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UK Online Safety Bill proposes age verification for all user-interactive sites
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- FridayoLeary 5y agobad idea. They are just talking about getting rid of annoying cookie banners to "deliver a Brexit dividend for individuals and businesses across the UK". I can easily imagine this law breaking almost all of the web.
- Dma54rhs 5y agoThere's fair amount of support behind it, famous footballers rallying it etc. Probably every politician in the uk would support it one way or another.
- dekken_ 5y ago> People who don't deserve to be paid propose things no one wants.
- jsuqo 5y agoReminds me of cookie banners.
- xxs 5y agoMost sites that display banners don't need them to operate. Neither the banners need to take half of screen and remind how useful would be when you are' properly tracked.
- pjc50 5y agoReminder that Boris Johnson was, for a time, paid more as a "journalist" writing one column a week than as a minister. He was eventually made to give that up. But, for those willing to sell out, the pay from being in an elected position of power is only partly from the public purse. Although the government is remarkably cheap to buy by SV standards: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-conservatives-rich-donors-b1898260.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson...
- HeckFeck 5y agoThe temptation of power is always stronger than pay.
- stuaxo 5y agoIn today's news that will make you go "Oh, fuck off!".
- pimterry 5y agoThis is a bad idea. That said, it's interesting to consider what a good idea would look like, if we imagine a world where age verification does become an inevitable strict requirement. Is it practical to do this cryptographically on the web, with something technically similar to today's client certificates? Age verification certificate authorities who verify your age, and then issue a private key & certificate pair that says just "the holder is 18+" (and nothing else) such that you then provide this seamlessly to websites as you browse? Without exposing a consistent certificate id that can be used to track you? That would allow the minimum verification but no more, without leaking personal data or creating any other UX impact. Such systems are still vulnerable to children actively stealing such certificates from verified adults of course, but so is every other manual verification scheme I've seen proposed, and at least it requires a fair degree of technical acumen to steal. Again, the UK plan here is a bad idea, but perhaps if this is a likely direction of future legislation then it would be good to get ahead of it with some kind of privacy-preserving alternative, instead of falling into easy but terrible fixes later.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoMS is following Apple's iPhone "it's not your device" model with Windows 11 needing the TPM chip, so soon we'll have less control of our hardware. I wonder if China would introduce a law which would monitor users through the camera e.g. "to ensure children (and adults) are not spending too much time on the computer". Afaik they already force the presence of monitoring software on phones of Ughyurs...
- conradfr 5y agoChina is already doing that and it's partially implemented that way. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/china-online-gaming-minors-regulation-curb-tencent-2146916 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/china-online-gaming... https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/china-tencent-facial-recognition-late-night-child-gamers-1984771 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/china-tencent-facial-re...
- matheusd 5y ago> Is it practical to do this cryptographically on the web, with something technically similar to today's client certificates? That one is easy to imagine (and is already deployed for some other use-cases in Brazil). People will be required by the government to have a client certificate, in order to interact with government services. You just slowly increase the scope of both which people are required and for what. If you increasing it slowly enough, most people won't even notice or status-quo-bias it into being "business as usual".
- rvz 5y agoKYC for every single internet service. From Twitter to TikTok it doesn't matter, It was a long time coming folks and now it is going to be a reality. A very terrible idea. Welcome to the new internet.
- earthbee 5y agoI hate saying it because it makes me sound like a paranoid loony, but we're literally getting close to being a config file change away from being an inescapable totalitarian dictatorship, all the parts are slowly being put in place and then all it'll take is someone to go for it. In the name of keeping us safe they're making us powerless and helpless before the powerful
- marcinzm 5y agoI mean, to be cynical, they managed to convince the population to support Brexit so why not go for gold while they can?
- CodeGlitch 5y agoBy "they" I assume you mean the government? The Tory government at the time was campaigning to remain, so not sure what you're talking about?
- shapefrog 5y agoIt would be the will of the people.
- switch007 5y ago> inescapable totalitarian dictatorship For context the government is also proposing: - Voter ID for voter disenfranchisement (Elections Bill) - To rig elections in favour of the Conservatives and stifle opposition (Elections Bill) - All but banning protests (Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill) There is multi-pronged attack underway which is in no way hyperbole.
- TicklishTiger 5y agoI think a good hedge against the web becoming more and more bureaucratic is to invest in the internet giants like Google and Facebook. It is such a tailwind for them. Every piece of regulation you have to comply with gives them an edge over the competition. Implementing cookie banners or an age verification system costs you the same if you have 1000 users or 1000 million users. So on a per user basis, these annoyances are a million times cheaper to master for the giants than for a startup.
