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!

  • @thehatfoxEnglish
    38•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
      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.