The U.K. Parliament is close to passing the Online Safety Bill, which threatens global privacy by allowing backdoors into messaging services, compromising end-to-end encryption. Despite objections, no amendments were accepted. The bill also includes content filtering and surveillance measures. There’s still a chance for lawmakers to protect privacy with an amendment preserving encryption. A recent survey shows the majority of U.K. citizens want strong privacy on messaging apps.
People glady give up privacy under the guise of helping children, while nothing is actually done to protect children. More at 11.
Actually, politicians give up public privacy under the fiction of helping children, repeatedly.
I cringe every time “online” and “children” are uttered in the same breath.
Which really sucks because us in tech know there’s more that we could be doing for sure, but politicians/big tech would rather grandstand with these BS policies that get the masses to agree, while giving up freedom, and not actually solving any problems.
I wish those non encryption laws apply to them too. So every single person can see what they do and how they manage our tax money right?
won’t somebody please think of the children!
Indeed, Prince Andrew is still roaming around Pizza Express in Woking.
I’m expecting this weakening of encryption / surveillance is to protect rich people by preemptively punishing dissidents who are organizing against them. It’s the step that authoritarian countries like China, Saudi, etc have been using against their own people, either with sweeping regulations, or just straight up buying pegasus spyware.
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U.K. civil society groups have condemned the bill, as have technical experts and human rights groups around the world.
Has there been pushback from banks and other big businesses whose activity fundamentally depends on secure encrypted communications? Has there not been pushback from the intelligence services? Or would they be exempt?
At least Apple, Signal, and Whatsapp. https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/27/an-encryption-exodus-looms-over-uks-online-safety-bill/
I doubt that E2E services will care. Matrix will not change. Just like many other services. They are just insane. You can’t also just break TLS in UK only. haha they are crazy.
Current world politicians are so tech illitirare it’s bewildering. Supposedly they have experts and think tanks at their disposal to help them in these sorts of endeavours, for what? It’s insane how much survailance has been ranked up in the past decade.
You’d need Microsoft/Apple/Google to agree to this to get these client side message scrapers on devices.
You’d need commercial/closed source e2e messaging services to agree to add a backdoor.
Why would they? Not that they care about end users, but corporate interests will take issue with it too. And it’s a bad look. UK is just one market for these global companies. I’m not an expert in such things so I’m basically talking out of my ass, but I think it makes sense.
But even if they somehow manage it, people will learn how to circumvent it. And then there’s open source operating systems and e2e messaging which are immune to this.
Edit: grammar.
Several players have said they’ll exit the UK rather than exit encryption.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” —Benjamin Franklin
For those who care, here’s the actual context of that quote, which has everything to do with taxes and nothing to do with privacy or safety from the government.
The “Safety” he’s referring to are bribes paid from certain landowners in order to be exempt from having their land be used defensively by the then-British colonies of America during the French and Indian War. So, literally paying for their physical safety.
If anything, it was very pro-government control, and an example of the shit modern politicians do as well because he was speaking about the these actions being for the “greater good” of the people.
But quotes gonna quote, I guess. I assume the tech-libertarians picked it up at some point and it spread from there. Feels very much like something from the “don’t tread on me” mid-2000s Tea Party era.
Not that I think the modern sentiment is wrong, to be fair, but the meaning of the quote has changed so much that I think it’s kind of pointless to attribute it to Franklin now unless we’re talking about taxing private land for military purposes.
This quote has been popular since long before tech-libertarians were a thing.
Of course, otherwise we wouldn’t still be using it.
But in the context of internet privacy, specifically, my guess is it was initially popularized by tech-libertarians or those who hung around on the conspiracy theory areas of the internet (Venn diagram overlaps a bit there, though not entirely).
There’s no doubt it was used as a quote for privacy in general before that.
I should hold back on my assumptions, though, so thanks for reminding me of that. Could obviously be very wrong.
I think they were referring specifically to the use of the quote in the context of privacy in tech.
At least, that was the whole reason they pointed out the discrepancy to begin with.
Edit: had the comments loaded up an hour ago, finally had time to read and respond, and then immediately saw their response to you from 49 minutes ago… rip.
Is everyone forgetting that Australia already did this, and it had no effect on anything? No one put backdoors in, none of these tech companies abandoned australia. This is just another scare mongering tactic. It should still be defeated though.
I’m getting really close to just not using the internet anymore. I only use it to stream movies, and doom scroll lemmy right now, anyway. The only reason I have an email is for spam. Take awake the only facade of privacy I have and I may as well hang it all up and walk away.
Still internet is important for many people to talk and come together, to discuss and fight against power abuse. So we all should care.
Does anyone know if this is threatening messengers based on federated networks like XMPP as well? Legally and practically?
This is probably not going to answer your question, but the law doesn’t seem to focus on protocols/network topologies, but focuses on providers with certain sizes. So if the protocol is used by large techs, then they might have to do something on their side to comply with the law, depending on etc…
