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!

  • Th4tGuyII@kbin.social
    30·
    1 year ago

    Exactly. Online safety my arse.

    Putting a backdoor onto people’s phones to bypass encryption and forcing them to upload photos of themselves doesn’t do shit to keep them safe. If anything it endangers them!

    And for what exactly?? Do they not think that criminals will just find other ways to communicate, just like they always have? Are they that desperate to catch the stragglers left behind? This will literally only hurt the common folk just trying to get on with their lives, nobody else, just like every other mass surveillance law.

    • jpeps@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      This is something that really bothers me about this law. Are they making maths… illegal? What’s stopping me from encrypting a message before sending it in a messaging app manually? And if that’s illegal, what if say I just sent something base64 encoded, or with a ceaser cypher for some treasure hunt game, am I now breaking the law too? What about a child talking in code to avoid their parents knowing something? Will that be illegal? It just seems so general.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        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.

      • EngineerGaming@feddit.nlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        And also… How does it stop you from using an open-source, non-spying messaging solution or (if it’s done on OS level) an open source, non-spying OS? I consider the mainstream messengers fully compromised already, so nothing changes for them anyway.