UK lawmakers vote to jail tech execs who fail to protect kids online

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/uk-lawmakers-vote-to-jail-tech-execs-who-fail-to-protect-kids-online/

by AlexandrB • 4 years ago

155 134 4 years ago

arstechnica.com

csense• 4 years ago

RIP UK tech industry

everyone• 4 years ago

But think of the children!!

edgyquant4• 4 years ago

If having to protect children and consider their outcomes (like basically every other industry has to) kills big tech then good riddance.

donmcronald3• 4 years ago

It now appears that tech company executives found to be "deliberately" exposing children to harmful content could soon risk steep fines and jail time of up to two years.

The subjective definitions of "deliberately" and "harmful" are what makes it problematic.

Also, harmful to what or who? Is the Wikipedia article on the theory of evolution harmful? Probably not. Is it harmful to some people's religious beliefs? Probably.

danjac• 4 years ago

The only industry the UK government cares about is providing real estate and money-laundering services to Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern despots.

zarzavat• 4 years ago

I hope this causes websites to start blocking UK users. That would cause VPNs to become more common, undermining the government's enforced logging of internet use.

rainforest• 4 years ago

IIRC some of the Snowden leaks alleged that (at least at the time) domestic traffic couldn't be surveilled (but this was solved by mutual assistance across the Atlantic - the British would spy on US citizens and vice versa[1]).

VPNs seem useful to guarantee that your traffic is designated as foreign, so this might be a net gain for the intelligence services rather than a loss - the mandatory collection of ICRs only relates to IP addresses and time of access.

[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/edward-snowden-leaks-uk-o...

b1122• 4 years ago

the British would spy on US citizens and vice versa[1]).

Five eyes has been a known thing, to everyone I knew (friends, parents, teachers, everywone) even in the 80s. This is not much of a revelation.

(Back then, it was phone calls, letters, and even foreign friendly spies operating domestically etc)

matthewdgreen• 4 years ago

"The United Kingdom wants to become the safest place for children to grow up online" is the first line of this article. Not presented as a quote, or a claim made by a source in the article. Just a fact.

From that point it just gets worse. There's basically no description of what terms like "protecting kids online" actually means.

The actual description of the law is extremely vague and doesn't answer basic questions about how the law would work. Would it only involve social media (published) content, or would it cover private text messages as well? Can providers simply ban children from using their platform, or will the law hold them accountable even for unauthorized users?

These are the details one might expect answers to in a reasonable article, but I'm not sure if this is a journalistic exercise or some sort of PR puff piece.

bjt2n39042• 4 years ago

No one should grow up online. There is no "safe" way to "grow up" online.

danuker2• 4 years ago

I saw all kinds of crazy stuff on the early web as a teen. I grew [up?] both tolerant and thick-skinned.

goatlover• 4 years ago

The internet has replaced growing up on tv, rock and roll and video games. Before then, the wrong books.

mancerayder• 4 years ago

A consequence of not having a Bill of Rights with a First Amendment, something routinely mocked on the one side of the Atlantic. The point is that intentionally overbroad restrictions on speech or content are a lot more difficult in the US.

pksebben• 4 years ago

I feel like we suffer from intentionally overbroad protections in this vein. Corporations being people and what not.

joenot4432• 4 years ago

This is true. We're frequently reminded growing up in Canada that despite what we'd gather from the tv/film we consume, we don't have the same freedom of speech laws that our friends in the south do. People are sent to jail for hate speech in Canada, both online and in-person, something I'm not aware of happening in the states.

Our Charter provides us with a "freedom of expression" for which the government is allowed "reasonable" grounds for censorship and speech restriction. For better or worse, there are many, many websites hosted in the US which would never fly in Canada.

cm21872• 4 years ago

In fact I am not aware of any restriction on what the house of commons can vote with a simple majority. On one hand it's the longuest continuously functioning democracy, so it deserves some credit. On the other hand it's a terribly dangerous system.

astrange6• 4 years ago

Sometimes you'll see British news discuss "constitutional" issues in politics. Since they don't have a written constitution, this is clearly cope, like when they pretend the food comes in colors other than brown.

