[HN Gopher] Google's Statement on the UK Online Safety Bill [pdf]
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Google's Statement on the UK Online Safety Bill [pdf]
Author : stefankuehnel
Score : 65 points
Date : 2023-09-09 09:36 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bills.parliament.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (bills.parliament.uk)
| darkclouds wrote:
| Why doesnt Katie explain that better education is needed,
| teaching kids how to recognise and avoid situations in the home,
| in public and online?
|
| Keeping someone innocent and protected from the realities of
| life, can set them up for a lifetime of mental health problems
| caused by historical exploitation in a variety of ways, that will
| haunt them for the rest of their life.
|
| If education is not the best way, what is?
|
| Katie O'Donovan is Public Policy Manager for Google UK with
| responsibility for economic policy. In this role Katie has
| developed Google's economic and digital skills programmes to
| ensure online opportunities can be realised across the UK and is
| responsible for engagement with the UK government on policy
| initiatives to ensure the UK remains a world-leading digital
| economy. Katie is also responsible for Google's Brexit Policy and
| work on young people's online behaviour.
|
| Prior to working at Google, Katie developed wide-ranging
| experience working in government and policy as a special advisor
| to Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Research and Information Unit
| at No10, and as an advisor to David Miliband. Katie also
| established the communications and policy team at Mumsnet helping
| the website grow from a forum startup to online institution.
| Katie is a board member of the Internet Watch Foundation.
|
| [1] https://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/network/katie-odonovan/
|
| https://ie.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-o-donovan-a13b0092
| amenhotep wrote:
| Good lord, it's difficult to think of a place I'd less like to
| see in the history of someone in a role like this than Mumsnet.
| [deleted]
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| (2022)
| dmcq2 wrote:
| It seemed to me that Google were struggling to stay its their
| limit as a company which supports government initiatives and is
| trying to find a way of working within them, whilst pointing out
| that most of what is being proposed is totally unworkable. I
| think they did about as well as one can in that situation. They
| put in a couple of very strong warnings about what they would do
| if it wasn't changed but I don't think it'll have much effect
| without some much stronger arm twisting. The measures seem to me
| to have little to do with protecting children and would not be
| very effective in that respect, volunteer groups work at
| detection very successfully but the law and police don't really
| support them. What they do wouldn't really be covered by this at
| all. It seems something the security services and the control
| freaks in government want, and who's going to oppose it and be
| liable to being called a paedophile supporter?
| wredue wrote:
| What does the bill actually say?
|
| To state that I don't trust google here is an understatement.
| If google is pissed off, then my default position is that the
| government is probably correct. Not having all the facts, I
| could be coerced to a different position.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Google gets a bad wrap for many reasons, I think mainly for
| its ad business.
|
| UK gov on the other hand.. oh brother. Where to start and
| where to end? They have been an ongoing fiasco/circus for the
| past decade, to say the least.
|
| Irrelevant to the specific topic, but in the "UK gov" front,
| I am still waiting for Boris Johnson and his minions to rake
| in the PS350m every week and fund the NHS.
|
| Back to the topic, for a country where intensive surveillance
| is BAU, it's no wonder they want to weaken and/or remove
| E2EE.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if in X years we hear that they (UK
| gov) have also tried to pull a "Room 641A" and failed.
| stephen_g wrote:
| The bill says a lot of things, it started out bad and has
| been amended and amended many times over years.
|
| I think the relevant points are putting things like
| requirements for age verification for anything possibly
| considered 'harmful' (like adult images) by way of, for
| example, requiring uploading an image of your Government
| issued ID or by using a face scan AI recognition system.
|
| The main other contentious one is the power for Ofcom to
| direct companies offering encrypted messaging services to
| break the security model of end-to-end encryption to allow
| content scanning and surveillance. Most big platforms (e.g.
| Apple, Meta/WhatsApp, Signal) said they would withdraw
| messaging services from the UK rather than breaking E2EE. The
| Government recently _kinda_ said they _might not_ use that
| power but then have been quite keen to try and say they're
| not backing down so who knows what that means...
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Cloudflare falsely thinks I'm a bot so I can't actually read
| it, but I believe the full text of the bill is here: https://
| publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/58-03/0362...
| psunavy03 wrote:
| . . . but that's exactly what a bot would say!
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Ironically it looks like I can read the document by
| having an actual bot fetch it for me.
|
| If I was a UK citizen I'd be pissed though (in the sense
| of being angry, not intoxicated). Everyone should be able
| to read the laws that their government is trying to pass.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| First dot point:
|
| _Developing and updating new community guidelines on YouTube,
| that we strictly enforce, on a range of harmful content,
| including suicide and self harm, scams, elections misinformation,
| harrassment and hate speech;_
|
| YouTube actively advertises videos of investment scams to me.
|
| _In our experience, algorithmic tools are effective at
| identifying CSAM and certain types of violent extremist content,
| but will struggle to accurately identify other, more context-
| dependent forms of illegal and harmful content._
|
| So Google aren't against automated scanning of anything and
| everything, it's the potential of mis-classification that they're
| concerned about.
