[HN Gopher] How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix
___________________________________________________________________
How the UK's online safety bill threatens Matrix
Author : daenney
Score : 309 points
Date : 2021-05-20 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matrix.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (matrix.org)
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I guess they'll just have to try and block it. The matrix devs
| aren't going to give in to government nonsense. Too bad they want
| to make 1984 a real thing.
| jeena wrote:
| I'm so happy that there are people out there who care about this
| things and have the time to invest fighting the fight. I would
| like to be with you there but right now my life doesn't allow the
| time but I'm totally with you there but only can help by throwing
| some money on the problem.
|
| But a very big thank you to everyone involved!
| sauntheninja wrote:
| cc
| Arathorn wrote:
| One of the most frustrating things about this legislation is that
| it's set up so that the only outfits with the resources to do the
| requested censorship would be a GAFAM. Which is utterly perverse,
| as on one hand the UK govt is despairing about the extent to
| which the UK is dependent on Big Tech social media and the
| control they exert on society... whilst simultaneously pushing
| through legislation which effectively ensures that GAFAM are the
| only people who can operate!
|
| The Matrix approach to addressing abuse is
| https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...
| (and we're in the middle of building out the first implementation
| of the decentralised reputation proposal right now) - but it is
| not pleasant to think that if a judge considered that approach
| inadequate, the directors of UK entities providing Matrix hosting
| (e.g. Element, running matrix.org on behalf of The Matrix.org
| Foundation) would be eligible for jail time \o/
|
| Needless to say, we're doing our best to explain to the UK Govt
| that their Bill is throwing out the baby along with bathwater...
| [deleted]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Something to wonder: How will these laws affect the current
| brain flow in the UK [0]?
|
| > whilst simultaneously pushing through legislation which
| effectively ensures that GAFAM are the only people who can
| operate!
|
| Considering they can get UK-based employees at a discount,
| that's a win for the US tech sector!
|
| [0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-
| br...
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| It's the same with GDPR. When I worked for a large enterprise,
| we had a legal/compliance team of dozens of people and a huge
| outsourced legal budget. When I worked in the startup of my
| wife, it was me implementing GDPR compliance.
| Arathorn wrote:
| But at least GDPR /is/ tractable to implement at small scale.
| Whereas for the OSB: if you run a smallish but popular
| chat/blog/forum/etc service, there literally isn't a solution
| for moderation which isn't fiendishly expensive, privacy
| invasive, or both.
|
| The legislation has clearly been dreamt up by folks saying
| "ah ha! if we threaten the Facebook UK executive mangement
| team with jailtime unless they do better at filtering self-
| harm/CSAM/terrorism/etc then they will obviously get their
| house in order!". Whereas in practice they crush their own
| UK-based startups instead. So frustrating.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| GDPR is only tractable because 90% of companies don't
| implement it. In Germany thousands of companies illegally
| use Mailchimp for example.
| hrktb wrote:
| I am curious what about Mailchimp make them illegal to
| use ?
|
| On the face of it they seem to have support for the
| required stuff: https://mailchimp.com/gdpr/
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I was also curious, so I found this:
|
| https://edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2021/bavarian-
| dpa-...
|
| The core: ... transfers of personal data to the U.S.-
| were not lawful.
|
| So the problem is that an US company cannot be GDPR
| compliant, because that conflicts with US law. Which
| sucks for mailchimp but makes sense.
| [deleted]
| hrktb wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| This looks like a pretry fresh ruling judging from the
| date of the article, good to know.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > So the problem is that an US company cannot be GDPR
| compliant, because that conflicts with US law.
|
| This is completely not true. First, most US companies are
| GDPR-compliant because they don't gather, store and
| process personal data of EU citizens. Now, those that do
| - mainly Internet companies - they need to abide by the
| terms of the GDPR (or not to serve EU customers, which
| for some is the easiest way - like New York Daily News).
| If you decide to store personal data of EU citizens, you
| need to do it using servers located in the EU, which,
| depending on the nature of your business, might or might
| not be easy, but companies had several years to prepare
| for that. There is no any conflict with US law anywhere.
