What is the Online Safety Act?

The online safety act moves responsibility from the government to the platforms and websites you use.

This requires platforms to restrict people from the UK that don't submit ID Verification from accessing content containing subjects of:

You can read the full contents of the act here.

So what does this mean?

Any site that refuses to comply with the age checks will be blocked in the UK, this may include Wikipedia as they have already lost their case against parliament. Age checks are enforced by either submitting your government id or by doing a scan of your face. You wouldn't send a picture of your ID or your face to a stranger on the internet, how can you trust a faceless corposration with your private information? Every website you submit your ID to: now has your ID. Every hacker that accesses those websites now has your information and can easily leak it for anyone to see. It is not a matter of if, but when.

Protests against discrimination, injustice and free speech will be censored, some posts related to Ukraine and Gaza have already been hidden behind age checks. LGBT content is often labelled as pornographic by advertisers, which will result in the censorship of LGBT people online. Resources related to help with addiction suffer from restricted access, for example some users found themselves unable to access Alcholics Anonymous.

Ofcom now has the power to force tech firms to monitor encrypted messages for "illegal content", thus undermining the security and privacy of encrypted networks. Bypassing encryption does nothing to protect kids.

There are plans to make VPNs illegal, to prevent people from bypassing the age checks. A VPN (Virtual Private Network) encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through a secure server, thus hiding your online activity, making it safer to browse and protecting you from poorly secured networks. Banning these would make the internet less safe to use.

How are surveillance states created?

  1. The surveillance nearly always starts off as being purposeful and justified on a publicly agreeable goal.
  2. Then it becomes routine; it happens as we all go about our daily business, it’s in the weave of life and not always visible.
  3. The surveillance is systematic; it is planned and carried out according to a schedule that is rational, not merely random.
  4. Lastly, it is focused; surveillance gets down to details, such as aggregating and storing data that can be transmitted, retrieved, compared, mined, and traded.

This results in a myriad of risks caused by this surveillance society: threats to human rights (including privacy), discrimination and exclusion, social sorting, function creep, and disempowerment.

The UK is becoming a surveillance state, we must not comply!