First post, by mR_Slug
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The online 'safety' bill seeks to destroy privacy and security of all UK citizens, but also US and other country's citizens.
- Politically driven censorship, Basically they just censor things they don't like.
- Exceptions for the press/media, but the government decides who the press is and who is not. This is very dangerous.
- Jailing executives (in the USA, No seriously they are that crazy) and/or fines for non-compliance.
- Curbing anonymity. They seem to want to make people unsafe by removing anonymity. Basically show your License to talk.
- Plans to make data protection largely meaningless.
- Age verification for adult sites. They claim its just porn, but they include Reddit, Google Search, and Twitter. So you'd need to prove your identity to search for porn. Yep that's right, every search for porn (even if you want to just find out what a term means) will be recorded by the government. This is guaranteed to lead to blackmail/political censorship.
- Bans on encryption! (Yes seriously). They are specifically targeting instant messaging of all things. So Discord/whatsApp wont be safe in the UK, and/or wont be interoperable with the rest of the world.
- Threat to competition of the big players like Facebook and Twitter. It will cement them as the only businesses in the market as smaller ones wont be able to follow all the regulations. In fact the regulations conflict with many US regulations that protect 1st amendment rights.
It fundamentally undermines the bases of internet safety, the bedrock, privacy and encryption.
To Americans, this violates Your 1st amendment rights. Fines to companies if they don't take down legal in the USA speech.
Please contact your MP and tell them this must not happen! We have internet censorship on cellphones In the UK and it is terrible, You can't access anything even archive.org.
I do hope the big companies just tell them to get stuffed. The UK may ban them, but then they will look even more ridiculous.
Please don't turn this into a left vs. right thread. It affects everything from talking about trans rights to talk of 2nd amendment rights.
Links:
ORG (Basically the UK's EFF)
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/online-s … made-dangerous/