Although some of it is written down; specifically it's written in an anonymous letter to the Times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascelles_Principles

sangnoir• 4 years ago

The point is that intentionally overbroad restrictions on speech or content are a lot more difficult in the US.

This depends entirely on the current mood of 5 justices on the Supreme Court, and on which side of the political spectrum an issue lands.

daveoc64• 4 years ago

But with a functioning majority, governments in Europe would be able to amend any such bill or constitution.

It only works how it does in the USA because of political stalemate and gridlock.

jonatron• 4 years ago

https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137 Reading through 260 pages of legislation is tl;dr for journalists.

supriyo-biswas• 4 years ago

I suspect the original article is about UK's "Online Safety Bill" which was discussed at length on HN[1] with some very good discussion about why it's a bad idea. (Which is something a few commenters on this thread are failing to grasp.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32055756

timthorn• 4 years ago

The politician responsible for this bill was replaced since that discussion, and the content of the bill has been changed significantly - some of the discussion of 6 months ago is still valid, but you can't rely on what was said then to form your opinion of the bill as is going through Parliament.

The original minister has not held back in her criticism of the changes. https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/nadine-dorries-mic...

oxfordmale2• 4 years ago

I can guarantee no tech exec will ever end up in prison under this law. At most, they will get a fine and happily file this under operational costs.

Very few MPs seem to understand how the internet works, and there is virtually no opposition against some of this madness. There are only demands to make it even stricter to "protect the kiddies". Most of these "kiddies" know how to use a VPN or are at least smart enough to borrow their father's phone to watch juicy content.

anigbrowl• 4 years ago

very few MPs seem to understand how the internet works

Perhaps, or then again maybe there are very few technologists that understand how politics works (in reality, not as a beautiful ideal where everyone is honest and dedicated to the public good).

ljm• 4 years ago

The UK as a whole leans fairly authoritarian and has had successive paternalistic governments for probably as long as anyone alive can remember (some people will call this the 'nanny state'). These fanciful proposals are created and supported by both Conservative (right, centre right) and Labour (left, centre left) parties alike.

As cynical as it sounds, this kind of legislation is rolled out practically every year and you could probably set your watch by it. Sometimes the law is implemented, quite often it's put on the backburner and resurrected the next year when there needs to be a distraction from something else.

You can ask, "how will this work in practice?" and few people will be able to claim they've actually thought as far as that.

nimbius• 4 years ago

you could make the argument that late-stage capitalism and the emergence of neufeudalism has reduced the state from an arbiter and partner in creating a thriving and successful society for its people, to a paul blart mall cop. well thought legislature is the purvey of the private sector, as is trade law and most of the sovereignty of the internet.

but realistically Boris Johnson himself was notorious for using dead-cat legislature to draw attention away from serious problems in his own government and serious issues the nation faces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy

chances are great we're seeing this bit of legislation to help people lose focus on the slow-rolling dumpster fire of brexit.

bsder• 4 years ago

You can ask, "how will this work in practice?" and few people will be able to claim they've actually thought as far as that.

This seemed to be the central problem of Brexit as well ...

neilv• 4 years ago

The bias starts before the first sentence, with the headline.

I'd like to think any journalism student in their first week would know not to do this. And one with some awareness of tech would know that general-purpose surveillance and censorship are ongoing battles, and at least acknowledge that angle.

This looks like a press release.

Maybe Ars Technica should stick to product advertorials, and we on HN should find real reporting around which to consider important societal issues.

908B64B1974• 4 years ago

This looks like an excuse to be able to beat into submission foreign "evil" tech companies thanks to an intentionally vague and arbitrary law.

Every time I read something about the UK these days it feels like I need to fact check it because it always sounds like something conspiracy theorists here in America would say. And it's almost always real.

