- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- privacy@programming.dev
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My kids are getting mini PC’s for Christmas, preinstalled with Mint. They use tablets now, but I want to introduce them to the joys of keyboards and mice (and The Secret of Monkey Island). I hope they’ll like it, so that in the future they’ll stick to PC’s and laptops, which offer far more robust control by the end user.
The year is 2031. Every phone comes with government mandated, pre-installed spyware scanning everyone incoming and outgoing message. VPNs are illegal now and special police units track and stop anyone with unauthorized account. Random stops and phone searches make sure no one is using modded ROMs. Failure to unlock phone for police is punishable with long prison terms.
People seeking privacy (i.e. criminals) resort to drastic measures to evade those new rules. Unlocked phones are smuggled through the channel but it’s to risky to carry them around or even to connect them to the network. “Privacy phones” are usually carried in the ass and only taken out for a quick PornHub session or to post illegal meme to lemmy. ROM updates are only traded underground and getting the images is more dangerous than trading drugs. Police informants are everywhere. Truly, the darkest days for privacy online.
On the bright side pedophilia was completely eradicated and all the children are safe now.
Fuck the UK at this point
You know it’s going to be bad when it’s almost literally called the “think of the children bill”
its been 10 yeares since satire is dead. but jfc this is yet another stark reminder how dead it is.
The “Pro-Ice Cream And Puppies And Anti-Terrorism And Hurting Children Bill” passes unopposed.
Fucking fascists everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children’s_Wellbeing_and_Schools_Bill
https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/62773/documents/7086 (the text of the bill).
The passages quoted on Mastodon appear not to exist in the text of the bill as passed and as sent to the Lords. It’s mainly about safeguarding kids in care.
I had to hunt to find them, they are proposed amendments and not yet part of the bill.
Go here https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3909/publications
And expand out ‘Ammendment Papers’ and choose ‘ HL Bill 135 Running list of amendments – 22 December 2025‘
It’s this doc
https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/64067/documents/7529
For example
LORD NASH BARONESS CASS BARONESS BENJAMIN
_ After Clause 27, insert the following new Clause—
“Action to prohibit the provision of VPN services to children in the United Kingdom (1) Within 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed the Secretary of State must, for the purpose of furthering the protection and wellbeing of children, make regulations which prohibit the provision to UK children of a Relevant VPN Service (the “child VPN prohibition”). (2) Regulations under subsection (1)— (a) may make provision for the provider of a Relevant VPN Service to apply to any person seeking to access its service in or from the UK age assurance which is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not that person is a child; (b) must apply the child VPN prohibition to the provider of any Relevant VPN Service which is, or is likely to be— (i) offered or marketed to persons in the United Kingdom; (ii) provided to a significant number of persons. © must make provision for the monitoring and effective enforcement of the child VPN prohibition. …
This is total vpn prohibition if you have to hand your personal data to the provider
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was ‘Oh no, not again.’
Yeah, it sounds good until the current or next leaders use it to arrest people because they don’t like the current leadership or a miriad of other things they don’t want people thinking, regardless of what side they’re on. I would gladly take privacy and security over throwing the baby out with the bathwater, especially with legislation and law that immediately treats you like a prisoner.
Yeah, it sounds good until…
Nope
Yeah i rather if children and young people where not used as tools for fascist desires.
Time for a feature phone.
Or just GrapheneOS?
I can only see the first post in the thread 😩
Can we take an ‘industry regulates itself’ approach to this? Make a foss csam hash scanner and include it in aosp. When they try to pass these show them that it already exists. That way we at least have some transparency to what it does
Yeah, because traditionally corporations have been good at regulating themselves, and we all know that they never sell access to private information of individuals to their governments.
On top of that, your idea would never work because they want a tamper-proof system, which would require Google having total control over the implementation, which would not work since multiple projects like GrapheneOS strip google entirely out of Android.
Furthermore, this is just a slippery slope to even worse invasions of privacy, and if your idea was implemented it wouldn’t be long before they insisted on even deeper intrusions, justifying it as being incremental on the access they already had.
As far as I know self regulation by media industries implementing age labels prevented these kinds of “think of the children” bills before. No idea where you got the corporations having private information from, the entire idea is that it would be open source so we can know that it’s not doing anything shady.
Politicians pushing for these bills don’t care about the excuse they present, but the reason they can repeatedly use the same excuse is because it is a legitimate concern for people. I don’t think digging our heels in to refuse a solution even if it were to align with our stated principle of preserving privacy helps us in the public consciousness.
even worse invasions of privacy
“worse” isn’t accurate as the entire point is that it would be designed to be non-invasive (for people who don’t have csam anyways). Of course they’ll keep trying to invade our privacy but with the example of a solution that doesn’t use mass surveillance for something they tried to push surveillance for, they’ll have less leg to stand on.
you:
the entire idea is that it would be open source so we can know that it’s not doing anything shady.
them:
Any relevant device supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software
The bill also seeks “Action to prohibit the provision of VPN services to children in the United Kingdom” and wants “all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users.”
This will effectively ban end-to-end encrypted communication and open source operating systems like GrapheneOS and forbid that people have administrator rights on their own devices.
tell me you didn’t read the linked info without telling me you didn’t read it.
What made you think I was proposing a scheme compliant with the bill? I repeatedly said that this would be to prevent such a bill from passing. And explained my reasoning why it would do so.
To make it doubly clear: I don’t support what they’re trying to do. I just think it could do us good to ourselves address any legitimate concerns they use as excuses to implement surveillance so it’s harder to use them as excuses.
