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The bait-and-switch hidden in today’s cookie announcement

ukoki 4y ago
Sounds like we're gonna need a Let's Encrypt-style NGO for age verification to kill these parasitic companies before they take hold.
- buttscicles 4y ago
  I would guess it's more expensive than generating certs - all those ID verification "AI" services use teams of people as a fallback from what I know
  - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
    What countries dont have govt funded ID services yet?
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      The UK is notorious for not having ID cards. That's a solved problem in every other developed country as far as I know. The reason behind it is privacy (lol, considering their total failure and unwillingness to enforce the GDPR) and yet they are totally fine with the tax office having the same database and information (which is no doubt accessible to law enforcement).
      - rndgermandude 4y ago
        >That's a solved problem in every other developed country as far as I know. Did you just call the US underdeveloped? :P But seriously, the US does not have a standardized "ID card" either. They have things like passports (which not that many people have), state-issued driver's licenses (so 50+ different ones, not sure how it's handled in all the non-state areas like Guam or Puerto Rico), social security numbers (which aren't exactly ID either), birth certificates, voter id cards (for people without a driver's license), and a slew of other things the government and businesses will accept under certain circumstances. What they do not have is a nation id card.
        weberer 4y ago
        >voter id cards (for people without a driver's license) You mean State ID cards? They're used for much more than voting.
      - riskable 4y ago
        The UK does have state-issued ID cards: Passports. Are you a UK person that wants to operate on the "international internet"? Get yourself a UK passport! :)
    - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
      Not sure why this was downvoted. It was a serious question. The countries I've lived all have digital ID services since a decade ago. And no I'm not talking about govt ID or a card. I'm talking about a digital identity you log into and then oauth into other govt services like the tax office or healthcare systems.
IshKebab 4y ago
Can anyone give a summary? This is ridiculously verbose.
- 542458 4y ago
  The UK has eliminated cookie pop up requirements. However, they have introduced other legislation that requires websites to establish the ages of all visitors via checking legal ID so that adult content can be restricted. This is expected to be done by integrating with (paid) third-party APIs that will keep track of users’ legal identity across websites. This will be both privacy-invasive for users and expensive for website operators. The UK has also axed many of the EU-based data protections that users have.
  - buttscicles 4y ago
    Wanted to add that according to the article, these checks will be required for all content, not just adult content.
    - ectopod 4y ago
      All user-generated content specifically. If you host non-adult content and there's no way for randos to upload it you don't need to verify.
      - matt321 4y ago
        That is not true. Either A) You know for a fact all content is safe for underaged, or B) You verify. What is safe for underaged is not defined and can change on a whim. Therefor, any sane person running a website that is not "explicitly for underageds" will verify and eject said underageds. Especially since the one in charge (hired by the company) can be personally liable for any "harm" comming to the underaged.
  - jcranberry 4y ago
    Is this website reliable?
orangesite 4y ago
Anyone else remember how to configure a gopher server?
cameronh90 4y ago
This sounds awful but I'm not sure comparing webcam age verification to Nazi phrenology is helpful. Indeed, such a reaching Reductio ad Hitlerum makes me doubt the credibility of the piece.
- 542458 4y ago
  I don’t see any references to nazis in there. The article says “Victorian phrenology”, not “nazi phrenology”. Calling it a Victorian practice isn’t unreasonable. Technically phrenology was most popular immediately before the beginning of the Victorian era, but it’s pretty close.
  - zuminator 4y ago
    The article embeds a tweet that states,"It took Nazi-era atrocities, forced sterilizations... for phrenology, eugenics, and other pseudosciences to be relegated from science’s mainstream to its fringe. It should not take mass injustice for Cheap AI to be recognised as similarly harmful."
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - technothrasher 4y ago
    The article doesn't directly equate phrenology with Nazis, but does make an implied connection between phrenology and Nazi craniometry, and goes on to quote a tweet which explicitly talks about Nazi atrocities being the driving force in the end of phrenology. The entire reference feels like an overreach, however, not just because of the Reductio ad Hitlerum, but also because it begs the question on the inherent evil of any use of craniometry.
  - adhoc_slime 4y ago
    There was an inline quote about nazi phrenology as well > But for the slow VCs at the back who do need to be told: >> Concluding, Dr. @Abebab notes, "It took Nazi-era atrocities, forced sterilizations… for phrenology,
  - 4y ago
bodge5000 4y ago
Government attempting to legislate something they don't understand (especially technology I'd say) is nothing new, its already happening in the UK, in the EU, in the states and all around the world. Why we let this pass, I don't know, but its the reality we're living in. But if I'm reading this right, this takes the cake for the worst one yet, or certainly up there.
- DyslexicAtheist 4y ago
  > this takes the cake for the worst one yet, or certainly up there. my number one is the Australian AABill mandating any Australian citizen working for a tech company can be forced to create backdoors in code and altering their employer about it is illegal. This one is so bad, that if it were China, we'd no longer hire any Chinese nationals anywhere in the world.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    I was an Australian freelancing internationally at the time it was introduced, and took pretty good care fully understanding the bill to the best of my ability. It really seems to be as bad as it sounds. But what worried me was that it was actually written quite coherently, I felt like it had been well considered by some people of technical background, but the bill still had ill intent. So I'm not sure what's worse, legislature misunderstanding technology so much that it's harmful, or people using a good understanding of technology to be more precise and underhanded in their abuse.
    - fifteenforty 4y ago
      It's completely outrageous and there is still no momentum to undo it.
  - AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
    What if I create a backdoor but during the code review it gets noticed? Or does Australian government also supply some handbook about how to do it properly?
aidos 4y ago
This is one depressing read.
EGreg 4y ago
I am impressed. This bill manages to go from “think of the children” to “papers, please” in zero intermediate steps! One motivates the other, directly. And no one noticed the irony!
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  It's on top of the existing measure where if you wanted to access mature content over your internet connection, you had to file a request with your ISP. And I'm sure the UK's big provider porn filter wasn't very good anyway, given how much and how quickly it can pop up. And the targeted demographic that should be protected - children - will find plenty of ways around it. Reddit and Twitter are easily accessed, Youtube has tons of soft porn that won't get filtered out, VPNs are everywhere - even free ones, like in Opera, and they Know about it - Tiktok has tons of soft porn, the list goes on.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Step 1: roll it out for mature sites Step 2: roll it out for all sites Step 1 could be seen to have some justification. But any lawmaker with a functioning brain would immediately realize that Step 2 will cause a radical change on the Internet. They aren’t saying that you get an unlinkable verifiable claim (Web3) that you’re over 18, to access ALL SITES. That would be somewhat reasonable. No, they say you’ll get an ID that is linked to you and all sites will be able to know who you are and cross correlate all data on you, to save the children. I mean… who needs third party cookie blocking at that point haha
    - tankenmate 4y ago
      The current proposals isn't to roll it out for mature sites, but any site that might possibly allow user generated content. Think of e-commerce sites with product reviews for example. Step 2 could conceivably happen a la boiled frog.
    - janekm 4y ago
      Web3 doesn't feel like the right framework here? Generally the types of tokens used in the "web3" world are inherently traceable. Something similar to Passkeys (https://developer.apple.com/passkeys/ https://developer.apple.com/passkeys/) would be more appropriate, generating a new key pair for every website accessed. In order to provide the attestation of age, the public key provided could be signed by a trusted authority. (not that I like any of this, but something like this would be the least objectionable implementation)
stormdennis 4y ago
Will the UK governemnt be also encouraging kids to use vpns, for their own protection, but remember to only use ones with UK ips, lest you seem something adult.
- tankenmate 4y ago
  I could image people lobbying the corridors of power to introduce legislation that puts age verification / blocking requirements on VPN technology. The Great Firewall on the Thames.
moss2 4y ago
There's a popular English stereotype that everything requires a permit or a license. I'm glad they continue to live up to that.
- macinjosh 4y ago
  Even 007 had a license to kill!
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
<<Preamble: you’ll be aware that the UK’s Online Safety Bill has been promoted as a piece of big tech/social media legislation, but it is not. It will impact any company or project of any size, nature, location, or business model which has user-generated content on it or allows humans to interact with other humans. So if your site, service or app is anything other than a promotional portfolio web 1.0 site, or a blog like this here blog that only allows comments, you’re in scope. If you weren’t aware of that, you are now. Enough of the preamble, let’s amble. Sold. I am all for returning to standard boring web 1.0. Lets do this thing!
DrBazza 4y ago
This doesn't read like a neutral analysis to me. On the other hand the UK will mostly continue to support GDPR, in the same way all our phones will be USB-C, EU legislation leaks across borders to every country on the planet. The UK government have been hopelessly out of their depth legislating the internet, since, forever. The site is called "webdevlaw.uk" and the article footer "This is my personal site, and the opinions on it do not reflect the views of any current or previous employer." seems a bit dishonest, but everywhere does it these days (putting "news" at the end of your twitter handle somehow makes you a journalist apparently).
- bodge5000 4y ago
  > The UK government have been hopelessly out of their depth legislating the internet, since, forever. This is both the good and the bad of this legislation. Bad, for obvious reasons, but good because usually they're so unbelievably out of their depth that it never actually comes to pass. We're now, what, 5 years is it delayed on a bill that was supposed to require an ID for adult websites? I remember it started up before May was in power and still nothing has been done about it, and that was far less "ambitious" than this.
  - DrBazza 4y ago
    Agreed. I don't really understand the UK government. Though it's probably the same elsewhere, career politicians schooled in humanities at university, completely clueless about the ministerial role they've been given.
    - mmarq 4y ago
      > I don't really understand the UK government. They need some crazy headlines to try to win the next by elections. When the pensioners will realise that they have to identify themselves to watch porn, the bill will be retracted.
    - rswail 4y ago
      It's like the republicans on abortion, the last thing they want is to actually pass any legislation, because then they'll have lost an issue that they can use to rile up the dumbest side of their supporters, combining the best of "won't someone think of the children", and "omg, genitalia in motion is much more evil than violence", and "if we do this right, we'll have a perfect panopticon to catch out the others out there that you don't like".