I'm still surprised how almost 250 years of separate history shaped radically different nations. And I'm not sure which one is best; but maybe the huge number of Britons here in America should be an indicator of that.

pjc504• 4 years ago

Every time I read something about the UK these days it feels like I need to fact check it because it always sounds like something conspiracy theorists here in America would say

Quite a lot of it is indeed directly imported from conspiracy theorists in America. Via the rightwing "media" pipeline straight to government.

sobkas• 4 years ago

"The United Kingdom wants to become the safest place for children to grow up online" is the first line of this article. Not presented as a quote, or a claim made by a source in the article. Just a fact.
From that point it just gets worse. There's basically no description of what terms like "protecting kids online" actually means.

Based on what I seen in British media, it's keeping children from talking to or knowing that trans people exist. Otherwise children might learn that trans people are humans to or even catch(they are for reals) transness...

pjc504• 4 years ago

"Under a further change to the bill, video footage that shows people crossing the Channel in small boats in a “positive light” will be added to a list of illegal content that all tech platforms must proactively prevent from reaching users."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/17/donelan-c...

It's state censorship for anything the government finds uncomfortable.

eecc3• 4 years ago

Also “terrorist material”… I bet Extinction Rebellion will quickly make its way in that list

dogleash• 4 years ago

I thought Ars was better that that. Srug, oh well, time to write them off too.

kodah• 4 years ago

Now if only we could jail lawmakers that crash the economy with their stupid ideas. /s

This seems brainless. Companies do need more accountability, but starting with a "for the children" issue is pretty bad sampling.

edgyquant4• 4 years ago

I disagree. Social media has amplified all of the worst aspects of being a kid and they’ve done so either on purpose or through gross negligence.

stu432• 4 years ago

So add those sites to the standard blocklists most ISPs already put in place for new customers and let parents decide if they want to remove them, just as they have to for porn and gambling. This is just a gimme for the security services under the "think of the kids" mantra.

twblalock2• 4 years ago

This law wouldn't solve any of the problems caused by social media. Maybe it aims to, but it wouldn't.

mcv2• 4 years ago

Can they perhaps start by jailing execs for crimes that their companies are actively committing? That rarely gets them more than a slap on the wrist, but now failing to do something poorly defined is going to land them in jail?

luckylion• 4 years ago

Hey, if you want to go after that company dumping sewage into the river, just have a child visit their website and get a tracking cookie and send in the cops to get them to stop stalking minors.

thinking4real• 4 years ago

Lol that would happen if they were actually concerned with exec/elite behavior.

This is not about protecting children. This is about clamping down on civilian rights to control the internet and indeed, civilian ability to communicate freely.

If children are being harmed (and they are, more than we’d like to imagine), the answer is simple: shut down social media.

Seriously. Yes we’d lose time wasting places like this. Yes we wouldn’t be as tuned into media ongoings. I’m sure many here will chime in to say how HN or similar has saved their life.

Don’t care, social media isn’t more important than the health of our children. And these companies have shown they don’t care and that profit is more important.

Thus, they needn’t exist.

But that won’t ever even be on the table. Because they don’t give a flying fuck about children. They want profits and control.

substation13• 4 years ago

Indeed. This is coming from the same people who dragged their feet on expanding free school meals until it become politically untenable.

valdiorn• 4 years ago

This is about clamping down on civilian rights to control the internet and indeed, civilian ability to communicate freely.

You're giving them way too much credit. MPs are not evil geniuses, they're highly motivated self absorbed politicians with no understanding of the internet, but the one thing they understand is that "protect the children" and "blame internet for bad stuff" is great for their career and ballot count. Trying to oppose this will get you a soundbite on the evening news with the headline "Tory MP defends online suicide porn". Good luck bouncing back from that.

computronus2• 4 years ago

It's interesting to think about "jailing" an entire company for its crimes. After all, in some legal (US) ways, a corporation is considered a person. If a company is found guilty of committing some crime, penalize it in an analogous way to a human. For example, if a person guilty of X ends up in jail for 30 days, a company guilty of X ends up ... here I'm not sure. Barred from doing business at all for 30 days? Forbidden from communicating with its customers? Cut off from, say, paying its employees? All things an imprisoned human would be unable to do themselves.

