Technology

Unfortunately this is nothing unusual or new for the UK, an authoritarian streak has long existed in both of the countries major political parties. The Conservatives had already passed the Investigatory Powers Act, AKA the "Snoopers Charter" which introduced a wide range of digital surveillance. The Tories have already had a crack at trying to introduce porn age verification laws. During the New Labour era the Labour Party tried to introduce a new ID scheme involving a sprawling government identity database with never-ending feature creep.

Many in Westminster are ignorant of the technological reality these bills collide with, and much of the UK public are (often wilfully) ignorant of the dangers they pose.

I hope Meta follows through with their threat to pull WhatsApp from the UK market in response the to Online "Safety" Bill. WhatsApp is very popular in the UK, and seeing it and many other online services withdraw from the UK could be the wake up call my country has long needed.

Exactly. Online safety my arse.

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

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

Once again, the UK is turning into a dystopia.

They are trying to do similar shit here in USA with KOSA. Absolute ghouls.

Who names these bills though? They could just as well name it "Wont-take-away-more-of-your-privacy-jk bill". Would be a lot more fair for everyone and less likely to mislead if we only refered to such stuff by a neutral and boring unique id.

I don't see Labour repealing this. I think they're both in on it.

I recently got Canadian citizenship through my dad. How are things in Canada currently? I feel like this country economically and socially is just gonna keep spiralling downwards so I'm curious what my backup is like.

What concerns me most is that biometric data is permanent and cannot be changed. If we share it with the digital world, it could lead to lifelong privacy risks. And I believe that the risks and threats to privacy brought by the UK's Online Safety Bill far outweigh the protection it can provide us with.

I don't know how the government plans to enforce the Bill, but as far as I know, some decentralized encrypted messaging apps are unstoppable, because every user who using the app jointly creates the social network that avoids a single point of failure.