throw0101a 4y ago
It's a bit of a shame that self-labelling by web sites never seemed to really take off: * https://www.w3.org/TR/powder-use-cases/#cpA https://www.w3.org/TR/powder-use-cases/#cpA * https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R... It could be much easier if the major web browsers (at this point Chrome, Safari (mobile), Firefox) were able to read the metadata and if parents (or corporate IT departments) wanted to filter content they could using 'built-in' technology rather every web site having to potentially re-invent the wheel.
- macinjosh 4y ago
  This 1000%. Legitimate services have an incentive to self-identify because they don't want to anger parents and are generally not out to corrupt kids. A setting to block unrated sites could be provided as well. Movies and video games self report their rating not sure why web content needs to be any different. The problem with the top down approach of the government deciding which topics are taboo is that it removes agency from parents. Different parents, different kids, and different ages all lead to different values and levels of acceptibility. My tin foil hat catches my eye every time I see government trying a heavy-handed, slippery-slope approach to clamping down on a problem instead of just providing society with a common set of tools to accomplish a relatively simple goal.
  - alisonkisk 4y ago
ta988 4y ago
If only Google had used just a little bit of its lobbying money to get those laws more technologically sound and help solve that with metadata that the browser can then handle.
EGreg 4y ago
I have a serious question… in elections, we need to know a person has exactly one account etc. Entering a bar, they need to know you’re 21 or over etc. The PROPER mechanism for this would be a certificate issues by a trusted authority (or a few) that would somehow prove with a zero knowledge proof that you have one of the certificates, but every time it would be different and unlinkable to you. It wouldn’t leak an identifier that can be used to track you. Google GROUP SIGNATURES, that is what we want to achieve. How? Is there a well-known software library in crypto, besides a mixer like Tornado.Cash or rings like in Monero? Something like openssl so we don’t have to “roll our own”? The technical name for what I want is Group Signatures, starting with this seminal paper by Chaum in 1991: https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Group_Signatures.pdf https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Group_Signature... But what is the latest State of the Art in Group Signatures? What is used today, that can work at scale for groups of MILLIONS of people, and still be anonymous? Chaum’s conception is linear in the number of group members and the group has to be fixed in the beginning, and can’t be dynamically changed. That means issuing new certs once a year year to people who have come of age at 18, or registered to vote etc. That proves your age so they’d have to actually create larger groups by aggregating these together with previous groups (they could also remove people from the rolls if they haven’t retegistered for a while, eg for a driver’s license again). This is the latest work I could find and it’s from 2003… why is no one making progress in this field, or implementations? https://cseweb.ucsd.edu//~daniele/papers/BMW.pdf https://cseweb.ucsd.edu//~daniele/papers/BMW.pdf
- dsr_ 4y ago
  The problem is that "exactly one account for election voting" and "untraceably anonymous" don't go together. What we've got now is a physical mixing where you "prove" your identity to a clerk at the assigned polling location, you are issued a physical token which you fill out in privacy, and then the token with the voting information on it is mixed with all the others from that polling location. By having opposed auditors watching vigilantly, we get some confidence that ballots are not altered or replaced. Let's say that you have a system which has a single account for every citizen (fine in theory), which can issue an anonymous bearer token that can be used for voting later. That bearer token is now vulnerable to being sold, confiscated, copied (but only usable once, so there's a race), forgotten, and can go unused.
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kmlx 4y ago
for reference, the online safety bill is in the committee stage: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137 https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137 so, a long way to go. the new Data Reform Bill has not even been submitted yet.
mngnt 4y ago
I'm really sad that even professionals hate the cookie/gdpr/data collection banners for the wrong reason. And most people hate the wrong entity for being responsible for their existence. If companies weren't actively spying on their users, if the didn't collect every last bit of data they can, there would be no need to put up a banner. If the website needs cookies for core functionality (essential cookies) only, there' no need to inform, ask or badger the user for anything. The websites/data collectors are the bad guy here (from where I'm standing) and now that they have to ask us if they can please spy on us, the EU is evil because they force them to ask? The main presented point of this bill is "We will eliminate the obligation for the spies to ask you if they may spy on you" and even the author of this piece is celebrating that.
- teh_klev 4y ago
  > and even the author of this piece is celebrating that. I don't think so. Read the last part of that sentence which I've emphasised in italics. "So if you work in any sort of tech or digital related role, and the work you put into the world can be viewed, or accessed, by anyone of any age in the UK, and you are (rightfully) celebrating the loss of the cookie popups, I need you to do me a favour and drop the balloons and party streamers and sit down."
- random_upvoter 4y ago
  > The websites/data collectors are the bad guy here (from where I'm standing) and now that they have to ask us if they can please spy on us, the EU is evil because they force them to ask? If the end-result of the law + standard human behavior is that you made web browsing a crappier experience then you made a crappy law.
  - riskable 4y ago
    > If the end-result of the law + standard human behavior is that you made web browsing a crappier experience then you made a crappy law. That's not a very good way to figure out if a law is "crappy". Building codes make for a crappier construction experience (can't just do whatever TF you want) but that doesn't mean they're bad. Laws requiring designated handicapped parking spaces make parking a slightly crappier experience for non-handicapped people. That doesn't mean they're crappy laws.
macinjosh 4y ago
I really despise "won't someone think about the children laws" and I say this as a parent. It is not society's job to shelter your children from the unsavory, it is the parents' job. Besides that, it is hard to argue against any law that is couched as protecting innocent children. Obviously, having to verify with ID the age of every website visitor is impractical right now. The logical solution is for government to mandate and issue Internet IDs that must be used to access any web service. This bait-and-switch leads down a slippery slope that erodes anonymity on the Internet, not that there is much left.
- loriverkutya 4y ago
  Let’s use leaded petrol again and you can protect your children however you want!
pilsetnieks 4y ago
Also, and I understand it is a quote in the article but the GDPR isn't "highly complex". It is actually one of the more understandable pieces of legislation I've ever read. It is, however, vague and gives a lot of leeway to local data protection authorities in interpreting it.
- scarface74 4y ago
  You realize the GDPR is 11 chapters and 99 sections don’t you?
dbrgn 4y ago
The announcement says it wants to "protect consumers", but it changes user tracking from opt-in to opt-out... How about ensuring that companies stop tracking people unnecessarily? I see so many websites – even club websites or private blogs – that have a cookie consent banner, but which wouldn't actually need one if they'd just turn off Google Analytics. I just don't get it.
- hericium 4y ago
  > wouldn't actually need one if they'd just turn off Google Analytics. Isn't one of the incentives for Analytics, that by knowing your audience Google will be able to suggest your site to their search engine users? I've heard more than once something in the lines of "we can't disable analytics as we'd lose traffic".
  - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    What are you talking about? I've been in SEO for a while and there are a lot of myths but I've never heard anything quite this wrong before.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      It's a pretty persistent "myth" ... do you have any support that it's a myth other than "I've been in SEO for a while"?
      - mikestew 4y ago
        Do you have any support that it’s not a myth, other than…”a lot of people are saying…”? I mean, burden’s on the one making the claim, not the other way around.
        Ensorceled 4y ago
        There are literally "a lot of people saying" it isn't a myth, I've heard them, and one guy saying it is a myth and is an expert ... so, seems like that expert could straighten the issue out for us? I mean, the burden is on both sides here but one has "been in SEO for a while".
that_guy_iain 4y ago
For me, this is the important part. > The UK is also planning to legislate to remove the EU-derived requirement for the Data Protection Officer, as the person responsible for safeguarding an organisation’s users’ privacy rights, while simultaneously demanding under the OSB that companies appoint named individuals who are subject to personal arrests and criminal sanctions for failing to prevent bad things from happening on the internet. *subject to personal arrests and criminal sanctions* seems like the limited liability companies no longer limit the liability. I have a legal entity registered in Scotland. Seems like it might be time to wind that up and move it to another country. Where is a good company within the EU to registered?
- jamessb 4y ago
  Ireland seems the natural choice, and wouldn't require you to use a language other than English for anything.
  - closewith 4y ago
    Limited liability companies in Ireland don't provide any protection against liability for criminal acts (nor do any countries), so I think the ideal would be to move to a jurisdiction where the act is not criminal or cease the criminal actions.
    - that_guy_iain 4y ago
      Well, the issue is, they made a company data protection issue criminal and not civil. It would be moving to a country where data protection is a civil matter in a day and age where data leaks happen on a regular basis.
- zekica 4y ago
  I heard good things about Ireland.
- dhimes 4y ago
  Kind of a Sarbanes-Oxley for privacy?
sdfhbdf 4y ago
Hmm the main allegation against GDPR seems to be that it lead to creation of useless pop-ups, which is partially true but it should be also highlighted that GPDR itself does not require a pop-up mechanism just consent, it did not specify what technological implementation should there be. It is the website owners to blame for using daunting cookie pop-up implementations. This is to say that "killing pop-ups" should not be a point of a legislation if there isn't one that requires these pop-ups.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  The popups are a revenge tactic used by data hoarders. "Oh, look at this terrible EU, they make us show you all kinds of popups [small]because we want to track your every move online[/small], poor you, the inconvenienced users! If only there was a way to prevent this terrible faith!"
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So you think every single website has cookie banners as some sort of political statement? Isn’t the simpler answer that the EU like most governments is incompetent and didn’t think through their legislation even though it’s 99 sections and 11 chapters?
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      The EU knew exactly what they were doing. The requirement for explicit consent was entirely intentional. It was websites and businesses that chose cookie walls over data minimisation. Most websites don't need a cookie wall or even a popup. Even ad supported websites can use context based advertising without any tracking whatsoever but the choice is clear. It's not always a political statement to add a cookie wall. Some companies are too lazy to consider alternatives, others don't care enough about their users. This stuff has been coming for years and nobody cared until suddenly everyone was "surprised" and now years later everybody is still acting like this is a recent development. The message is always clear: your convenience as a customer is worth less than your data.
andy_ppp 4y ago