I can't tell if the idea makes much sense, but there's a symmetry there, specifically around the personhood of corporations.

birdyrooster3• 4 years ago

Businesses have been run from the confines of prisons, so I think the analog is all of the employees at the corporation must live and work from jail for the next 30 days.

twblalock2• 4 years ago

Think about who actually suffers if you punish a company in this way: the customers, and the employees, most of whom did nothing wrong. That is not justice.

Punishing people for something they did not do is wrong, period. And collective punishment is widely regarded as a violation of basic human rights -- it's even banned by the Geneva conventions!

Furthermore, the possibility of such a punishment would have a chilling effect on business to an extent that would seriously damage the economy.

For all these reasons, no responsible government would enforce that kind of punishment on a company, and even if they tried, it would be struck down in court.

Punishments for a lot of corporate rule breaking are viewed as a "slap on the wrist" because sometimes the rules that were broken just aren't that important. Similarly, we don't usually put people in prison for speeding.

mcv2• 4 years ago

A company consists of people. If a company commits a crime, some of those people are responsible for it. That they're not financially liable does not mean they can't be held criminally liable. But of course it's got to be the people in charge, the people who made the decision to do it, allow it, enable it, create a culture that normalised it, who need to be held accountable and liable, not just the person who received the order to do it.

alar44• 4 years ago

Maybe they should jail the parents instead? Your kids, your responsibility.

LinuxBender3• 4 years ago

That may be a bit harsh but is not far from what I have been suggesting [1][2] The liability for protecting kids must be on the parents and there are simple technical ways to solve this. In my opinion laws should just require websites to add RTA headers and the most popular ways small children access content must be required to once again read these headers and integrate with parental controls. I say once again because some browsers used to implement this ages ago. If browser devs are opposed to this then it could be done by writing an add-on.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34260167#34262400

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34352923

edgyquant4• 4 years ago

If one or two children are effected it’s the parents fault, when all children are statistically impacted in a negative way it’s systemic and is the fault of organization.

edgyquant4• 4 years ago

The companies build services designed to addict children and make bullying ten times easier. Fuck your politics, this is evil shit and these companies need held accountable. We don’t allow kids to purchase alcohol and blame the parents when they get alcohol poisoning. We make sure companies don’t target alcohol at kids.

hospadar• 4 years ago

Maybe let's not jail anyone?

Putting kid's parents in jail is a surefire way to make sure that kids life becomes a stressful, scary, unsupported nightmare. Parents who let their kids use social media (i.e. almost every parent whose family has access to technology) are a lot better than no parents at all.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 4 years ago

I'm too excited about GDPR to pay any attention.

coldcode• 4 years ago

Nothing like vague laws referencing Simpson memes, instead of actually solving real problems.

vezycash• 4 years ago

fail to protect kids online

Actually means, refusing to provide backdoors, provide user data; or the crime of supporting a different candidate. My personal favorite, collateral damage, no crime committed, arrest as a favor to a competitor.

themaninthedark• 4 years ago

Will the UK lawmakers also jail the UK lawmakers and those who implement policy for failing to protect kids?

I remember a story about Birmingham...

adolph• 4 years ago

Context

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring

pjc504• 4 years ago

The Birmingham "Trojan Horse" story was entirely made up.

Real child protection is often difficult to discuss, because it's necessarily anonymous, and we tend to find out what's happened only very late. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11626806

LatteLazy2• 4 years ago

This is a shitty bill. But the chance of it becoming law is very low. Various leaders from this party have been (very half heartedly) trying to pass it for a decade. If passed it would fail (in dozens of ways). And the problem is more useful to scare voters and whip votes than solving it would get them actual benefits.

