Most Brits have no idea what's in the Online Safety Act since it expressly mandates the neutering of end-to-end encryption in messaging apps.

And protesting is very difficult when everyone doing so is branded a child molester.

Britain isn't a true democracy. Neither is Australia. They're Orwellian societies where the populace has been trained to believe that "the government knows best."

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inigyou a day ago | parent | next [-]

Brits want something roughly akin to the online safety act - they want liability for online unsafety. I doubt many of them care about the requirement for platforms to register or the fees for doing so, and would still support it if that wasn't in there.

We should be trying to give people what they want in the best possible way. Otherwise, other people (with ulterior motives) will give it to them in the worst possible way.

For kid's online safety, it would be sufficient for each device to ask upon installation if it's for an adult or a kid, and send that as an HTTP header to each website. We should recommend that, so we don't get a much worse solution to the very real problem - such as UKOSA.

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mdp2021 a day ago | parent [-]

> For kid's online safety, it would be sufficient for each device to ask upon installation if it's for an adult or a kid

But the voices call for "robust" systems... And some parties are trying to implement that, and from there difficulties I mentioned in the other post.

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inigyou a day ago | parent [-]

Those are the ulterior motives people I referred to. Asking on installation is robust enough because parents buy devices for their children and set them up. You could make it even more robust if you required a cellphone store employee to do it. Whatever way someone is authenticated as a cellphone store employee would surely leak, but again: robust enough. An example of something not robust is asking the child upon access to the site. Brits tolerate ID checks for cigarettes, even though parents can buy cigarettes for their children.

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mdp2021 19 hours ago | parent [-]

> You could make it even more robust if you required a cellphone store employee

And you would accept a device that would require a third party for setup?!?!?!

That is what I meant with "either proving identity or lunatic workarounds"...

That "robust enough" is full grounds to have a population rise, given that an expectable combination of stupidity as ineptitude and stupidity as radical psychosis from the state can shift the "robust enough" to substantial dystopia. Have they (the keir starmer bunch) or have they not issued a law without the crucial details - how to do it, the whole matter is absurd without full clarity on "how to do it"?

	▲	inigyou 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes I accept that every device requires a third party for setup. That setup being namely putting the device in my hands and giving me legal ownership of the device.

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dofm a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't believe the Online Safety Act does require that. RIPA did.

But again, most Brits are using WhatsApp anyway; end-to-end security is wholly meaningless in that context.

I don't really recognise this "branded a child molester" accusation either, TBH. That seems fantastical but I suspect you are not British.

There are plenty of people on the right (e.g. in Reform) making reasonable points about the burden of requiring adults to identify themselves to access legal material and people are not branding them child molesters (not least because that sort of screeching typically comes from the right).

The simple reality is that in the UK the majority don't think it's that troublesome, in general, that adults should have to prove they are adults to access adult material (or use a VPN, which the government is actually not acting to ban or add new regulations to). We already have default adult content blocks on mobile data, for example (and the adult content block, once disabled, can therefore be used as a way to identify adulthoot).

I tend to find that foreign observers, especially American foreign observers, always tend to conjure up really abstract arguments about inalienable fundamental rights, reduce everything to freedom of speech, whatever.

Life is messier and more complex and despite our more nuanced, complex set of laws, they are more moderate than various laws from US states, and it is not the UK that is the first to run headlong into fascism: that is happening in the USA, which voted for it.

British law is untidy. Life is untidy. We aren't fucking idiots or ill-informed children. We just draw the lines differently.