|
| _This would leave UK users with a poorer quality Internet
| relative to elsewhere._
|
| Elsewhere will catch up though.
|
| _We believe that protection of children should be considered
| holistically, and their right to access information and to
| privacy must be respected in much the same way that we would
| expect for adults_
|
| Sarcastic chuckle at the arrogance and meaninglessness of this
| commentary.
|
| The whole Advertising section is worth reading to get an idea of
| the value Google believes it is offering to the world.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I don't think even ChatGPT would have done a worse job of
| explaining this
|
| > So Google aren't against automated scanning of anything and
| everything, it's the potential of mis-classification that
| they're concerned about.
|
| They can live with a half-assed solution that only benefits
| then, but if it means they have to do more work and assume
| liability then suddenly it's not so great
| fguerraz wrote:
| Google seems pretty comfortable with making automatic content
| scanning a legal requirement, and it's easy to see why: it nips
| the competition in the bud. They can afford to spend billions on
| this, other can't.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Also, it gives them more reason to collect more information
| which they love. And it ties in nicely with their idea of
| "trusted" devices and browsers which ban things like adblockers
| baz00 wrote:
| After reading this, I'm not sure if Google are on my side.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| It's pretty clear: they're not.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Corporations are never on your side. At best their goals are
| temporarily aligned with yours, but it is _always_ fleeting.
| baz00 wrote:
| Not always. Some of them still value customers and are at
| least attempting to go in the correct direction for society.
| This one, not so much.
| developer93 wrote:
| It seems like lots start off like that but it never lasts.
| I think it's an effect of having shareholders: it all boils
| down to money in the end
| wredue wrote:
| The moment a company begins their push for IPO is the
| very moment the enshitification and anti-user bullshit
| starts.
|
| Every once in a while, those corporations are held to
| task by other non-public entities, but as soon as they
| drive the non-public out, enshitification begins.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| 'Corporations don't want money. They want all the money - all
| of it, all of the time.'
| ur-whale wrote:
| >After reading this, I'm not sure if Google are on my side.
|
| Google stopped being on your side a very long time ago
| Try1275 wrote:
| on _our_ side
| daveoc64 wrote:
| It's interesting that so much of their letter is basically them
| saying "we can't automate enforcement of our rules", yet that
| hasn't stopped them doing that up until now on platforms like
| Google Play and YouTube (with obvious terrible results).
| tapoxi wrote:
| I mean they were sued by Viacom for a billion dollars. Google
| didn't put ContentID in for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
| smoldesu wrote:
| Maybe we should take their word for it, then? It's hard to
| imagine what enforcement even looks like, at their scale.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Then they're operating at too high a scale
| Arnt wrote:
| Most people find it hard to imagine what my work even looks
| like (I'm a software developer, approximately). Then I'm
| operating at... [complete the sentence].
|
| Or if you don't want to complete the sentence, you may
| instead explain why abuse handling at scale is something
| people should understand while the 120-frame stack trace
| involved in my current task is too
| complex/difficult/whatever.
| dmcq2 wrote:
| How many people do you think they should employ at the job?
| Ten years ago China was already employing two million
| people to monitor the internet. Google and others employ
| tens of thousands of people round the world to monitor
| pictures or videos that their AIs flag, and it is a nasty
| job with a lot of burnout. Scale makes the job easier if
| anything.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Employing 2 million people is (relatively) easy. Train
| them for all applicable law in the world is hard.
| theptip wrote:
| It's not cheaper for smaller companies to do this kind of
| moderation. If it's too expensive even with Google's
| economy of scale, then it's going to be even worse for
| small businesses.
| yibg wrote:
| That's the scale of the internet though. It's either google
| or 1000 smaller googles. The amount of work required
| doesn't change.
| Arnt wrote:
| I don't find it interesting -- it's just another way to say
| that you can do lots more things if you're not legally
| responsible for the quality of your work.
| [deleted]
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Thank you for inviting Google to give evidence to the Online
| Safety Bill Public Bill Committee, and for your subsequent
| invitation to provide written evidence.
|
| So, they've now provided written evidence. But they haven't
| responded to the invitation to appear before the committee.
|
| It sounds like they're saying "Sure, here's our evidence. We're
| not prepared to answer your supplementary questions." Will Goo be
| sending someone to appear before the committee?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| They appeared before the committee six months before they wrote
| this letter.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| [Edit] By "haven't responded", I meant haven't responded in
| that letter, which was the only context I had.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| > The Bill does not currently require Ofcom to consider the
| impact of compliance measures on children's rights to access
| information, and on both children and adults' privacy. This is a
| signicant omission, given the impact that any form of age-
| verication also has on adult users (who would also need to go
| through some form of age assurance to access services)
|
| This is an interesting way to address some of the problems in the
| bill (though I can see why Google wants it in particular)
|
| (It's also an interesting way of phrasing your lobbying: "the
| bill does not currently take into account [thing that we want it
| to take into account]" - phrased in a way that makes it seem like
| a silly omission by the lawmakers)
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(page generated 2023-09-09 23:01 UTC)