So the Online Harms Bill (the switch part of TFA) is about having a completely controlled Internet in which innovation is completely stalled and entirely government mandated. It seems kind of mad that this could be phased in soon... I presume I will have to log into hacker news via a VPN because obviously this place isn't going to implement anything other than geo blocking for UK IPs (like 99% of websites will); it certainly isn't going to be paying 10p+ for every user here to prove they are over 16/18? Do we know under what terms young people will be allowed to interact with the Internet?
- ssl232 4y ago
  I think for the reasons you give this bill is never going to actually get through in its current form, or, if it does, it won't be abided by nor enforced. The reason it's gotten this far is because government ministers don't have any idea how the web works and they've adopted an attitude of ignoring experts so they won't learn. Once ordinary Tory voters start to get irritated by the implications of the law (credit card to view porn?) it'll get quietly scrapped. In any case, I know otherwise-luddite 60 year olds who know how to use VPNs to watch geoblocked TV, so getting around it will be trivial for a sizeable chunk of the population. And there's no way the UK government has the resources and political capital to police the internet on the scale required by this bill.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > And there's no way the UK government has the resources and political capital to police the internet on the scale required by this bill. It doesn't have to, it just has to follow up by making VPNs illegal, and then selectively enforcing that law against its political opponents.
    - ssl232 4y ago
      I don't doubt that the government can make life hell for its opponents if it wants to, I just doubt that ordinary voters will allow it to get that bad. Tories have such power right now because they're taking actions (and making signals) popular with the people, whether the rest of us agree or not. I don't buy that they've so corrupted the system that it no longer matters what the voting public think, which is why I still believe this bill is not going to be implemented or enforced in a way that removes real freedoms, once the public notice. Besides, don't plenty of despotic countries already ban VPNs around the world, to limited effect? A large, liberal country like the UK banning them would I'm sure drive improvements to VPN protocols to make them even harder for ISPs to detect. Maybe I'm too hopeful for the future...
gorjusborg 4y ago
The EU had some teeth when GDPR was passed. Even if I'm not in the EU, there are lots of countries that are, so cost/benefit of compliance seems reasonable. When I hear about strange Brinternet rules, I just think why should I care about a single country and their strange and costly laws. If UK users want to reach my site, change your laws or use a VPN.
- unicornfinder 4y ago
  Indeed. My response to this has largely been "if this passes I'll just block traffic from the UK to my website" as it'd be cheaper than implementing this utter madness.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  Especially if compliance becomes a _criminal_ issue. But then again Britain probably thinks this will spur a domestic market for smaller tech, and maybe that’s correct? Though it does sound like the main thing it incentivizes will be some rent seeking age verification companies or very dubious utility to consumers.
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ilaksh 4y ago
Is there a service or system for automatically blocking anyone from the UK? And how can we make it clear to British politicians that such a thing will be widely deployed?
- riskable 4y ago
  A better service would be one that automatically blocks UK politicians with a clear message indicating why
- onionisafruit 4y ago
  Why would a webmaster with no ties to the UK go to the trouble of blocking their traffic?
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    Read the article.
    - onionisafruit 4y ago
      I did read the article. I don't see anything in it that would cause somebody with no ties to the UK to block traffic. If I'm to believe this article, it's a pretty terrible law for UK residents, but as a US webmaster I am not bound by their laws. I can continue to serve user-generated content without any age verification and Her Majesty's government can't really do anything about it aside from blocking my web site. In an extreme case they could issue an arrest warrant should I ever decide to visit their kingdom, but that doesn't really worry me either. If this becomes UK law and I continue to run onionisafruit-forum.net without age verification or blocking UK traffic, these are what I consider the possible outcomes from most to least likely: - It never comes to the kingdom's attention, and everything continues as before. - Some vigilant Brit reports it to their government. An email is sent to the support address. I do nothing, and the matter is dropped. - My site gets reported and is added to a blocklist for UK ISPs. - My site gets reported and Her Majesty's government convinces my ISP to cut me off. - My site gets reported. Her Majesty's government puts in the effort to identify me personally and issues an arrest warrant. I never get to fulfill my lifelong dream of drinking warm beer in a London pub for fear of arrest.
dcdc123 4y ago
> The government said the change will cut down on “the irritating boxes users currently see on every website”. Hate to break it to you but we have no laws for them in the US and we have the stupid popup on almost every site.
trinsic2 4y ago
> where I discussed how government is shifting its language from describing us as people with data rights to consumers with contracts, was spot on. You’ll understand if I’m not gloating. This is exactly the issue, and the most important point that people and small businesses should be focused on. Especially when dealing with organizations that want to use the "consumers with contracts" model. Stop using the word "Consumer". People are not consumers, they don't consume things. People and Individuals purchase things with their own purchasing power as "Customers". We are not apart of a mindless machine, where businesses are the engine and we are the gears. Its the other way around, and the more that people promote this in the work place and other areas of life, the better. Words are like magic, they can empower, or enslave us. Don't let the few, who want to control public perception, make the calls.
rudasn 4y ago
Would it be possible to avoid all this mess by imaging a different way to use the web? An access method based on rss (of some sort), in the way "start pages" did it ages ago. So instead of going to a website to get information, the information comes to my website where I make the rules (as I'm the provider and the sole user). And instead of only receiving plain text information, I can also interact and communicate with other people (the content provider and other consumers), if I choose to. It took them 15 years to fuck up the Web, we can pull the rug underneath them and perhaps get 20 more.
- deleted 4y ago
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permo-w 4y ago
Historically in the UK inconvenience-inducing online laws like the Online Safety Bill have fallen either shortly after passage or shortly before passage as the people who pass them realise that they too have to follow their own rules. This was certainly the case for that nationwide opt-out porn block that they brought in a decade ago, then quickly slipped under the rug when it became clear that they too would have to either learn to use a VPN or call up their service providers expressing their desire to watch porn
- toyg 4y ago
  Some of it lingers, though. Like the invisible DNS filtering that all consumer ISPs are effectively forced to implement, blocking URLs coming from an unaccountable third party organization. Or: > that nationwide opt-out porn block That's still there; ISPs just made it very easy to switch off the block from apps and websites. Tories ask for 100, bag 20, then ask for 200 and bag 80 - result: they get 100. And there is no recourse now, because those pesky supranational voices of reason have been jettisoned.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    Boris Johnson is the only hope, in my opinion. Yeah he's a slimy, entitled, lying, racist, upper-class con-artist, but he's a populist at heart and has no principles beyond what he thinks will make the public like him. Yeah that's disgusting, and yeah it's the best of the worst, but it's still better than Cameronism, which simply doesn't care what you think. If an uproar comes, which it hopefully will, at least our fearless leader will listen, if only out of self-interest
    - toyg 4y ago
      I hope that was satire...? Johnson is the one who keeps pushing these crazy schemes just to keep people riled up against the "bureaucracy-mad EU" he invented so many years ago. He will stop at nothing to stay in power, and will happily sacrifice all your freedoms to that effect - he doesn't respect the law anyway, so anything put on the book is just for you and me to be beaten down, not for him and his mates. > it's still better than Cameronism That's a false dichotomy. There is life outside the Tory ideological landscape. > If an uproar comes, which it hopefully will If the uproar comes from the "wrong" sector of the electorate, the Tories will just double down on it.
dangerface 4y ago
Is there tldr? I am half way through the article and so far all I know there is a new bill is there any more detail than that?
wdb 4y ago
I hope the day I need to proof my identity to access the internet for typical sites (e.g. this site or a news site etc) never comes
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
>> The announcement criticized the EU’s “highly complex” General Data Protection Regulation and promised a “clampdown on bureaucracy, red tape and pointless paperwork” to “seize the benefits of Brexit.” And that's all one needs to know about that announcement.
thayne 4y ago
How does the UK passing a law saying you don't need cookie popups make those popups go away. Maybe big companies will target UK cetizens to not get popups, but most sites will still give you popups, because giving everyone popups to comply with EU laws is a lot easier than figuring out if you live in the EU or not. For example, the US doesn't have requirements for cookie consent, but you still see a ton of these popups if you live in the US.
TrueDuality 4y ago
From what I understand the way this is currently shaking out, is that it largely won't impact marketplace sites as credit cards can be used as a form of age verification. You might have to create an account and associate a credit card before you're able to browse which would be an awful user experience... For other sites though, if the this passes into law I suspect it will have a much more intense cooling effect on the availability and access to sites. For the unpaid service sites I run, I'm certainly not going to pay for identity verification or allow that garbage on my sites. I'm much more likely to hide or disable any user generated content, or just serve a static page to users in the UK saying the site isn't available in your region. They're really doubling down on removing themselves from the world community...
- dhosek 4y ago
  Yeah, this seems remarkably unworkable. 10p per user is a really high cost. I have to imagine that sites like Facebook or Twitter will fight hard against this. It’s far more onerous than GDPR.
draw_down 4y ago
golem14 4y ago
What I don't get is that if you have a web presence in the EU, you're STILL subject to GDPR regulations, so really, in practice, for many – in particular larger – companies, you'd have now implement GDPR AND the new british rules. And it's not clear to me that those two sets of rules would be compatible, rather than mutually exclusive. What a clusterfuck!
jokethrowaway 4y ago
This is the living proof you can't even trust the governments that are removing bureaucracy and regulations. All those bribes must have made them forget their fight for freedom.
sandstrom 4y ago
I know protection of children is usually a false pretense, but for those that really care, it makes much more sense to let parents fine tune their children's access to various internet properties. For example, iOS has pretty good parental controls, where parents can limit time in certain apps, etc. It's just a much more scalable and flexible solution. Sure, some laws for companies could make sense, e.g. forbid them to run ads tailored to children below a certain age. Or label their products appropriately. But I think it's basically the same thing as "video violence" and any reasonable set of parents shouldn't have any trouble making sure that their eight year old isn't watching Saw 3 (or some other violent film) with her friends.

