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!

    • nicktron
      2•1 year ago

      Apologies, I incorrectly believed we were discussing Canada for some reason.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 year ago

        You don’t need to apologise. The comment OP asked how Canada was doing, then the next commenter gave their opinion on the UK, not Canada.

        It confused me as I read through the comment chain, as I was also expecting a comment on Canada (not UK).

        It’s probably worth mentioning that the UK has a parliamentary system, not a presidential system. So the people elect a party, and the party leader then becomes prime minister (but the party can decide amongst itself who the next party leader should be, and this is usually done by a vote among party members).

        Now there are legitimate criticisms of whether this is a democratic process, but the person who you replied to seemed to suggest that the recent change of prime ministers without elections was unusual and evidence of the UK “plummeting”. This user is entitled to his/her opinion, of course, but I just wanted to point out that this is actually constitutional and common practice in the UK.

        “Far from being unusual, it’s actually the norm for Prime Ministers to enter office outside of a general election.”

        Source: https://fullfact.org/news/unelected-prime-ministers-common-or-not/

        • @[email protected]English
          1•1 year ago

          The comment at the time I replied said “how are things over there”, without the “in canada” bit.

          I assumed that because he mentioned that he became a canadian citizen, that he was currently living in canada, and because the post is about a UK policy, that wanted to know more of what it was like in the UK currently in case he ever wanted to come back.

          And while I am aware that we live in a parliamentary system, I find calling it a democracy, like most tend to do, is pretty ridiculous if we only get to participate in it for a few minutes every five years, and afterwards, whoever wins isn’t held to account when they end up failing in their duty to represent the people who elect them.