UK Tightens Online Safety Bill Again as It Nears Final Approval - Slashdot

The gross privacy violations will soon be extended from dead children to living adults. Because... Safety online.

This slope has been thoroughly slathered with soap...

...detailed understanding by a coroner isn't a bad thing. It's always good to have clear, objective, information rather than wild speculation and rumours. Unless you like Fleetwood Mac, in which case Rumours is just fine.

On the other hand, the current government is prone to abusing power - the courts are working overtime to stop this, but the government plans to pass a bill that will allow them to overrule the courts whenever they feel like it. (A perfect example of abusing power, if ever I saw one.)

I have no personal objection to working age verification - I just don't believe that any such scheme exists. However, if someone can come up with such a scheme, then by all means place the method and the source in the public domain or under a BSD/GNU dual license and require providers to use it. If you can actually do what seems impossible, then who am I to stand in the way of progress? (VPNs will do that just fine...)

Nor do I have any objection to coroners being given full and truthful information.

My problem with the legislation is that the current government will abuse the hell out of the law and that there will be not so much mission-creep as mission-wildly-exceeded. And I'm not sure I trust Starmer to pass legislation to protect privacy against such excesses. Indeed, he strikes me as someone who would have no issue with some excesses himself. I doubt he'll be as evil as the Tories, but that's only because it would be almost impossible for any actual human being to be as evil as that lot. But it's not really comforting to know the choice will be between the embodiment of pure evil versus just the guts, spleen, and left kidney of pure evil.

I simply don't trust that the legislation will be used as advertised on the box, by any in parliament, and I detest having to be so cynical. Cynicism isn't my style, it fits badly, it's totally alien to me, but it's the most optimistic I'm capable of being given the current spate of legislation going through.

The perverts will easily find dozens of ways to dance around this legislation. The only people who will suffer are the ones who wind up targeted by the government and its semi-autonomous minions for engaging in various forms of public dissent.

Age estimation? I swear she looked 18 your honor!

Currently a 255 page bill, so nothing clean and easy.

It is completely vague to how it is to be accomplished. In each section the quote is the same. First, that it must not be possible for children to access it, followed by "a provider is only entitled to conclude that it is not possible for children to access a service, or a part of it, if there are systems or processes in place (for example, age verification, or another means of age assurance) that achieve the result that children are not normally able to access the service or that part of it."

They require record keeping, which is disturbing. Many variations of what they need to keep, including "A provider must make and keep a written record, in an easily understandable form, of every children's access assessment." Since each "assessment" determines if they're adult or child, and it needs to have enough detail to prove they're an adult or a child in case the government comes looking. That's basically creation of a masturbation log for every adult.

Naturally it doesn't state certain things. There are no data retention guides, so no guidance of when it can be deleted. They reference investigations at 12 month limits so records must be kept for at least a year. There is nothing mentioned about data security, safety of the record keeping, nor consequences for distributing or safeguarding the data... so we must conclude the masturbation log is free to be sold, given to marketers, and passed along to government as business records that can be subpoenaed.

If you take a look at the bill itself, it doesn't make executives personally responsible for content minors may view on their platform or content of minors on their platform. It makes them liable for failing to comply with an information notice, providing false information in response to the notice, providing encrypted information in response to the notice without means to decrypt it, or destroys information relevant to the notice.

Executives are not personally responsible for child safety on their platforms