Sounds like we're gonna need a Let's Encrypt-style NGO for age verification to kill these parasitic companies before they take hold.

buttscicles 4y ago
I would guess it's more expensive than generating certs - all those ID verification "AI" services use teams of people as a fallback from what I know
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
  What countries dont have govt funded ID services yet?
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    The UK is notorious for not having ID cards. That's a solved problem in every other developed country as far as I know. The reason behind it is privacy (lol, considering their total failure and unwillingness to enforce the GDPR) and yet they are totally fine with the tax office having the same database and information (which is no doubt accessible to law enforcement).
    - rndgermandude 4y ago
      >That's a solved problem in every other developed country as far as I know. Did you just call the US underdeveloped? :P But seriously, the US does not have a standardized "ID card" either. They have things like passports (which not that many people have), state-issued driver's licenses (so 50+ different ones, not sure how it's handled in all the non-state areas like Guam or Puerto Rico), social security numbers (which aren't exactly ID either), birth certificates, voter id cards (for people without a driver's license), and a slew of other things the government and businesses will accept under certain circumstances. What they do not have is a nation id card.
      - weberer 4y ago
        >voter id cards (for people without a driver's license) You mean State ID cards? They're used for much more than voting.
    - riskable 4y ago
      The UK does have state-issued ID cards: Passports. Are you a UK person that wants to operate on the "international internet"? Get yourself a UK passport! :)
  - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
    Not sure why this was downvoted. It was a serious question. The countries I've lived all have digital ID services since a decade ago. And no I'm not talking about govt ID or a card. I'm talking about a digital identity you log into and then oauth into other govt services like the tax office or healthcare systems.

