Dark day for online privacy in the UK.
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:
child sexual abuse
controlling or coercive behaviour
extreme sexual violence
illegal immigration and people smuggling
promoting or facilitating suicide
promoting self-harm
animal cruelty
selling illegal drugs or weapons
terrorism
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.
You don’t know anything about how technology or even communication works then.
That was the original intent - that sole thing. Stop kids accessing harmful content. It’s now morphed into a legislative tool for mass surveillance.
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?
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)