|
| Personally I was in a similar position and instead of
| choosing Mailchimp I choose Mailerlite, which is Europe-
| based and, being less popular than Mailchimp, (much) less
| expensive for the customers I have (with mailing lists in
| the range of 5k-50k contacts). It has its quirks but it
| works and I have no much reasons to complain.
| kjakm wrote:
| A US company can be compliant. They just have to host EU
| user data in the EU.
| hrktb wrote:
| Judging from this
|
| > Mailchimp may in principle be subject to data access by
| US intelligence services on the basis of the US legal
| provision FISA702 (50 U.S.C. SS 1881)
|
| It might not be just a matter of where the data is
| stored, but also who can get access to it. From my
| reading, any US based conpany would be affected.
|
| This feels like a super huge impact that would have made
| more waves, but the ruling also seems recent. And perhaps
| there will be more twists and turns yet ?
| majewsky wrote:
| There was a contract between the US and EU that was
| supposed to address this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E
| U%E2%80%93US_Privacy_Shield
|
| As described in the Wikipedia article, the contract has
| been thrown out by the European Court of Justice for
| exactly the reasons stated by the parent comment.
|
| > [Standard contractual clauses] do not necessarily
| protect data in countries where the law is fundamentally
| incompatible with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of
| the EU and the GDPR, like the US.
| duiker101 wrote:
| What makes Mailchimp illegal? From what I can see they
| seem GDPR compliant
| LeftTriangle wrote:
| I like how you, with actual concrete real-world
| experiences you are sharing, are being downvoted by
| silent armchair enthusiasts who mostly just like GDPR
| because they get the sense that it's vaguely bad for
| Facebook.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| As a private citizen I like GDPR - even if Facebook will
| find ways around it (but I do not really care, I've left
| Facebook many years ago because of privacy concerns).
|
| As someone who implemented it in several companies, I
| don't like it because it hits smaller companies much
| harder than bigger ones, and because it tries to be
| technology agnostic it is quite fuzzy, compate to
| something like SOX or PCIDSS (which I also implemented as
| CTO). In Germany at least data protection agencies
| declared they will go after companies that use e.g.
| Mailchimp.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > Whilst we sympathise with the government's desire to show
| action in this space and to do something about children's safety
| (everyone's safety really), we cannot possibly agree with the
| methods.
|
| Respectfully, stop sympathising with authoritarians who want to
| take away your freedom. They are not good people. Good people
| aren't nosey. Good people don't deprive others of liberty.
| Neither do they class a whole group (Internet users and
| entrepreneurs) as responsible for the actions of a _minority_.
| Guilt by association and collective punishment are antithetical
| to any lover of freedom and life.
|
| Their reasons of 'child safety' and 'online harms' (whatever on
| earth that means) are simply pretexts. They don't give a shit
| about children's safety. This bill will do nothing, _nothing_ to
| improve the safety of children. The perpetrators will simply go
| after children in other ways. They won 't change.
|
| If you, Mr. MP, care about children then ask why are they drawn
| to bad online content? What's going wrong with families and
| upbringing? Start with questions that might actually address the
| problem rather than implicate everyone who uses the Internet!
|
| The trajectory is to increase their power and control over your
| life. Again, they are _NOT_ good people. They know EXACTLY what
| they are doing. They love dominating you. It 's understandable
| why some imagine the government as simply well-meaning but
| misguided, for it makes our helpless subjection easier to accept.
| But we won't stop getting the boot from the state until we start
| calling their actions out as morally reprehensible.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Indeed. We know exactly how much the UK conservatives care
| about child safety by their decisions around funding for child
| protection, schooling, health and so on. The child protection
| argument is a smoke screen.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Ex-fucking-actly right.
|
| Various legislation around internet-related activities
| cleaning to be to "protect children" only shifts government
| resources and funding away from the departments that actually
| do something real and tangible to protect children.
|
| Child protection where I'm from only has the resources to
| attend to reports in which the child is in immediate, life-
| threatening danger.
