1w ago

No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online

www.eff.org No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online

Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissible. But in one of the latest misguided attempts to protect children online, internet users of all.....

If they doing this might as well ban books also for harmful content to children:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments

57 comments

You mean sharing their real identity with online companies who will sell and/or lose it to hackers doesn't make children sAfE oNLinE??!!?!11?!
- Hopefully this will happen sooner than later and change people’s minds about the whole thing.
  
  Yeah, it won't be good, but it's going to happen eventually. Sooner is better.
- If the recent Tea App crap is anything to go by doesn't even require a hacker for someone to gain access to your info. Just takes more companies using AI to build shit without security and someone will just happen to find their open to the public firebase bucket.

I saw an interesting video suggesting that the real motivation is to give megacorps like Google a new business acting as "banks" for identity, i.e. the Internet would get so inconvenient that people would just save their identity with Google (or Meta, etc) and then use them to log in to other websites.
I probably explained it badly, but the video I saw is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAd-OOrdyMw
People in the comments pointed out that those companies would also have the ability to delete or suspend your identity verification if you did something they didn't like (or refused to do something they wanted). Reminds me of the SIN from Shadowrun .
- Indeed. Anybody but the biggies will have an impossible task trying to convince people to verify their ID, so all the smaller sites will switch to only allowing registration/sign-in through Google/Apple/MS's Oauth, and depreciate the username/password option. When "signing in with Google/whatever", Google will simply pass a flag "adult" along with authorizing. In the end, they become the gatekeepers for the whole web, collecting tremendous valuable data in the process and gaining even more power over your identity.
  Always keep in mind that the small players will always take the easiest option, and the big players want more control.
  
  Bingo. they'll just tack it on to what they currently have with most sites that have you sign in with your google/apple/meta account. mask it as the easier option instead of using another email/registering an account on your own.
  And they won't just stop on websites. Google will also incorporate this with your phone. FRP will now require you have a valid ID with Google, same with account recovery OR simply signing into a new device with your existing Google Account.
  Hell wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft roles out that you must have a valid ID simply to install windows. Already requires users to have a Microsoft account and be online to install it, what's to stop them from now requiring you provide a photo ID?
  
  Facebook are the same, been the same for years.
- The other part is that christofascists really want to ban "porn" (read: anything they don't like), and they know age verification will make their operation almost impossible. The fact that corporations like Google might get to validate people they advertise to is a positive side effect.
- This is by far the most plausible theory.
- Yeah, but the governments obviously want to know exactly what you're doing as well.
  I think their only objection to Google et al having so much data is that they need to jump through hoops to get hold of it.
  I suspect this will be in browser before too long. Mostly so they can automatically provide your full unique ID code to anyone who asks, so your government can keep track of you if you say "I support Palestine Action" anywhere, or so Google can look it up when you dare suggest AI is not our glorious future.
  But also because there's only so many "let us check your ID" services you can use before you end up giving your details to somebody who is going to sell them directly. How long before a dodgy porn site does a "show us your face" check, before generating deepfakes starring yourself and demanding payment not to send them to a social media profile it's already detected based on your face?
  I don't really want to be on an internet where instead of blackmist@feddit.uk, somebody can just click that and go "Oh, that's Jeff Timmons of 48 Badminton Way, Stoke-on-Trent. Ring Staffordshire police so they can go and grab him"
- This isn't the motivation in Europe where there's a deep skepticism about those - all foreign - companies.
  There is no need for conspiracy-type thinking. "Think of the children" has always been a powerful and real motivating force, not just a cover for nefarious other stuff. You need to recognise that, even if it's wrong-headed.
  
  It being a real and powerful motivational force means it's one of the more useful covers.
  Just because it motivates the voters/customers doesn't mean it's the genuine reason behind a decision.
  I cannot think of a single recent "think of the children" based action that was intended to and actually helped the children in a meaningful way.
  Can you?

Obviously emotive reason for an outright erosion of personal liberty and freedom, shocked Pikachu is shocked

Obviously not, but it's not like they're gonna be honest and call it the UK Online Spying Act.

failure to comply could result in fines of up to 10% of global revenue or courts blocking services
So most federated platforms should be fine, as they don't have any revenue(usually) and blocking is hard because DNS is easy to bypass and there just are so many instances already.
- Oh! So they can fine by revenue percentage but not against megacorps.
- This might actually make people move to Lemmy nice.
  
  Big not a lawyer caveat but if it is revenue then likely not. That would be all money collected before expenses which I could see including donations collected for server expenses.

Well, they don't care, because this is a good reason to start total control. Or they just want to raise a submissive generation of obedient dogs who don't know what it means to fight back or bite or think critically. China by the way is a great example of the alpha version of the shit that can await us.

Makes identity theft much more likely though
- And identity theft is not a joke, Jim! Millions of families suffer every year!
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5f5ni0zpl5E

Prob should double down the efforts rather than scrap it then right?

Well, who'd have thought.

Surely nobody who is not doing anything online which is or will ever be until the day they die deemed morally objectionable by those with access to those databases or those with power over anything on their lives who can be provided directly or indirectly with data from those databases, have nothing to fear from this.

Those measures never did.

A bureaucratic regulation doesn't actually do what it purports to do, and which is the entire point of it's existence?
No way.
Who could've forseen that?!

Has anyone got any half decent ideas for how to improve age verification? Obvs without this draconian shit.
I had a thought once about doing it with NFTs, where a company could independently verify you with certain metadata, like 'is human' or 'is over 18' etc. Then you get issued your token, and these sites can verify you without de-anoninising you.
Not sure if that's a naff idea, but would be interested to know if anyone's got anything better
- The EU has something in the works with zero knowledge proofs. Which would be a good way to do this.
  I still don't agree on the fact that this needs doing at all... But at least it's not as bad as the UK's half-baked nonsense
  
  Unfortunately, even EU's solution doesn't support non-google-backed android.
- It doesn't need to exist at all. Parents should take responsibility for their children's internet usage.

57 comments