This is just the bill going from one committee to another (with some extreme additional parts the other committee will take out, likely leading to deadlock)

rwmj• 4 years ago

Unfortunately I think this time it'll pass (not least because of the exact failure you mention - they are desperate to pass something and it's got cross-party support apart from a few symbolic edge cases). Whether or not it will be fully enacted and then enforced is questionable.

LatteLazy2• 4 years ago

The fact labour will support it (the even crazier version) is why the government will not bring it to a vote. It will die in committee like the last 17 drafts. It's already been sent to the Lords committee with Rishi saying it will be a "long hard journey" (or words to that effect). Given the terrible polls you'd have to be pretty suicidal to risk bringing down your own government and forcing an election. Not to say there are not plenty of crazy tories, just that they're usually more self-interested than that...

kwhitefoot• 4 years ago

As the bulk of such services are based in other countries I imagine that the most obvious result would be that the executives of the companies concerned would simply never visit the UK for fear of arrest and nothing else would change. Would other countries, such as China or the US, extradite their own citizens to face prosecution for this?

guy982387102• 4 years ago

As a parent, I can tell you how the current laws work in practice. When you admit you are younger than 18, average website will, with significant probability, lock your account immediately with no way to correct the situation and no way to setup new account with the same email address. After this happens a few times, you learn to dutifully tell all websites that you are 18.

I fear the mandatory age checking tech/laws. Being a kid is becoming increasingly illegal.

How about equal access laws for children before passing any new laws that encourage websites to block all children?

londons_explore• 4 years ago

I think the obvious solution to this is to require websites not ask the visitors age or name. Like, that stuff is private info, and they don't need it to provide whatever service they're providing.

guy982387102• 4 years ago

It is however nice to warn younger kids that something scary is ahead. Images of violence can be traumatizing. Attracting adult attention to suspected bullying is also nice.

gergov• 4 years ago

or if you're going to ask them their age just display age appropriate content. Automatic categorizing of even user generated stuff should be a pretty much solved problem by now

donmcronald3• 4 years ago

Yeah. Kids only put in their real age once. After they get burned they know they have to say they're over 12 or 18 or whatever the site is asking about for a threshold.

Worse than that, the proof of identity is making it impossible to use the safest option - anonymity. If a kid gets bullied or harassed or targeted by bad actors they can't simply delete their account and create a new one. These laws force them to have one or two super high value (to them) accounts that are difficult to abandon.

rtkwe• 4 years ago

I was always ~1 middle mouse spin years old on any age gates.

For the anonymity problem there's nothing really requiring that accounts are 1-1 permanently linked with their identities much less publicly linked to them. Just that they're validated as being >=XX years old right?

Pigalowda• 4 years ago

Why not just make a license to get on the “information super highway”?

Obviously this excludes IOT devices but for smart phone, desktop/laptop, tablets, etc maybe a card reader should be installed. The backfacing camera can use facial recognition tech to intermittently check if the correct user is on. Licenses can be renewed every year until 18 years of age.

If needed, licenses can be extended to adults to keep track of certain undesirable behaviors and to maybe even reward prosocial behavior.

Disclosure: I’m not a UK citizen, I would vehemently oppose these ideas if they were ever proposed in the US.

danuker2• 4 years ago

All I see is $GOVERNMENT wants tyrannical surveillance due to $EXCUSE.

ajsnigrutin• 4 years ago

Why do kids need special protections online? How about we jail parents who don't teach their kids how to behave online?

Imagine way-too-young kids printing out their bathing suit pictures and sellotaping them to a tree with their phone number written underneath... is the city (or whoever is responsible for the trees there) guilty if some pedophille calls the number and does something bad? Or have the parents failed in educating the kid on what is good and bad, right and wrong? Replace the tree with instagram (or whatever), and you're there.