|
| If a politician is talking about protecting children and it
| doesn't include increased funding for the actual child
| protection agencies and education of the bottom end of
| society, then they're actually working against protecting
| children. It's gross politics and should be called out.
| ______- wrote:
| I wish there was some sort of island or safe haven country setup
| by cryptographers so they could safely work on crypto without
| legal issues or crypto being seen as a munition and a threat to
| government. We could call it `01` and have it in a non fourteen-
| eyes jurisdiction preferably as an independent nation.
|
| We could export code containing cryptographic algorithms to
| countries that need it for privacy and safety reasons.
| Cryptography actually is needed for safety more than it is used
| by undesirable people to commit crimes!
| teclordphrack2 wrote:
| We can't have communist countries in latan america because of
| the good ole u s of a. You think you are going to get some
| slight utopia that helps people b/c of their ideals? Never
| going to happen... sadly.
| [deleted]
| LeftTriangle wrote:
| You can't have communist countries in "Latan" America because
| their industrial base and population expertise is even worse
| than the USSR. Not to defend the CIA's actions, but Venezuela
| was never going to work out.
| FranchuFranchu wrote:
| I don't think he was talking about Venezuela.
| LeftTriangle wrote:
| It's a synecdoche.
| varispeed wrote:
| In the UK if you won't give up your password (or essentially
| give means to decrypt data) when requested you can get 5 years
| for that. Encryption will not protect against the state in this
| case. Likely other countries will start to copy that...
| gambiting wrote:
| I know it's the law already, but has it actually ever been
| used against anyone? I always thought it would be extremely
| difficult to successfully prosecute because if you give them
| "a" password and swore it's "the" password to the best of
| your knowledge you couldn't be accused of maliciously
| refusing to cooperate. I imagine they would still throw a
| book at you somewhere, but probably not the 5 years under
| this law.
| varispeed wrote:
| Yes! Plenty of times e.g.
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140116/09195525902/uk-
| ma...
|
| You can Google more easily...
| gambiting wrote:
| Yes, thank you for reminding me I can Google.
|
| From your own link - he said he forgot the password,
| which(I assume) in itself wasn't enough to prosecute, it
| was the fact that he eventually caved in and provided it
| 4 months later, so they got him on purposefully
| obstructing justice for 4 months. It's not clear if he
| could be successfully prosecuted for this crime if he
| never remembered the password.
| varispeed wrote:
| Here you have someone directly sentenced for not
| disclosing their password:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-45365464
| gambiting wrote:
| I mean, we can be doing this back and forth for a while,
| but again, to quote from the article:
|
| "Judge Christopher Parker did not accept Nicholson's
| "wholly inadequate" excuse that providing his password
| would expose information relating to cannabis."
|
| So basically he said "I know the password, but I'm not
| going to tell you". That's obstructing justice.
|
| My point is if you say you don't remember and _maintain_
| saying you don 't, can you be persecuted purely on this
| one law. Because so far it looks like you can't.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| This is the reason America's 5th amendment exists, people
| have the ability to not self-incriminate because it gives
| way for a different form of obstruction of justice,
| compelling people to speak under duress mainly.
|
| I've long wished most of the American constitution made
| it's way over to Britain. We've had many of the freedoms
| enshrined in it for centuries but a few, particularly the
| principle of freedom of speech, has been trampled over in
| the internet age.
| alentist wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption
| newacct583 wrote:
| > Cryptography actually is needed for safety more than it is
| used by undesirable people to commit crimes!
|
| This is actually more because criminals on balance tend to be
| too dumb to hide their traces than because of any demographic
| truth. There are a _lot_ of criminals.
|
| Focusing on "crypto" is, I think, a forest for the trees
| argument. Look instead at anonymity for evidence of where this
| kind of thing goes. Put up any reasonably anonymous forum where
| people can interact without their identities being reveals
| (which often includes, but doesn't always require, some kind of
| crypto protocol). Within a year it will be filled with
| criminals. Minor criminals like drug dealers. Worse things like
| market manipulation and fraudsters. Weapons sales. Black market
| rings. Revolutionaries of all sorts and sizes. Child porn. Mail
| order brides and other trafficking trades.
