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!

  • Echo DotEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    No, none of those things will be illegal because the government are full of idiots and they haven’t fought literally any of this through.

    The criminals will do what they always have which is to continue to use different services for their criminal activity. As in they already use those services so they’ll continue to use those services.

    Anyone remotely techie will essentially not be affected by this dumb law other than to be minorly inconvenienced by it, this is only going to expose the technologically illiterate.

    If they want a photo of me that’s fine, but I’m uploading an AI photo. I bet they don’t have checks for that.