The kids will just change their birth date everywhere to something 18+, and online services will ban everyone below. The next step is mandatory government ID for registering to any service online... and everyone laughing at Sunak asking a homeless man if he's "working in business" will get police on their doors.

kderbyma• 4 years ago

.....stopped reading after your first sentence. A simple second would bring many reasons

charlieyu12• 4 years ago

But why the rest of society has to pay because some parents couldn't do what should be their responsibilites?

wonderwonder• 4 years ago

"The United Kingdom wants to become the safest place for children to grow up online". Or they could actually arrest the people responsible for child rape and prostitution. UK Police ignored the rape of 1400+ kids because they didn't want to be accused of racism. UK criminal justice system and laws are a circus.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/rogerscrut...

tasubotadas• 4 years ago

How about we jail MPs and police when they fail to protect citizens?

bluescrn• 4 years ago

Maybe they'd be better off punishing parents who allow kids unfiltered and unsupervised Internet access at far too young an age.

frogpelt• 4 years ago

What about their parents??

golemotron• 4 years ago

I'm curious about how extraterritoriality plays with this. Are there any UK-based online platforms or do are they obliging themselves to pursue Zuckerberg, Elon, and whomever runs Reddit?

squarefoot• 4 years ago

An always relevant cartoon in serious need of adaptation to other countries beside the US.

https://teddit.net/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/5re9s1/how_w...

passwordoops• 4 years ago

I'm all for jailing execs who break the law (e.g, HSBC's entire C-suite and board should have probably been in cuffs after the bank was caught laundering money again for terrorists, drug/human traffickers, and general human rights abusers AFTER paying a substantial fine for laundering money on behalf of terrorists, drug/human traffickers, and general human rights abusers [0]).

But the "protect the children" angle is a steep, nebulous, subjective and very slippery slope that will likely target small fry who are not really harming anyone... Unlike the execs running HSBC who enabled money laundering for terrorists, drug/human traffickers, and general human rights abusers.

[0] https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-...

from• 4 years ago

The ICIJ investigation showed that HSBC reported on a bunch of suspected criminals and it turns out some of them were in fact criminals. There is no law that requires closing accounts after a suspicious activity report, some banks do so after multiple of them but it is not a requirement at all. Generally companies are not penalized for what they report on.

And like what is this?

The records show HSBC worked with a bank in Tiraspol, within Moldova’s breakaway territory of Transnistria, for four years after the U.S. Treasury Department issued a 2011 advisory warning of the risks of doing business with the Tiraspol bank.

An advisory warning is not binding, is not an act of Congress, does not show up in the Federal Register, and just generally means the bank should monitor customers specified in the notice more, not that they should deny service entirely. These articles never say it directly but they are basically arguing for "derisking" which in practice means excluding large numbers of customers based solely on nationality.

Havoc• 4 years ago

UK loves invoking children whenever some shady oppressive online stuff needs passing.

croes• 4 years ago

Are these the same lawmakers that allowed this?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/16/metropolitan...

Which exec will be jailed?

Beaver117• 4 years ago

Unpopular but I think kids should not be allowed on the public internet at all. Let alone porn or social media, only certain apps like youtube kids or similar with extremely filtered content should be allowed if at all. The danger/addiction is too high and the benefit is really low.

On the other hand I became quite a good programmer since I started tinkering at age 10. But today is a different era than when I was growing up.

shortcake27• 4 years ago

While I don’t agree with your reasoning, I do agree with your approach. All of these laws require restricting/removing content or invasive identity verification, in order to “protect” a tiny fraction of internet users. Preventing those people from accessing the internet would be cheaper, more effective, and less problematic for the rest of the population.

The problem is that we’re assuming laws like the Online Safety Bill are about protecting children, which they aren’t.

charlieyu12• 4 years ago

And ideas like this will be the reason why we won't have good programmers for the next generation. Or worse, a more ignorant population.

Guthur• 4 years ago

This makes more sense when you realise we are all to be treated like children.

And more crudely, we're to be kept in the dark and fed shit.

ChewFarceSkunk• 4 years ago

Yet another nail in the Internet's coffin. It's more telescreen now than in 1984.

UK lawmakers vote to jail tech execs who fail to protect kids online

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