|
| Seriously, run a Tor exit node for a while and see where this
| goes.
|
| Your neighbors in your imagined "safe haven country for
| cryptographers" aren't going to be who you think they are.
| robobro wrote:
| I recently made a federated, anonymous / pseudonymous
| messageboard. It took about 2 months before I had found cyber
| criminals had translated it into another language and were
| using it to sell narcotics on the darkweb.
| mezentius wrote:
| > I wish there was some sort of island or safe haven country
| setup by cryptographers so they could safely work on crypto
| without legal issues or crypto being seen as a munition and a
| threat to government.
|
| This has always been a fascinating concept to me as well -- but
| I think history demonstrates that you can't just set up a safe
| haven without significant international leverage, whether
| financial or military. And if you're actively exporting
| "munitions" to other countries, it's only a matter of time
| until someone tries to knock you off.
|
| The more likely scenario is that your safe haven will be
| dependent on a larger nation-state patron--and therefore
| ultimately vulnerable to changes in its domestic politics.
| (E.g. Israel, or Taiwan.)
|
| It's difficult to build leverage in a country the size of an
| island--and once you're big enough to have any leverage,
| autarky becomes nearly impossible as you're always dependent on
| someone else for logistical reasons (food, fuel, etc.). This is
| essentially what the Second World War was fought about; autarky
| lost.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| Creating an island nation to evade laws won't work. It's the
| same thing as trying to evade tax laws but for content laws.
|
| What has happened to tax havens is they are labeled tax non-
| compliant and then an IGO effectively embargoes them unless
| they turn over all tax records and come into compliance with
| their laws. So the same thing would apply to creating an island
| nation to evade some cryptography export law, or content
| restriction.
|
| I don't think convincing the respective governments with
| arguments will work either because the incentive they have to
| require censorship on internet content that they are not
| mentioning is that they can censor it for their own purposes.
| For example, Russia is considering blocking Twitter entirely
| for having illegal content (you know what I mean by this) but I
| think everyone knows that's not the real reason they are
| considering blocking Twitter.
|
| I don't know what the best solution is.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Well, corporations do evade taxes using island nations and
| other such machinery, and mostly get away with it.
|
| It probably won't work for "just people", without strong
| lobby powers and corrupting financial temptations dangled
| before politicians.
|
| IMHO there's no running away from resisting/circumventing
| oppressive legislation in our social surroundings, not by
| looking for far-away havens.
| swiley wrote:
| Ironically the UK is pretty much a handful of islands. I don't
| think the islandness means much.
| jancsika wrote:
| > I wish there was some sort of island or safe haven country
| setup by cryptographers so they could safely work on crypto
| without legal issues or crypto being seen as a munition and a
| threat to government.
|
| I wish there was some sort of island of safe haven country
| setup by compiler developers where C didn't have problems with
| memory safety.
|
| Why is politics the only domain where HN'ers think they can
| make the domain's problems _disappear entirely_ by moving it
| physically to an island? It 's inane.
| bosswipe wrote:
| You're HN'er yourself.
| [deleted]
| ipaddr wrote:
| They created it and called it rust. Time fixes all bugs.
| young_unixer wrote:
| There's Liberland, an attempt at a libertarian country, but
| it's still far from being an actual country.
| lostlogin wrote:
| That sounds a lot like a place for liberals rather than
| libertarians.
|
| It's very interesting to read about, thanks.
|
| https://liberland.org/en/about
| world_peace42 wrote:
| "when we force technology companies to make calls about what is
| right or wrong - or what is "likely to have adverse psychological
| or physical impacts" on children - we end up in a dangerous place
| of centralising and regulating relative morals"
|
| I told myself to laugh when I read this line. As it stands now, a
| small group of Facebook and Google executives determine what
| peasants are allowed to think and see on a daily basis based on
| their "relative morals". Not that politicians are any better, but
| at least some people did vote for them, and that counts for
| something.
|
| Let's be real here, anyone with time on their hands should click
| on foundation, and go check each of their grant histories. I am
| not even going to agree or disagree with the legislation, but I'm
| going to bet the money trail will explain this letter.