IshKebab 4y ago

Can anyone give a summary? This is ridiculously verbose.

542458 4y ago
The UK has eliminated cookie pop up requirements. However, they have introduced other legislation that requires websites to establish the ages of all visitors via checking legal ID so that adult content can be restricted. This is expected to be done by integrating with (paid) third-party APIs that will keep track of users’ legal identity across websites. This will be both privacy-invasive for users and expensive for website operators. The UK has also axed many of the EU-based data protections that users have.
- buttscicles 4y ago
  Wanted to add that according to the article, these checks will be required for all content, not just adult content.
  - ectopod 4y ago
    All user-generated content specifically. If you host non-adult content and there's no way for randos to upload it you don't need to verify.
    - matt321 4y ago
      That is not true. Either A) You know for a fact all content is safe for underaged, or B) You verify. What is safe for underaged is not defined and can change on a whim. Therefor, any sane person running a website that is not "explicitly for underageds" will verify and eject said underageds. Especially since the one in charge (hired by the company) can be personally liable for any "harm" comming to the underaged.
- jcranberry 4y ago
  Is this website reliable?

orangesite 4y ago

Anyone else remember how to configure a gopher server?

cameronh90 4y ago

This sounds awful but I'm not sure comparing webcam age verification to Nazi phrenology is helpful. Indeed, such a reaching Reductio ad Hitlerum makes me doubt the credibility of the piece.

542458 4y ago
I don’t see any references to nazis in there. The article says “Victorian phrenology”, not “nazi phrenology”. Calling it a Victorian practice isn’t unreasonable. Technically phrenology was most popular immediately before the beginning of the Victorian era, but it’s pretty close.
- zuminator 4y ago
  The article embeds a tweet that states,"It took Nazi-era atrocities, forced sterilizations... for phrenology, eugenics, and other pseudosciences to be relegated from science’s mainstream to its fringe. It should not take mass injustice for Cheap AI to be recognised as similarly harmful."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- technothrasher 4y ago
  The article doesn't directly equate phrenology with Nazis, but does make an implied connection between phrenology and Nazi craniometry, and goes on to quote a tweet which explicitly talks about Nazi atrocities being the driving force in the end of phrenology. The entire reference feels like an overreach, however, not just because of the Reductio ad Hitlerum, but also because it begs the question on the inherent evil of any use of craniometry.
- adhoc_slime 4y ago
  There was an inline quote about nazi phrenology as well > But for the slow VCs at the back who do need to be told: >> Concluding, Dr. @Abebab notes, "It took Nazi-era atrocities, forced sterilizations… for phrenology,
- 4y ago

bodge5000 4y ago

Government attempting to legislate something they don't understand (especially technology I'd say) is nothing new, its already happening in the UK, in the EU, in the states and all around the world. Why we let this pass, I don't know, but its the reality we're living in. But if I'm reading this right, this takes the cake for the worst one yet, or certainly up there.

DyslexicAtheist 4y ago
> this takes the cake for the worst one yet, or certainly up there. my number one is the Australian AABill mandating any Australian citizen working for a tech company can be forced to create backdoors in code and altering their employer about it is illegal. This one is so bad, that if it were China, we'd no longer hire any Chinese nationals anywhere in the world.
- ehnto 4y ago
  I was an Australian freelancing internationally at the time it was introduced, and took pretty good care fully understanding the bill to the best of my ability. It really seems to be as bad as it sounds. But what worried me was that it was actually written quite coherently, I felt like it had been well considered by some people of technical background, but the bill still had ill intent. So I'm not sure what's worse, legislature misunderstanding technology so much that it's harmful, or people using a good understanding of technology to be more precise and underhanded in their abuse.
  - fifteenforty 4y ago
    It's completely outrageous and there is still no momentum to undo it.
- AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
  What if I create a backdoor but during the code review it gets noticed? Or does Australian government also supply some handbook about how to do it properly?

aidos 4y ago

This is one depressing read.

EGreg 4y ago

I am impressed. This bill manages to go from “think of the children” to “papers, please” in zero intermediate steps! One motivates the other, directly. And no one noticed the irony!

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
It's on top of the existing measure where if you wanted to access mature content over your internet connection, you had to file a request with your ISP. And I'm sure the UK's big provider porn filter wasn't very good anyway, given how much and how quickly it can pop up. And the targeted demographic that should be protected - children - will find plenty of ways around it. Reddit and Twitter are easily accessed, Youtube has tons of soft porn that won't get filtered out, VPNs are everywhere - even free ones, like in Opera, and they Know about it - Tiktok has tons of soft porn, the list goes on.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Step 1: roll it out for mature sites Step 2: roll it out for all sites Step 1 could be seen to have some justification. But any lawmaker with a functioning brain would immediately realize that Step 2 will cause a radical change on the Internet. They aren’t saying that you get an unlinkable verifiable claim (Web3) that you’re over 18, to access ALL SITES. That would be somewhat reasonable. No, they say you’ll get an ID that is linked to you and all sites will be able to know who you are and cross correlate all data on you, to save the children. I mean… who needs third party cookie blocking at that point haha
  - tankenmate 4y ago
    The current proposals isn't to roll it out for mature sites, but any site that might possibly allow user generated content. Think of e-commerce sites with product reviews for example. Step 2 could conceivably happen a la boiled frog.
  - janekm 4y ago
    Web3 doesn't feel like the right framework here? Generally the types of tokens used in the "web3" world are inherently traceable. Something similar to Passkeys (https://developer.apple.com/passkeys/ https://developer.apple.com/passkeys/) would be more appropriate, generating a new key pair for every website accessed. In order to provide the attestation of age, the public key provided could be signed by a trusted authority. (not that I like any of this, but something like this would be the least objectionable implementation)

stormdennis 4y ago

Will the UK governemnt be also encouraging kids to use vpns, for their own protection, but remember to only use ones with UK ips, lest you seem something adult.

tankenmate 4y ago
I could image people lobbying the corridors of power to introduce legislation that puts age verification / blocking requirements on VPN technology. The Great Firewall on the Thames.

moss2 4y ago

There's a popular English stereotype that everything requires a permit or a license. I'm glad they continue to live up to that.

macinjosh 4y ago
Even 007 had a license to kill!

