The headline sounds sensationalised. Below are the relevant sections from the Conservative Party Manifesto (https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/manifesto2017/Man

The headline sounds sensationalised. Below are the relevant sections from the Conservative Party Manifesto (https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/manifesto2017/Manifesto2017.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/manifesto2017/Manifesto20...). "The safest place to be online In harnessing the digital revolution, we must take steps to protect the vulnerable and give people confidence to use the internet without fear of abuse, criminality or exposure to horrific content. Our starting point is that online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline. It should be as unacceptable to bully online as it is in the playground, as difficult to groom a young child on the internet as it is in a community, as hard for children to access violent and degrading pornography online as it is in the high street, and as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically. Where technology can find a solution, we will pursue it. We will work with industry to introduce new protections for minors, from images of pornography, violence, and other age-inappropriate content not just on social media but in app stores and content sites as well. We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm. We will make clear the responsibility of platforms to enable the reporting of inappropriate, bullying, harmful or illegal content, with take-down on a comply-or-explain basis. We will continue to push the internet companies to deliver on their commitments to develop technical tools to identify and remove terrorist propaganda, to help smaller companies build their capabilities and to provide support for civil society organisations to promote alternative and counter-narratives. In addition, we do not believe that there should be a safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online and will work to prevent them from having this capability. We will educate today’s young people in the harms of the internet and how best to combat them, introducing comprehensive Relationships and Sex Education in all primary and secondary schools to ensure that children learn about the risks of the internet, including cyberbullying and online grooming. Where we believe people need more protections to keep them safe, we will act to protect them. We will give people new rights to ensure they are in control of their own data, including the ability to require major social media platforms to delete information held about them at the age of 18, the ability to access and export personal data, and an expectation that personal data held should be stored in a secure way. To create a sound ethical framework for how data is used, we will institute an expert Data Use and Ethics Commission to advise regulators and parliament on the nature of data use and how best to prevent its abuse. The Commission will help us to develop the principles and rules that will give people confidence that their data is being handled properly. Alongside this commission, we will bring forward a new data protection law, fit for our new data age, to ensure the very best standards for the safe, flexible and dynamic use of data and enshrining our global leadership in the ethical and proportionate regulation of data. We will put the National Data Guardian for Health and Social Care on a statutory footing to ensure data security standards are properly enforced." ----- I don't know how the data regulations mentioned at the end compare with the EU's Data Protection Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive), which is already part of UK law. It's also interesting to compare the comments in this thread with the recent thread about the EU's fines for Facebook (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219828), where the EU was praised for protecting consumer rights. I am genuinely undecided on this issue. I'm basically pro-freedom and pro-capitalist in politics, so Theresa's May's anti-market and authoritarian policies have made me much less likely to vote Conservative. Still, I think the right to privacy is an essential part of the right to liberty, so there's some justification for the government regulating the use of personal data.