| [deleted]
| Permit wrote:
| > Forcing a "duty of care" responsibility on organisations which
| operate online will not only drown small and medium sized
| companies in administrative tasks and costs, it will further
| accentuate the existing monopolies by Big Tech.
|
| I often wonder about this. I mean, just the other day there was
| an article[1] here about sending GDPR requests to a health non-
| profit in order to sequence your genes for free.
|
| The costs of each individual piece of legislation are small, but
| internet legislation only ever trends in the direction of "more
| of it". As more small costs are added (GDPR, cookie
| notifications, right to be forgotten, removal of Safe Harbor
| etc.) these costs will start to play a factor in who can run a
| web service and who cannot.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27146975
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Cookie notifications? You have to be actively tracking your
| users for those to even be relevant. You could literally do
| less work and avoid the need for them altogether.
| daenney wrote:
| GDPR, or CCPA, isn't all that costly as long as you stop
| thinking of user data as something for you to harvest, mine,
| resell and profit from. If you instead treat user data like a
| security liability, system designs and trade-offs will flow
| from there. They'll help ensure you design systems that
| minimise collection and anonymise things early, remove data
| promptly when no longer needed, and make it easy to audit what
| data you do hold which in turns makes supporting GDPR requests
| easy.
|
| The largest cost of GDPR is making that shift for existing
| companies. If GDPR ends up killing a few companies because of
| that, I personally don't mind. And if a startup doesn't end up
| seeing the light of day because it's not possible for them to
| operate under the conditions that GDPR imposes, then from my
| point of view the GDPR is doing what I'd like it to do.
| anshorei wrote:
| It's possible for you to be in violation of GDPR without
| "thinking of user data as something for you to harvest, mine,
| resell and profit from".
|
| If it's "killing a few companies" and "a startup doesn't end
| up seeing the light" then "GDPR is doing what I'd like it to
| do."
|
| That's a pretty shitty opinion to hold.
|
| What did those companies and startups do wrong? I'm as tired
| of stupid startups as the next person, but I won't cheer for
| their failure unless they actually do something wrong.
| 3np wrote:
| How about adding third-party analytics integrations that
| compromise your visitors, tracks them around the web, and
| fail to protect that data properly as the analytics company
| gets acquired by another entity?
|
| Stop saving PII for profit/exploitation reasons and you're
| in the clear.
| Permit wrote:
| > If you instead treat user data like a security liability
|
| > minimise collection
|
| > anonymise things early
|
| > remove data promptly when no longer needed,
|
| > make it easy to audit what data you do hold
|
| These (and others) are the costs I am speaking of. The vast
| majority of HN commenters will tell you that these costs are
| worth the upside in user privacy (which is totally fine!).
|
| My point here is that the costs are not fixed. Over the
| decades we will see other, often sensible costs added to this
| list. While each individual cost may be small, they do
| accumulate and they influence who can and cannot start a
| business (or even personal website!) that deals with
| individuals from the EU.
|
| Large companies will always be able to pay these costs. Some
| small companies may not. What you make of this is up to your
| personal interpretation, but I will miss the web of 00's
| where it felt like anyone could build a website or online
| business with next to no overhead.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Interesting. I don't send cookies or keep personal data, so why
| do I need to worry about them?
|
| The only time I've got into issues was with an american firm
| using an american law (dmca) to attack me (a non-american) and
| my hosting company (a non-american hosting company)
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Common CMSs send cookies by default. Even if you are one of
| those tech-inclined people using a static site generator for
| your own website, this is not the case for millions and
| millions of other websites.
| nfoz wrote:
| Then let's replace those CMS's.
|
| [edited with less anger]
| maxrev17 wrote:
| Replace them? You need cookies for a tonne of reasons.
| It's really difficult to justify replacing half the web
| because some people abuse it. That's like replacing cars
| with walking because some people drink drive.
| [deleted]
| Permit wrote:
| > I don't send cookies or keep personal data, so why do I
| need to worry about them?
|
| Can you share your website/service?