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

<<Preamble: you’ll be aware that the UK’s Online Safety Bill has been promoted as a piece of big tech/social media legislation, but it is not. It will impact any company or project of any size, nature, location, or business model which has user-generated content on it or allows humans to interact with other humans. So if your site, service or app is anything other than a promotional portfolio web 1.0 site, or a blog like this here blog that only allows comments, you’re in scope. If you weren’t aware of that, you are now. Enough of the preamble, let’s amble. Sold. I am all for returning to standard boring web 1.0. Lets do this thing!

DrBazza 4y ago

This doesn't read like a neutral analysis to me. On the other hand the UK will mostly continue to support GDPR, in the same way all our phones will be USB-C, EU legislation leaks across borders to every country on the planet. The UK government have been hopelessly out of their depth legislating the internet, since, forever. The site is called "webdevlaw.uk" and the article footer "This is my personal site, and the opinions on it do not reflect the views of any current or previous employer." seems a bit dishonest, but everywhere does it these days (putting "news" at the end of your twitter handle somehow makes you a journalist apparently).

bodge5000 4y ago
> The UK government have been hopelessly out of their depth legislating the internet, since, forever. This is both the good and the bad of this legislation. Bad, for obvious reasons, but good because usually they're so unbelievably out of their depth that it never actually comes to pass. We're now, what, 5 years is it delayed on a bill that was supposed to require an ID for adult websites? I remember it started up before May was in power and still nothing has been done about it, and that was far less "ambitious" than this.
- DrBazza 4y ago
  Agreed. I don't really understand the UK government. Though it's probably the same elsewhere, career politicians schooled in humanities at university, completely clueless about the ministerial role they've been given.
  - mmarq 4y ago
    > I don't really understand the UK government. They need some crazy headlines to try to win the next by elections. When the pensioners will realise that they have to identify themselves to watch porn, the bill will be retracted.
  - rswail 4y ago
    It's like the republicans on abortion, the last thing they want is to actually pass any legislation, because then they'll have lost an issue that they can use to rile up the dumbest side of their supporters, combining the best of "won't someone think of the children", and "omg, genitalia in motion is much more evil than violence", and "if we do this right, we'll have a perfect panopticon to catch out the others out there that you don't like".

throw0101a 4y ago

It's a bit of a shame that self-labelling by web sites never seemed to really take off: * https://www.w3.org/TR/powder-use-cases/#cpA https://www.w3.org/TR/powder-use-cases/#cpA * https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R... It could be much easier if the major web browsers (at this point Chrome, Safari (mobile), Firefox) were able to read the metadata and if parents (or corporate IT departments) wanted to filter content they could using 'built-in' technology rather every web site having to potentially re-invent the wheel.

macinjosh 4y ago
This 1000%. Legitimate services have an incentive to self-identify because they don't want to anger parents and are generally not out to corrupt kids. A setting to block unrated sites could be provided as well. Movies and video games self report their rating not sure why web content needs to be any different. The problem with the top down approach of the government deciding which topics are taboo is that it removes agency from parents. Different parents, different kids, and different ages all lead to different values and levels of acceptibility. My tin foil hat catches my eye every time I see government trying a heavy-handed, slippery-slope approach to clamping down on a problem instead of just providing society with a common set of tools to accomplish a relatively simple goal.
- alisonkisk 4y ago

ta988 4y ago

If only Google had used just a little bit of its lobbying money to get those laws more technologically sound and help solve that with metadata that the browser can then handle.

EGreg 4y ago

I have a serious question… in elections, we need to know a person has exactly one account etc. Entering a bar, they need to know you’re 21 or over etc. The PROPER mechanism for this would be a certificate issues by a trusted authority (or a few) that would somehow prove with a zero knowledge proof that you have one of the certificates, but every time it would be different and unlinkable to you. It wouldn’t leak an identifier that can be used to track you. Google GROUP SIGNATURES, that is what we want to achieve. How? Is there a well-known software library in crypto, besides a mixer like Tornado.Cash or rings like in Monero? Something like openssl so we don’t have to “roll our own”? The technical name for what I want is Group Signatures, starting with this seminal paper by Chaum in 1991: https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Group_Signatures.pdf https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Group_Signature... But what is the latest State of the Art in Group Signatures? What is used today, that can work at scale for groups of MILLIONS of people, and still be anonymous? Chaum’s conception is linear in the number of group members and the group has to be fixed in the beginning, and can’t be dynamically changed. That means issuing new certs once a year year to people who have come of age at 18, or registered to vote etc. That proves your age so they’d have to actually create larger groups by aggregating these together with previous groups (they could also remove people from the rolls if they haven’t retegistered for a while, eg for a driver’s license again). This is the latest work I could find and it’s from 2003… why is no one making progress in this field, or implementations? https://cseweb.ucsd.edu//~daniele/papers/BMW.pdf https://cseweb.ucsd.edu//~daniele/papers/BMW.pdf

dsr_ 4y ago
The problem is that "exactly one account for election voting" and "untraceably anonymous" don't go together. What we've got now is a physical mixing where you "prove" your identity to a clerk at the assigned polling location, you are issued a physical token which you fill out in privacy, and then the token with the voting information on it is mixed with all the others from that polling location. By having opposed auditors watching vigilantly, we get some confidence that ballots are not altered or replaced. Let's say that you have a system which has a single account for every citizen (fine in theory), which can issue an anonymous bearer token that can be used for voting later. That bearer token is now vulnerable to being sold, confiscated, copied (but only usable once, so there's a race), forgotten, and can go unused.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kmlx 4y ago

for reference, the online safety bill is in the committee stage: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137 https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137 so, a long way to go. the new Data Reform Bill has not even been submitted yet.

mngnt 4y ago

I'm really sad that even professionals hate the cookie/gdpr/data collection banners for the wrong reason. And most people hate the wrong entity for being responsible for their existence. If companies weren't actively spying on their users, if the didn't collect every last bit of data they can, there would be no need to put up a banner. If the website needs cookies for core functionality (essential cookies) only, there' no need to inform, ask or badger the user for anything. The websites/data collectors are the bad guy here (from where I'm standing) and now that they have to ask us if they can please spy on us, the EU is evil because they force them to ask? The main presented point of this bill is "We will eliminate the obligation for the spies to ask you if they may spy on you" and even the author of this piece is celebrating that.

teh_klev 4y ago
> and even the author of this piece is celebrating that. I don't think so. Read the last part of that sentence which I've emphasised in italics. "So if you work in any sort of tech or digital related role, and the work you put into the world can be viewed, or accessed, by anyone of any age in the UK, and you are (rightfully) celebrating the loss of the cookie popups, I need you to do me a favour and drop the balloons and party streamers and sit down."
random_upvoter 4y ago
> The websites/data collectors are the bad guy here (from where I'm standing) and now that they have to ask us if they can please spy on us, the EU is evil because they force them to ask? If the end-result of the law + standard human behavior is that you made web browsing a crappier experience then you made a crappy law.
- riskable 4y ago
  > If the end-result of the law + standard human behavior is that you made web browsing a crappier experience then you made a crappy law. That's not a very good way to figure out if a law is "crappy". Building codes make for a crappier construction experience (can't just do whatever TF you want) but that doesn't mean they're bad. Laws requiring designated handicapped parking spaces make parking a slightly crappier experience for non-handicapped people. That doesn't mean they're crappy laws.