- Havoc 5y agoReminds me of the time Zuckerberg appeared before Congress struggling to explain internet 101 to old politicians.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoThe web is pretty broken anyway - so this could be a driving force for an alternative web? I thinking something like IPFS: https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ Or broadcatching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcatching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcatching These are of course for generally downloading content, rather than interactive content.
- sys_64738 5y agohttps://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- CodeGlitch 5y agoI know it's a joke, but there's only 1 WWW. Would be good to have at least an alternative.
- ogwh 5y agoThis should go a step further and require ID. In reality ("IRL") everything we do is tied to who we are. Our very faces identify us instantly to everyone we interact with. There is no privacy of the kind people associate with the internet IRL. It's nothing more than an unhealthy vice that leads to people living unauthentic split lives with multiple incongruent personas. Those who exist solely on the internet and that which lives solely IRL. By making the internet an extension of reality with the same social dynamics instead of treating it as an alternate reality/fantasy world we'll start to integrate our online behaviour/activities with our offline selves. The end result being that many of the problems we associate with the internet cease to exist. No more anonymous trolls, less disinformation/fewer manipulative botnets shaping public discourse, less aggressive behaviour in online games... Above all else: accountability. It strikes me that the same people who want transparency of organisational behaviour (government, corp) seem to be the same people who themselves want their own behaviour to be kept secret.
- dexen 5y ago>No more anonymous trolls, less disinformation/fewer manipulative botnets shaping public discourse, less aggressive behaviour in online games. This assumption was tested extensively by several platforms, and it failed miserably all the way. You can still witness it yourself, on Facebook, where almost everybody posts under their own name and photo - and yet trolling, brigading, mass reporting, flamewars, and all other continue in force. Even worse, you'll find plenty of bot accounts on places like Twitter, with perfectly fine name and picture, while insightful and dissenting content is delivered by anonymous, or ironically branded, accounts. The correct solution is to stop trying to shoehorn our preconceived notions from offline life to online activities - and to reminding individual users that power is in their hands. The solution to Eternal September is to teach and integrate newcomers - and sometimes to also gatekeep - rather than trying to become a campus police of sorts. The much different nature - the vastly larger scale - of the internet makes it entirely unsuitable to govern by offline intuition.
- hammyhavoc 5y agoIt's cute that you think this is in any way achievable when the UK has left the EU. Your fantasy would require global cooperation. More chance of disarming nuclear weapons.
- davidhowlett 5y agoI am British and will be directly affected by this. What can I do to help stop this becoming law?
- sys_64738 5y agoIs it worth it to sites like this to implement age verification? Initially it will be too a high burden so just ban the UK IP address ranges to indemnify your site. In the long run age verification sites will emerge that are cheap but they will still cost. Anything that is supported by ads is gonna struggle so the long run has a UK accessible web being void of independent voices. This doesn’t consider the security implications once the UK identity and verification database is used for identity theft.
- thinkingemote 5y agoOne should let their local MP know about this.
- TeaDude 5y agoThey failed to do this with porn sites and now they want to do it with every site in existence? Preposterous. Incompetence is common in the public sector and it's really the only thing stopping this sort of thing from happening. Political support for this is mostly unanimous among the local parties and the larger European sphere. Every party will complain for votes and then proceed to re-implement it with a different blame figure.
- beardyw 5y agoI would commend to the government the age based questions from Leisure Suit Larry, but they probably have something less sophisticated in mind. https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.html https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...
- HeckFeck 5y agoIt would be nice if governments would heed the maxim 'don't interfere in what you don't understand'. But it's too easy to propose non solutions to non problems, or where there are problems blame the wrong people and do nothing to address the actual source of the problem. Maybe. Just maybe, leaving your children dumped at computer screens is a bad idea. Also raising them without any social defences, yes, perhaps that's part of the problem? Predators and morally harmful content exist everywhere, and there is plenty of both in the government might I add. So using force to ruin the Internet for everyone in the UK and introducing more time wasting paperwork will just make the world worse. Meanwhile, the kids who were vulnerable to online exploitation will fall to predators elsewhere or languish in generally miserable lives anyway. The government can't make up for your parental failings. We should stop letting it think it can.
- tomjen3 5y agoI imagine many, if not most of those services, will cut of the UK, rather than enforce this on everybody. This can be fixed with a VPN.