| frockington1 wrote:
| Commenting to follow up later. I'm really interested in the
| use case. The only thing I can think of would be a website
| similar to mid-2000s youtube to mp3 converters.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Is the Matrix based in the UK? I guess I don't follow why this UK
| specific law matters to anybody outside that country. I mean, if
| the Matrix is in the EU then is a UK law really relevant? If your
| website is not based in the UK then it's not your problem unless
| I'm missing something. Even if the reach of the UK was beyond its
| shores then the fallback is to simply ban that country's IP
| addresses. Sucks to be from that country but blame your
| government for draconian legislation.
| Arathorn wrote:
| Yes, the Matrix.org Foundation is a UK non-profit. It leans
| heavily on Element, the company which set up by the original
| Matrix team to fund Matrix, which is a UK for-profit. So if the
| UK govt starts incarcerating the team who created Matrix
| because they provide Matrix hosting, this is bad news for
| Matrix.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Yes that totally is terrible for them then. Hope this all
| falls apart for Boris.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| What the US, UK, EU, Australia, Canada, etc... do have
| implications for the whole world. These countries all
| communicate and align on surveillance policy.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Whilst we sympathise with the [UK] government's desire to show
| action in this space and to do something about children's safety
| (everyone's safety really)
|
| I don't sympathize with it. A government which supports and arms
| near-genocidal attacks and blockades in Yemen and in Palestine -
| is not a legitimate actor where it comes to safety and harm
| prevention online. Or at the very least - where its involvement
| may have effect on non-UK-citizens.
| buro9 wrote:
| This appears to be the thing that will finally take my sites
| offline.
|
| I'm an individual who runs 300 forums. I do this because I
| believe that forums organised around an interest bring people
| together and help address loneliness. Further I believe that if
| you do that, you also help minimise the impact of depression and
| things like the suicide rate for middle aged men.
|
| The forums are things like this: https://www.lfgss.com/ Cycling
| related. So that people come together, build friendships, and
| take those friendships into the real world through the interest -
| to go on a cycle ride.
|
| I can't really see how I could comply with this bill at a low
| cost (the forums all run a deficit that I cover), and even if I
| did the paperwork side of things there are risks created that
| come with large and scary penalties for me... too large for me to
| consider bearing them.
|
| There is no exemption I fit in... I run forums, and these are
| defined by the bill as being a regulated service.
| 3np wrote:
| I think you should contact the press. Maybe The Guardian? You
| seem like the kind of person that could help bring light and
| counterweight to this
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Transfer them to the United States and simply ban European
| members?
| viccuad wrote:
| or better, transfer them to Europe and simply ban UK.
| [deleted]
| jsdevtom wrote:
| The current UK politicians are so mind numbingly naive in so many
| ways.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| The Bill is arguably the biggest threat to global online freedoms
| that exists.
|
| I'm surprised it has not been covered more here. It is amazingly
| badly written and will have huge negative consequences.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > Amazingly badly written
|
| You know they _want_ ambiguity. It means MPs can dismiss
| objectors as irrational slippery slope proponents. Then when it
| 's appended to the statute books it only takes a few judgements
| to 'clarify' the law.
|
| It's all downhill for freedom. The intention is clear. Voting
| is useless. The press have been silent to the point of
| compliance. It only takes a well placed messaging campaign and
| an unvigilant, ignorant public.
|
| At least we still have beer to see us through the long haul.
| See you at the pub.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > See you at the pub
|
| This is a disturbing good summary of UK politics at the
| moment.
| varispeed wrote:
| We have a little forum with a niche community. Few months ago we
| have closed the registration, because of spam and also because we
| had people posting questionable stuff and then reporting it to
| the hosting provider. There is not much money from ads, it barely
| covers the servers. Moderators do not always have time to react
| quickly to something stupid.
|
| Probably many other communities will be forced to close with
| either having to move to Facebook or other privacy hostile
| platforms.
|
| Then there is EU terreg - we have some members from the EU, so we
| would have to boot them out or create a legal entity in the EU to
| process content removal requests as I understand, in a year or
| so. There is no money for that. Sad times for the internet...