macinjosh 4y ago

I really despise "won't someone think about the children laws" and I say this as a parent. It is not society's job to shelter your children from the unsavory, it is the parents' job. Besides that, it is hard to argue against any law that is couched as protecting innocent children. Obviously, having to verify with ID the age of every website visitor is impractical right now. The logical solution is for government to mandate and issue Internet IDs that must be used to access any web service. This bait-and-switch leads down a slippery slope that erodes anonymity on the Internet, not that there is much left.

loriverkutya 4y ago
Let’s use leaded petrol again and you can protect your children however you want!

pilsetnieks 4y ago

Also, and I understand it is a quote in the article but the GDPR isn't "highly complex". It is actually one of the more understandable pieces of legislation I've ever read. It is, however, vague and gives a lot of leeway to local data protection authorities in interpreting it.

scarface74 4y ago
You realize the GDPR is 11 chapters and 99 sections don’t you?

dbrgn 4y ago

The announcement says it wants to "protect consumers", but it changes user tracking from opt-in to opt-out... How about ensuring that companies stop tracking people unnecessarily? I see so many websites – even club websites or private blogs – that have a cookie consent banner, but which wouldn't actually need one if they'd just turn off Google Analytics. I just don't get it.

hericium 4y ago
> wouldn't actually need one if they'd just turn off Google Analytics. Isn't one of the incentives for Analytics, that by knowing your audience Google will be able to suggest your site to their search engine users? I've heard more than once something in the lines of "we can't disable analytics as we'd lose traffic".
- weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  What are you talking about? I've been in SEO for a while and there are a lot of myths but I've never heard anything quite this wrong before.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    It's a pretty persistent "myth" ... do you have any support that it's a myth other than "I've been in SEO for a while"?
    - mikestew 4y ago
      Do you have any support that it’s not a myth, other than…”a lot of people are saying…”? I mean, burden’s on the one making the claim, not the other way around.
      - Ensorceled 4y ago
        There are literally "a lot of people saying" it isn't a myth, I've heard them, and one guy saying it is a myth and is an expert ... so, seems like that expert could straighten the issue out for us? I mean, the burden is on both sides here but one has "been in SEO for a while".

that_guy_iain 4y ago

For me, this is the important part. > The UK is also planning to legislate to remove the EU-derived requirement for the Data Protection Officer, as the person responsible for safeguarding an organisation’s users’ privacy rights, while simultaneously demanding under the OSB that companies appoint named individuals who are subject to personal arrests and criminal sanctions for failing to prevent bad things from happening on the internet. *subject to personal arrests and criminal sanctions* seems like the limited liability companies no longer limit the liability. I have a legal entity registered in Scotland. Seems like it might be time to wind that up and move it to another country. Where is a good company within the EU to registered?

jamessb 4y ago
Ireland seems the natural choice, and wouldn't require you to use a language other than English for anything.
- closewith 4y ago
  Limited liability companies in Ireland don't provide any protection against liability for criminal acts (nor do any countries), so I think the ideal would be to move to a jurisdiction where the act is not criminal or cease the criminal actions.
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    Well, the issue is, they made a company data protection issue criminal and not civil. It would be moving to a country where data protection is a civil matter in a day and age where data leaks happen on a regular basis.
zekica 4y ago
I heard good things about Ireland.
dhimes 4y ago
Kind of a Sarbanes-Oxley for privacy?

sdfhbdf 4y ago

Hmm the main allegation against GDPR seems to be that it lead to creation of useless pop-ups, which is partially true but it should be also highlighted that GPDR itself does not require a pop-up mechanism just consent, it did not specify what technological implementation should there be. It is the website owners to blame for using daunting cookie pop-up implementations. This is to say that "killing pop-ups" should not be a point of a legislation if there isn't one that requires these pop-ups.

jeroenhd 4y ago
The popups are a revenge tactic used by data hoarders. "Oh, look at this terrible EU, they make us show you all kinds of popups [small]because we want to track your every move online[/small], poor you, the inconvenienced users! If only there was a way to prevent this terrible faith!"
- scarface74 4y ago
  So you think every single website has cookie banners as some sort of political statement? Isn’t the simpler answer that the EU like most governments is incompetent and didn’t think through their legislation even though it’s 99 sections and 11 chapters?
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    The EU knew exactly what they were doing. The requirement for explicit consent was entirely intentional. It was websites and businesses that chose cookie walls over data minimisation. Most websites don't need a cookie wall or even a popup. Even ad supported websites can use context based advertising without any tracking whatsoever but the choice is clear. It's not always a political statement to add a cookie wall. Some companies are too lazy to consider alternatives, others don't care enough about their users. This stuff has been coming for years and nobody cared until suddenly everyone was "surprised" and now years later everybody is still acting like this is a recent development. The message is always clear: your convenience as a customer is worth less than your data.

andy_ppp 4y ago

So the Online Harms Bill (the switch part of TFA) is about having a completely controlled Internet in which innovation is completely stalled and entirely government mandated. It seems kind of mad that this could be phased in soon... I presume I will have to log into hacker news via a VPN because obviously this place isn't going to implement anything other than geo blocking for UK IPs (like 99% of websites will); it certainly isn't going to be paying 10p+ for every user here to prove they are over 16/18? Do we know under what terms young people will be allowed to interact with the Internet?

ssl232 4y ago
I think for the reasons you give this bill is never going to actually get through in its current form, or, if it does, it won't be abided by nor enforced. The reason it's gotten this far is because government ministers don't have any idea how the web works and they've adopted an attitude of ignoring experts so they won't learn. Once ordinary Tory voters start to get irritated by the implications of the law (credit card to view porn?) it'll get quietly scrapped. In any case, I know otherwise-luddite 60 year olds who know how to use VPNs to watch geoblocked TV, so getting around it will be trivial for a sizeable chunk of the population. And there's no way the UK government has the resources and political capital to police the internet on the scale required by this bill.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > And there's no way the UK government has the resources and political capital to police the internet on the scale required by this bill. It doesn't have to, it just has to follow up by making VPNs illegal, and then selectively enforcing that law against its political opponents.
  - ssl232 4y ago
    I don't doubt that the government can make life hell for its opponents if it wants to, I just doubt that ordinary voters will allow it to get that bad. Tories have such power right now because they're taking actions (and making signals) popular with the people, whether the rest of us agree or not. I don't buy that they've so corrupted the system that it no longer matters what the voting public think, which is why I still believe this bill is not going to be implemented or enforced in a way that removes real freedoms, once the public notice. Besides, don't plenty of despotic countries already ban VPNs around the world, to limited effect? A large, liberal country like the UK banning them would I'm sure drive improvements to VPN protocols to make them even harder for ISPs to detect. Maybe I'm too hopeful for the future...

gorjusborg 4y ago

The EU had some teeth when GDPR was passed. Even if I'm not in the EU, there are lots of countries that are, so cost/benefit of compliance seems reasonable. When I hear about strange Brinternet rules, I just think why should I care about a single country and their strange and costly laws. If UK users want to reach my site, change your laws or use a VPN.

unicornfinder 4y ago
Indeed. My response to this has largely been "if this passes I'll just block traffic from the UK to my website" as it'd be cheaper than implementing this utter madness.
mattnewton 4y ago
Especially if compliance becomes a _criminal_ issue. But then again Britain probably thinks this will spur a domestic market for smaller tech, and maybe that’s correct? Though it does sound like the main thing it incentivizes will be some rent seeking age verification companies or very dubious utility to consumers.

