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Online Safety Act: What went wrong?

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Re: Online Safety Act: What went wrong?

#11
Absolutely nothing about it has gone wrong.

They have collected some personal data from law abiding pornography consumers: obvious perverts who should know better anyway. If their information gets released it will be their own fault. Some other stuff got hidden, but that's no problem as the BBC will tell you anything that you need to know anyway.

They can, and will, readily ban VPNs later, since those have no legitimate purpose for individuals, and will only be allowed for licensed operators like banks, hospitals, and defence manufacturers.

If you think this is sarcasm you haven't been paying attention to what the people pushing these laws actually say.

Re: Online Safety Act: What went wrong?

#13

It's mostly deliberate. Current petition to revoke it has half a million signatures, and the government have stated they will ignore that. Censorship is one of the advantages they like: https://freespeechunion.org/protest-footage-blocked-as-onlin...

I mean, this was in the manifesto for both the major parties - this is really not what the petition website is for, and it was never going anywhere. X flagging protest footage as adult content is not the endgame of some great british elitist conspiracy.

Re: Online Safety Act: What went wrong?

#17

It's mostly deliberate. Current petition to revoke it has half a million signatures, and the government have stated they will ignore that. Censorship is one of the advantages they like: https://freespeechunion.org/protest-footage-blocked-as-onlin...

I mean, this was in the manifesto for both the major parties - this is really not what the petition website is for, and it was never going anywhere. X flagging protest footage as adult content is not the endgame of some great british elitist conspiracy.

> both the major parties

The uniparty strikes again.

Re: Online Safety Act: What went wrong?

#18
For me personally, I agree that wanting non-adults to be able get at online porn is commendable, and the fact that the tech industry is scrambling over itself to comply is evidence that this Act has teeth. However, what bugs me personally is that 1) The Government had nearly 2 years head start to set up a centralised ID repository, hopefully basing it on the same model as the DVLA and Passport Office sharing photo and other data. They did not. 2) Verification sites are not UK based, and therefore subject to the same mistrust with handling PII - which obviously can't be replaced. 3) There are no Goverment-created apps that can/should handle ID verification despite the fact that these would probably solve 95% of the problem. 4) Feature overreach: if you want to surveil your citizens, be honest for once and don't use the knee-jerk carrot of it "being for the kids" - we're not as stupid as you think (unfortunately).

That is all.

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