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Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

webdevlaw.uk

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Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#411

Post by s1k3s »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #279
s1k3s wrote: post #254

Does anyone have a tldr? Respectfully to the author, I don’t have the patience to read through this blog post full of metaphores and anecdotes. So what happened?

tldr: In the name of "protecting the children," the British government wants to create an ultra-efficient police state so they can instantly hoover up information about every British user of the Internet, on a scale that would make the Chinese government blush. Like the Chinese, they propose to put executives of ISPs and websites in jail if they fail to assist the government in the creation of this police state. Unli…

Thank you. This seems like an extension to the already existing TELECOM laws across EU, where the companies must provide customer information if requested by the gov. I think I recently saw something about "web hosting" companies in EU being forced to provide customer and user data on request as well - but this one didn't really make the news.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#413

Post by di4na »

Nasrudith wrote: post #111
di4na wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair re Section 230, the interpretation the court have of it is... wildly on the side of the platform. In particular, it allows a company to wiggle out of its TOS if it seems the TOS could be construed at being more stringent than Section 230. There is definitely some change to do to section 230. I do not think it needs a repeal, but i do think it needs some rethinking and probably some more regulation on priva…

Bullcrap. There is nothing to wiggle out of because they don't have any actual obligation. Terms of service are a mutual courtesy and not a legal contract. They cannot have you arrested or fined for posting swears on their Christian Minecraft server but they can ban you.

Right, the problem is the other way around. Like if you are doing something bad to someone else, like impersonating and using that to damage them. Even if the TOS says it is not allowed and the person impersonated come to the court and ask for this to stop, they are not obliged to do anything.

At some point, we are going to have to be able to do something about it. At the very least have some ways to handle this kind of problems.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#414

Post by aahortwwy »

etherael wrote: post #409
aahortwwy wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't really matter. The point Turnbull was making is something along these lines: https://xkcd.com/538/ No, they can't change the laws of mathematics to make all encryption have a government backdoor. They don't have to, though. They can just legislate to make use of non-backdoored encryption criminal. And if they want to make generating random streams of bytes a crime they can probably do that too. It's not…

Sure, they can make thinking of a pink elephant criminal, too. That doesn't mean it will actually be effective.

You don't think so? I worry that it will be very effective, that it will be passively accepted by the public, and that we will see widespread injustice as a result.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#415

Post by cstross »

Agamus wrote: post #377
goodpoint wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mistaken.

No, I am not.

Shorter version: Yes, you are mistaken.

Longer version: this is a discussion of a bill in progress in the British parliamentary system, where the current government is by a party known as the Conservative and Unionist Party, or "Conservatives" for short. This should not be confused with any colloquial meaning of the term "conservative" that might be familiar to you from American vernacular usage.

Note that political party names undergo drift from whatever they originally described over a period of decades to centuries. For example, the Australian Liberal Party is anything but "liberal" in the US context -- they're roughly equivalent to the US Republican mainstream in terms of ideology. Nor is the Australian "Labour" party a party of organized labour. Neither is the British Labour party -- it used to be, but the party leadership embarked on a protracted and mostly successful campaign to cut it off from its grassroots over a decade ago.

Anyway: the Conservative and Unionist Party has a very specific policy platform, which is described by the word "conservative" in British political discourse and which does not map neatly onto the American concept of conservativism because large chunks of American conservative culture simply don't exist in the UK. Yes, there are out-of-the-closet libertarians and objectivists and Christian dominionists in the Conservative party, but they're minor factions. The main faction can loosely be described as post-Thatcherite free marketeers, with a recent influx of hard-right racists and xenophobes who migrated en masse from UKIP, the UK Independence Party, after the Brexit referendum in 2016. There is no equivalent of the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, so there can be no equivalent of Constitutional Originalism in British conservativism. It's a different animal.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#416

Post by concordDance »

codedokode wrote: post #394
enlyth wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I see with this is you are disadvantaged from your peers if you're the only kid without access to the internet. You can't just shield your specific kid from the world and then they go to school and their friends all show them tiktok/4chan/porn/gore/whatever. We've crossed this line already, the internet is out there and everyone can access everything. Instead of being regressive and focusing on futile eff…

You can say the same thing about alcohol or cigarettes. Obviously, kids can find a way to buy them illegally but it doesn't mean that we should allow that. I propose to make it illegal to help kids to obtain access to adult Internet the same way as it is illegal to help them to buy alcohol.

Alcohol and cigarettes physically harm you. As best I can tell internet access is no more harmful than gaming.

The two classes of risk are too different for the analogy to work.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#417

Post by etherael »

aahortwwy wrote: post #414
etherael wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, they can make thinking of a pink elephant criminal, too. That doesn't mean it will actually be effective.

You don't think so? I worry that it will be very effective, that it will be passively accepted by the public, and that we will see widespread injustice as a result.

Sure, but that will happen no matter what given the public are idiots and the authorities are authoritarian. And that goes double for places like Australia where both of these things are particularly so.

And yet it will still be possible to ponder pink elephants.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#418

Post by guggleet »

fguerraz wrote: post #151
throwaway4aday wrote: post #53

Can someone explain why this won't result in a renaissance for peer to peer and e2e encrypted chat/forums/social media etc.? When government or industry makes it nearly impossible for consumer needs to be met we inevitably see a grey and black market spring up to meet those needs. My prediction is that if legislation like this becomes widespread we'll see a freely distributed application rise to prominence among a ga…

Don't worry, blocking p2p is the next step and is extremely easy to do. China has done it already and it's very effective: * Force every service provider to register their IPs and domains (for CDN use) * Force every ISP to do stateful firewalling and block every attempt to establish a new connection unless the destination IP is on a whilelist maintained by the government. Problem solved.

In ultimate dystopia, invite-only mesh(ish) networking, WAN Parties

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#419

Post by concordDance »

calibas wrote: post #344
muyuu wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have, and he's right also, learn not to overexpose yourself with your real id online, also from 1990s internet 101 the idiotic model of the 2020s with everybody posting their entire private lives with their real names and profiles that have their mugs in circles, and then proceed to broadcast hot takes they're afraid to get feedback on - it doesn't work and it's stupid

I'm not convinced the "solution" to abuse is to remain completely anonymous online.

What's wrong with it as a solution?

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#420

Post by rlpb »

Brybry wrote: post #296
rlpb wrote: post #220

The article says: "Is it possible for your site, service, or app, which allows content to be shared and/or people to communicate with each other, to be accessed by any adult or any child within the UK? Then you’re in scope. NB “accessed” doesn’t necessarily mean that a user can set up an active account on your service. If a British adult can merely download your app on the app store, the app is in scope." However, th…

The "has links with the UK" portion of the "regulated service" definition says if UK users are a "target market", or if the "service is capable of being used in the United Kingdom" and there's user generated content with a "material risk of significant harm" then it "has links". If an app is available in an app store are the users who can access it not a target market? I'm not really sure what "material risk of signi…

If it's not a "user-to-user service", then it's not a "regulated user-to-user service" either and therefore not a "regulated service". Whether or not it "has links" or is a "service is capable of being used in the United Kingdom" is therefore moot.
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