Esme on 17/6/2022 at 16:18
I may have read this wrong, but the UK government looks like it's going to try and force age verification on every website that provides a service to UK citizens under the guise of removing cookie consent pop ups & preventing children accessing porn
They're doing this by asking you to prove your
identity, not your age
Given the content of some of the fan missions & some of the opinions expressed on this board I'm pretty sure that will include this site
So if you want to access pretty much any website from the UK you'll need to prove your identity with some government approved identification & you'll have to do it pretty much every time you visit
For UK based websites there's a list of approved age verification services you can use at a cost of about 10p per check and if you don't have a credit card/passport/driving license etc they're thinking of using an AI & your webcam, hello phrenology
That's 10p for every access to your site even if your site is free or funded by donation, so if someone closes their browser & comes back later that's another 10p because there's no proof it's not a different person, I'm not entirely sure why websites outside the UK are going to go along with this idea, a cheaper way for them would be just to block access for every UK based IP address
The bill is extra-territorial being located offshore isn't good enough to save you, I have no idea how they intend to enforce that, too busy picking my jaw off the floor so I may have missed it
A few highlights
Quote:
Preamble: you'll be aware that the UK's Online Safety Bill has been promoted as a piece of big tech/social media legislation, but it is not. It will impact any company or project of any size, nature, location, or business model which has user-generated content on it or allows humans to interact with other humans. So if your site, service or app is anything other than a promotional portfolio web 1.0 site, or a blog like this here blog that only allows comments, you're in scope. If you weren't aware of that, you are now. Enough of the preamble, let's amble.Quote:
The use of third-party age verification systems is intended to ensure that the service provider, e.g. you running your site there, never sees nor accesses the personal data - meaning the identities - of the people accessing your service. The fact remains, however, that age verification is still being mandated onto you, and that your users will hold you - not the third party provider - responsible for the hassle.
So how's this going to work?
The simplest way to explain this is that it's going to be like cookie popups, mandated onto every site and service, at the point of page load, regardless of any subsequent interaction with the service. Except that instead of asking you to confirm your choices, it's going to be asking you to confirm your identity.
No passport? No driving license? No credit card? No internet for you. Digital exclusion a go-go.
Quote:
And keep in mind that the UK also envisions this Bill to be extraterritorial, meaning that businesses outside the UK will be expected to comply with it - meaning age-gate their visitors - as well. How that's going to work in their own domestic privacy contexts is one question; why they're going to spend that money on the likes of you is another.
Quote:
The UK is also planning to
shout at browser manufacturers to nerd harder require browser manufacturers to create UK-only versions of browsers to deal with consents, while the heart of the issue - the use of cookies and data harvesters in the first place - isn't actually dealt with by either government or the regulator; in fact, today's publication signals an intention to “move to an opt-out model of consent for cookies placed by websites. In practice, this would mean cookies could be set without seeking consent.”
Website (
https://webdevlaw.uk/2022/06/17/data-reform-bill-cookie-popups/) https://webdevlaw.uk/2022/06/17/data-reform-bill-cookie-popups/
clock123 on 18/6/2022 at 09:52
And people thought the Commies were surveillant, oh the irony....
demagogue on 18/6/2022 at 23:50
I posted this on the Darkmod forums and thought I may as well cross post it here too.
UK politics is fascinating to me. The LibDems are the only party in the world I've ever read up on that I felt fit my sensibilities. But I'm still an outsider to it. It's not like I understand where the minister from Wilberlyshire-on-Trent is coming from like I understand where Mitch McConnell from Louisville, KY is coming from. But it's fun to talk about anyway. Feel free to correct or better enlighten me.
Quote Posted by demagogue
If you'll allow me to take a bird's eye view of this ... remember back in 2016, when they nutcakes were campaigning for Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US? The joke back then was, no matter how crazy one side got, the other had to outdo it. And I was wondering which flavor of crazy was going to be more permanently damaging to their respective country.
At the time I thought it was going to be Brexit, since that's "forever" and Trump was only 4 or 8 years, but I underestimated how deeply Trump's admin could undermine all of our institutions., even after he's left. But then I also underestimated the wreckage that was going to be left in Brexit's wake.
-------
Fast forward 6 years later and I'm still not sure who has the worse deal. Even if this law doesn't pass, it seems like it's putting on display how dysfunctional UK politics is now, like the ultimate exercise in dissociation -- trying so hard to ignore how shambolic the post-Brexit political & economic situation is by hyperfixating on problems that aren't problems with truly batshit legislation. (You can correct me if my reading of it is off.)
But if you've been paying attention to the Jan 6 hearings in the US, you know the US still won't be outdone. The problem isn't that the hearings are bad. The problem is that they're a slam dunk case against the previous administration and GOP, but it's only (apparently) making the whole GOP circle the wagons and double down on their insanity. Not to mention the SCOTUS decision that's going to allow the criminalization of abortions, the arguments behind it could just as easily apply to criminalize birth control, or gay or transgender behavior, and I have to imagine in some states there's a sizeable part of the population chomping on the bit to do just that.
-------
On the topic of this law itself, of course it's a mess. It's weirdly chauvinistic. UK-legal-compliant browsers & the extraterritorial bit? Didn't the UK just go to a lot of effort to tell everybody it was done with multilateralism and would be much happier as a fading second rate power? It's a tall order to follow that up with this.
But the big problem is the part about net neutrality. The more control the state wrangles the Internet into, the more it's just going to whip it into some propaganda mouthpiece for megalomaniac & tyrannical demagogues (& not the benevolent kind like me). I'm all for strict measures to protect children from child pornography, get it off the net, and punish anybody uploading it or any server or site hosting it. But forcing people to maintain their identity for sites is asking for people to be targeted, tracked, and coerced, or putting in the architecture to do that when the bad guys get into power. The problem is even if this law fails, I think they may keep trying until they make it work. This is all a stupid road to dystopia we're on.