| hwbehrens wrote:
| While I agree with their position overall, particularly with the
| ambiguity of "harmfulness", I think this is not the right tack to
| take here:
|
| > fails to acknowledge how actually harmful it would be for
| certain groups of the population to have their real life identity
| associated with their online identity
|
| No nanny-state-style government is going to buy this argument for
| a moment, because it requires a certain level of distrust of
| authority that certainly won't be present _in the authorities
| themselves_. Even among the population at large, there are
| undeniable trends in many countries towards authoritarianism on
| both the left and the right that are ignored or embraced by a
| majority (or a large minority) of their respective bases of
| support.
|
| Combined with prevailing trends against web-based anonymity and
| concerns over "fake news" and other amplification mechanisms for
| information warfare, I suspect we will see a further bifurcation
| into regulated, KYC-style services and unregulated, anonymous
| communities. Even here on HN, posters and commenters are
| regularly chastised for failing to adequately disclose their
| identities when they have a vested interest in the topic under
| discussion.
|
| Rather, the privacy angle which has been so conveniently mooted
| by Apple lately is (in my opinion) more palatable to the general
| public. By giving more responsibility to the service providers,
| the government is also implicitly giving them more power as well
| (as censors, if nothing else). But in practice, most people have
| personally observed that when more power/information is provided
| to private companies, it leads to a slippery slope of
| monetization, advertising, and lock-in.
|
| An appeal to this sense of unfairness and power imbalance with
| companies seems more "sellable" to me than convincing people
| their governments have nefarious/censorious motives. As a
| supporting argument, consider the general global consensus on gun
| control -- if people were willing to believe that their
| governments were ready to turn on them (in terms of physical
| oppression) at any moment, there would be more global concern
| about the physical power disparity between police/military and
| the civilian populace.
|
| Currently (with some exceptions, e.g. the U.S.), the global
| consensus is that people are much more willing to trust their
| police/military with weaponry than their fellow citizens, based
| on the implicit notion that the likelihood of experiencing harm
| from the latter is disproportionately more likely than the
| former.
|
| In contrast, as partially evidenced by the relative growth of
| Signal as a response to the changes in WhatsApp and the public
| support for app-tracking changes in iOS, people are demonstrably
| concerned about privacy in the _commercial_ space.
|
| Thus, I theorize that an appeal to privacy would be more
| effective: "Under the proposed changes, we would have the ability
| to do ____, which would exploit your personal, private
| information for profit. If we can do it, that means ____, ____,
| and ____ can do it too. Do you want your government giving even
| _more_ power to private companies to profit off you? "
| ne0flex wrote:
| Agree that the way an argument for privacy is framed determines
| the support from the average person.
|
| I've heard a number of times people saying that they have
| nothing to hide, yet would not give my unreserved access to
| their phone when I ask. Then I try to explain to them that
| Google, Apple, etc. are doing the same thing except they're not
| asking permission and they just don't seem to care. The
| convinience of having an Alexa that they can talk to whenever
| is worth more to them than the possibility that these companies
| can be listening in on them. Until an event that causes real
| fear of privacy loss occurs, I don't think many will take it
| seriously.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I've had this conversation with a relative. To them, the
| difference is that if I know what's on their phone I might
| judge them for it or tell other people, Google isn't likely
| to do either.
| viktorcode wrote:
| Sad to see UK becoming one of the apologists of internet
| censorship, closing the gap to the levels of authoritarian
| countries.
|
| Once you have censorship facility in place, the area of its
| application will only grow. The term "illegal information" is
| also widely used in Russia for the same purpose.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The UK has never not been eager to censor to a sometimes
| comical extent. Just look at the "Video Nasty" moral panic, or
| the hilarious dubbing of Northern Irish people on television.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_nasty
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%931994_British_broa...
