically garaunteed, so they’ve effectively become diet tories.

      • nicktron
        1•2 years ago

        Hell, we didn’t even get to vote for our last two leaders

        Please explain this false statement.

        Edit: I am silly and thought that statement was about Canada. I feel shame.

  • @pret2xyz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3•2 years 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.