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ilaksh 4y ago

Is there a service or system for automatically blocking anyone from the UK? And how can we make it clear to British politicians that such a thing will be widely deployed?

riskable 4y ago
A better service would be one that automatically blocks UK politicians with a clear message indicating why
onionisafruit 4y ago
Why would a webmaster with no ties to the UK go to the trouble of blocking their traffic?
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Read the article.
  - onionisafruit 4y ago
    I did read the article. I don't see anything in it that would cause somebody with no ties to the UK to block traffic. If I'm to believe this article, it's a pretty terrible law for UK residents, but as a US webmaster I am not bound by their laws. I can continue to serve user-generated content without any age verification and Her Majesty's government can't really do anything about it aside from blocking my web site. In an extreme case they could issue an arrest warrant should I ever decide to visit their kingdom, but that doesn't really worry me either. If this becomes UK law and I continue to run onionisafruit-forum.net without age verification or blocking UK traffic, these are what I consider the possible outcomes from most to least likely: - It never comes to the kingdom's attention, and everything continues as before. - Some vigilant Brit reports it to their government. An email is sent to the support address. I do nothing, and the matter is dropped. - My site gets reported and is added to a blocklist for UK ISPs. - My site gets reported and Her Majesty's government convinces my ISP to cut me off. - My site gets reported. Her Majesty's government puts in the effort to identify me personally and issues an arrest warrant. I never get to fulfill my lifelong dream of drinking warm beer in a London pub for fear of arrest.

dcdc123 4y ago

> The government said the change will cut down on “the irritating boxes users currently see on every website”. Hate to break it to you but we have no laws for them in the US and we have the stupid popup on almost every site.

trinsic2 4y ago

> where I discussed how government is shifting its language from describing us as people with data rights to consumers with contracts, was spot on. You’ll understand if I’m not gloating. This is exactly the issue, and the most important point that people and small businesses should be focused on. Especially when dealing with organizations that want to use the "consumers with contracts" model. Stop using the word "Consumer". People are not consumers, they don't consume things. People and Individuals purchase things with their own purchasing power as "Customers". We are not apart of a mindless machine, where businesses are the engine and we are the gears. Its the other way around, and the more that people promote this in the work place and other areas of life, the better. Words are like magic, they can empower, or enslave us. Don't let the few, who want to control public perception, make the calls.

rudasn 4y ago

Would it be possible to avoid all this mess by imaging a different way to use the web? An access method based on rss (of some sort), in the way "start pages" did it ages ago. So instead of going to a website to get information, the information comes to my website where I make the rules (as I'm the provider and the sole user). And instead of only receiving plain text information, I can also interact and communicate with other people (the content provider and other consumers), if I choose to. It took them 15 years to fuck up the Web, we can pull the rug underneath them and perhaps get 20 more.

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permo-w 4y ago

Historically in the UK inconvenience-inducing online laws like the Online Safety Bill have fallen either shortly after passage or shortly before passage as the people who pass them realise that they too have to follow their own rules. This was certainly the case for that nationwide opt-out porn block that they brought in a decade ago, then quickly slipped under the rug when it became clear that they too would have to either learn to use a VPN or call up their service providers expressing their desire to watch porn

toyg 4y ago
Some of it lingers, though. Like the invisible DNS filtering that all consumer ISPs are effectively forced to implement, blocking URLs coming from an unaccountable third party organization. Or: > that nationwide opt-out porn block That's still there; ISPs just made it very easy to switch off the block from apps and websites. Tories ask for 100, bag 20, then ask for 200 and bag 80 - result: they get 100. And there is no recourse now, because those pesky supranational voices of reason have been jettisoned.
- permo-w 4y ago
  Boris Johnson is the only hope, in my opinion. Yeah he's a slimy, entitled, lying, racist, upper-class con-artist, but he's a populist at heart and has no principles beyond what he thinks will make the public like him. Yeah that's disgusting, and yeah it's the best of the worst, but it's still better than Cameronism, which simply doesn't care what you think. If an uproar comes, which it hopefully will, at least our fearless leader will listen, if only out of self-interest
  - toyg 4y ago
    I hope that was satire...? Johnson is the one who keeps pushing these crazy schemes just to keep people riled up against the "bureaucracy-mad EU" he invented so many years ago. He will stop at nothing to stay in power, and will happily sacrifice all your freedoms to that effect - he doesn't respect the law anyway, so anything put on the book is just for you and me to be beaten down, not for him and his mates. > it's still better than Cameronism That's a false dichotomy. There is life outside the Tory ideological landscape. > If an uproar comes, which it hopefully will If the uproar comes from the "wrong" sector of the electorate, the Tories will just double down on it.

dangerface 4y ago

Is there tldr? I am half way through the article and so far all I know there is a new bill is there any more detail than that?

wdb 4y ago

I hope the day I need to proof my identity to access the internet for typical sites (e.g. this site or a news site etc) never comes

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

>> The announcement criticized the EU’s “highly complex” General Data Protection Regulation and promised a “clampdown on bureaucracy, red tape and pointless paperwork” to “seize the benefits of Brexit.” And that's all one needs to know about that announcement.

thayne 4y ago

How does the UK passing a law saying you don't need cookie popups make those popups go away. Maybe big companies will target UK cetizens to not get popups, but most sites will still give you popups, because giving everyone popups to comply with EU laws is a lot easier than figuring out if you live in the EU or not. For example, the US doesn't have requirements for cookie consent, but you still see a ton of these popups if you live in the US.

TrueDuality 4y ago

From what I understand the way this is currently shaking out, is that it largely won't impact marketplace sites as credit cards can be used as a form of age verification. You might have to create an account and associate a credit card before you're able to browse which would be an awful user experience... For other sites though, if the this passes into law I suspect it will have a much more intense cooling effect on the availability and access to sites. For the unpaid service sites I run, I'm certainly not going to pay for identity verification or allow that garbage on my sites. I'm much more likely to hide or disable any user generated content, or just serve a static page to users in the UK saying the site isn't available in your region. They're really doubling down on removing themselves from the world community...

dhosek 4y ago
Yeah, this seems remarkably unworkable. 10p per user is a really high cost. I have to imagine that sites like Facebook or Twitter will fight hard against this. It’s far more onerous than GDPR.

draw_down 4y ago

golem14 4y ago

What I don't get is that if you have a web presence in the EU, you're STILL subject to GDPR regulations, so really, in practice, for many – in particular larger – companies, you'd have now implement GDPR AND the new british rules. And it's not clear to me that those two sets of rules would be compatible, rather than mutually exclusive. What a clusterfuck!

jokethrowaway 4y ago

This is the living proof you can't even trust the governments that are removing bureaucracy and regulations. All those bribes must have made them forget their fight for freedom.

sandstrom 4y ago

I know protection of children is usually a false pretense, but for those that really care, it makes much more sense to let parents fine tune their children's access to various internet properties. For example, iOS has pretty good parental controls, where parents can limit time in certain apps, etc. It's just a much more scalable and flexible solution. Sure, some laws for companies could make sense, e.g. forbid them to run ads tailored to children below a certain age. Or label their products appropriately. But I think it's basically the same thing as "video violence" and any reasonable set of parents shouldn't have any trouble making sure that their eight year old isn't watching Saw 3 (or some other violent film) with her friends.