The UK usually ties with Australia for the industrialized country vying to be the greatest enemy of the Internet.
UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
111–120 of 213 posts
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#112Privacy has an age rating now ? Seems a little ironic forcing anyone under 18 away from being able to have extra layers of privacy and in some cases security online.
> Privacy has an age rating now ?
It always did. https://www.keygreer.net/family-law-faqs/what-rights-do-chil...
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've written to my MP several times about this. Each response just repeats the same talking points about safety whilst completely missing the underlying technical issues and consequences.
There are lots of replies stating that their MP gave them a cookie cutter response, so it is a waste of time. I can tell you that isn't entirely true. When they get a lot of messages about the same thing, or better still you meet them in person, they may keep giving you the 'party line response', but they will also be feeding back that there is discontent to the whips.
What you are telling me in effect is that all the exchanges I have are ultimately disingenuous with the MP. It also tells me that the MP represents the party and not me (as they are acting as nothing more than a glorified public relations officer).
This undermines the entire point of the process and only further degrades public trust.
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#114Can we somehow get age verification without IDs? Age verification itself is OK as an idea. I’m happy to show ID to buy alcohol at the store… but the store clerk doesn’t take a photo of that ID and store it in logs somewhere forever. Can we please get a law where kids won’t just take their parents’ IDs and upload them to random places?
You might like the Digital ID scheme. It uses Zero Knowledge Proofs, so that one of your 'IDs' could be a simple 'Is over 18' ZKP, without involving your name or anything other detail. These are not tracked by government or possible to associate with your wider identity. This is one of the examples listed in the framework docs. > "Unlike with a physical document, when using a digital identity, you can limit the amoun…
> if you are asked to prove you are over 18, you could provide a simple yes or no response and avoid sharing any other personal details
I can't imagine how that would operate, esp. given we're told this ID will not be a digital ID card you can "show".
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#115Has anyone told them teens would create accounts with foreign VPN services?
IP blacklisting will follow.
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative. A Labour MP foolish attended a GB News show and when pushed admitted that the Online Safety Act was also about identifying speech by adults [0]. Sorry about the quality of the link, but the video is there (higher quality is available on X) and its not like the paragon of truth that is the BBC reported on this. https:/…
> political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative. No, this age verification is not against that.
No, the age verification doesn't, the linking of adult profiles to real human people, which is required to enable the age verification is.
Did you watch the linked video? There's an MP admitting they are doing this
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#117Not made clear in this article - this bill will be passed back to the House of Commons to debate/amend before going back to the House of Lords. This was not the final say.
The Commons are even more hungry for pervasive online surveillance than the Lords - at least, while Labour and the Tories are in power. Reform UK (the party currently leading in the polls by a large margin) is the only party that loudly opposed the draconian measures within the Online Safety Act and promise to repeal it
[deleted]
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#118Does the house of lords really do anything, though? At best, they can delay decisions, but what power do they really have? Aren't they just a bunch of rich people funded with taxes doing basically nothing?
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#119Not made clear in this article - this bill will be passed back to the House of Commons to debate/amend before going back to the House of Lords. This was not the final say.
The Commons are even more hungry for pervasive online surveillance than the Lords - at least, while Labour and the Tories are in power. Reform UK (the party currently leading in the polls by a large margin) is the only party that loudly opposed the draconian measures within the Online Safety Act and promise to repeal it
Of course Rusform UK promise to repeal it - they want Russian trolls to have as much unfettered access to the British public as possible
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#120Can we somehow get age verification without IDs? Age verification itself is OK as an idea. I’m happy to show ID to buy alcohol at the store… but the store clerk doesn’t take a photo of that ID and store it in logs somewhere forever. Can we please get a law where kids won’t just take their parents’ IDs and upload them to random places?
You might like the Digital ID scheme. It uses Zero Knowledge Proofs, so that one of your 'IDs' could be a simple 'Is over 18' ZKP, without involving your name or anything other detail. These are not tracked by government or possible to associate with your wider identity. This is one of the examples listed in the framework docs. > "Unlike with a physical document, when using a digital identity, you can limit the amoun…
The major problem is that no one trusts government not to abuse it and use it to track everything people do. There will be some proportion of people who trust the current government, but will be paranoid that a future government will abuse it, and there will be a proportion of people that don't trust the current government to not abuse it.
You might be able to get more trust by the government assigning a third party to audit the systems to make sure they are working as advertised, and not being abused, but you would still get people being paranoid that either the third party could be corrupted to pretend that things are okay, or that a future government would just fire them and have the system changed to track everyone anyway.
No matter what you do, you will never convince a subset of people that a system that can potentially be used to track everyone won't be abused in that way. Unfortunately, those people are most likely correct. This is why we can't have nice things :(
For the record, I thing it would be great to be able to have a trusted government issued digital ID for some purposes. I especially think it would be great to have an officially issued digital ID that could be used to sign electronic documents. My partner and I moved home recently, and it was not easy signing and exchanging legal documents electronically.