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Now that you mention Ireland, it occurs to me the UK plays
| second fiddle compared to its former colony. After achieving
| independence, the Irish Free State and its successor, the
| Republic of Ireland were dominated by right-wing,
| conservative, Papist and authoritarian nationalists.
|
| Modern art and music - particularly "evil" jazz - were all
| banned. Our best writers had to leave the country. The
| writers that didn't leave had to apply to the Department of
| Justice for permission to possess a copy of their own book.
| The video nasties of the eighties didn't even have a chance
| to become a problem in Ireland.
|
| The UK's censorship of the Irish Republican movement paled in
| comparison to that of Ireland. Enforcement of Section 31 of
| the Broadcasting act began in the early seventies and lasted
| until the mid-nineties. And it was often interpreted to
| prevent Sinn Fein members from speaking about non-political
| issues. We didn't even get to have Stephen Rae's voice
| standing in for Gerry Adams.
|
| As a young adult in the mid-nineties, censorship was still an
| issue: I only ever saw Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers"
| on a very crap video in a student centre. I remember watching
| Robert Rodriguez' "From Dusk Till Dawn" in a cinema in the
| Netherlands knowing that it was banned back at home and
| around the same time, I remember it being a big deal when the
| ban was lifted on Playboy magazine.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Haven't they been that for a long time? Wasn't Britain the
| country that pushed for that EU directive that required all
| ISPs to save all the traffic of their users? They were also the
| ones that tried doing website blacklists and are trying to
| censor social media (google: "girl punished for hate crime for
| posting rap lyrics").
|
| What does the UK have to do so that people will accept that the
| UK is lying when it calls itself a free country? Start
| arresting people for speech? For activism? Kill protesters?
| [deleted]
| randompwd wrote:
| > Sad to see UK becoming one of the apologists of internet
| censorship
|
| Almost as if, (at this point in time), the benefits of this to
| the people of the country(not just you) outweigh the
| negatives...
| jlokier wrote:
| Not really. This legislation is not something the electorate
| knew about, let alone discussed, when they were voting in the
| current government.
|
| It's just one of those things a government with a large
| majority keeps quiet about until it's got plenty of time
| between elections to bring it up and push it through before
| the next one.
| t-writescode wrote:
| The cameras tracking everything everywhere in UK would say that
| it's long been an authoritarian country.
|
| Authoritarianism is a sliding scale. From what I can gather,
| lots of humans that have any political pull at all tend to be
| authoritarian (against the kinds of people they don't like, of
| course).
| cyrksoft wrote:
| Most cameras in the UK (I think around 95% even) are private.
|
| Not sure why you think the UK is an authoritarian regime.
| Check any ranking and it is one of the freest countries out
| there (Heritage Ranking, for example:
| https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking)
| fragileone wrote:
| Yet the UK has the Snooper's Charter, GCHQ and mass content
| policing. This is new bill is an extension of their control
| apparatus, not an exceptionally unique case.
| ipaddr wrote:
| He is referring to the camera network in London.
| cyrksoft wrote:
| The government's camera network in London is very small,
| only 23708 cameras (15516 of which are from Transport of
| London across the tube network)[0].
|
| It's a fairly small network for an authoritarian
| government.
|
| [0]https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-
| there-in-lo....
| palestine-tree wrote:
| In what way is that a "very small" network?
|
| In fact, given how small London is that's a _huge_
| network.
| cyrksoft wrote:
| Small London?
|
| London's population: 8.982 million
|
| Area: 8,382 km2.
|
| How is that small?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| If your definition of authoritarianism is ubiquitous video
| surveillance you'll have to come to terms with the fact that
| not only every politician is authoritarian but just about
| every citizen, because there's pretty strong support for
| these security measures.
|
| The word authoritarianism appears to have lost all meaning in
| internet circles. What authoritarianism actually is, is a
| people being governed without their consent by a government
| they did not elect. If British citizens, or their
| representatives decide they put significant value on public
| safety rather than privacy that's a choice.
| beermonster wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei...
| dblohm7 wrote:
| The UK was already heading down that route with the public
| surveillance cameras, IMHO.
| cyrksoft wrote:
| Most cameras in the UK are private (around 95% if I recall
| correctly). Businesses, home cctv, doorbell cameras, etc.
| beermonster wrote:
| And the land-grab law changes over the last 12 months.
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