Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06-08-uk-surveillance-is-not-safety.pdf

by g0xA52A2A • 1 month ago

691 322 1 month ago

signal.org

stronglikedan• 1 month ago

Surveillance Is Not Safety

Maybe not, but as long as the average person thinks it is, it may as well be.

Animats• 1 month ago

It's a great meme, though. Use it more.

ktallett2• 1 month ago

The average person doesn't have any knowledge on this system.

rockskon• 1 month ago

Does the average person think this? Perception of what other people think doesn't always line up with what they actually think.

pydry• 1 month ago

I doubt the average person gives it much thought at all.

This certainly isn't a result of democratic overreach by a concerned group of citizens. No demographic is demanding this.

It's one of those "create the infrastructure for stasi 2.0" the epstein elite tries to periodically ram down our throats ironically using "think of the children" to manufacture consent.

The last time they did this they contracted saatchi and saatchi to run an a disturbing campaign: https://londondaily.com/revealed-uk-gov-t-plans-publicity-bl...

cucumber37328423• 1 month ago

The average person doesn't think that far ahead. They just hear "a cause I like can be furthered by implementing 1984" and so they support it.

Check out any comment section on transportation policy, environmental policy, professional licensing for trades other than software. Look at how HN, people who should know how this sausage is made, schemes about how policy and technology can be used by government to enforce it's will and preferences upon other people in ways they cannot avoid or resist. It's not a case of divide and conquer, it's a case of completely lacking principals. Nobody believes in privacy, civil rights or that the application of government (violence) should be expensive and difficult and politically fraught when it's an application that they like. Nobody is thinking far enough ahead to wonder how those systems will be used when the whims and dispositions of government and society shift.

Just this morning I was reading a comment where some jerk was scheming about how the government should (the implication being that now that AI makes it easy to automate) scrape property listings and fine people for not pulling permits when there's a diff from the prior listings and that the whole thing can be automated and anyone innocent can just have the government tour their home to prove it.

pixl97• 1 month ago

Does the average person think this?

The average person hold all kinds of conflicting views.

The average middle class parent will surveil the shit out of their children, for example.

Hence the title of the article is not completely correct. The outcome of surveillance is the intent of the entity surveilling. In the case of the parent, this is likely the safety of their offspring. In the case of a state entity, it's likely the safety of the people in power of the state. This second type of safety is very dangerous and does not include your safety.

madaxe_again4• 1 month ago

The average person does not think anything much. They receive the meme, they transmit the meme. No processing occurs.

cyanydeez• 1 month ago

isn't more as long as the average billionair thinks it is.

It's not like it's the average person pushing it.

circadian2• 1 month ago

https://xkcd.com/610/

cwmoore• 1 month ago

If only the average person had tools and access to all such information.

ktallett2• 1 month ago

Won't somebody think of the children appears to be the world's most effective method of bringing in restrictive and privacy destroying laws, yet they just don't work.

christoph• 1 month ago

Well yes, the great cabal of people bringing in these immense rafts of surveillance are the very people who commit, or who certainly hang out with the people who commit the most heinous acts. See the Epstein files.

Notice the same people will also talk during the daytime about morals and equality, while then conducting genocide in the evening.

Lio• 1 month ago

We'll see. I can't be the only voter fed up with how Labour are handling this.

I find they way that Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have dismissed privacy concerns about online surveillance particularly condescending.

Come the next general election they are going to be paid back for this.

(Oh, and I appreciate Signal speaking up and have just donated to them again for doing so).

ls612• 1 month ago

The idea is that people who have politics like yours can be “visited” by the police and asked to “voluntarily” come down to the station for an interview about “hateful rhetoric” on social media. Doesn’t matter how you vote if actual political opposition is outlawed, which is where the UK is heading rapidly aided by digital surveillance.

budududuroiu• 1 month ago

The ratchet ratcheting: client side scanning, then remote attestation to ensure client side scanning works, digital identity verification, etc etc.

Ajedi322• 1 month ago

I'm slowly coming around to the idea that closed source software was the original sin of the modern digital surveillance state.

Due to the fact that it can't easily be modified without the source, software is uniquely able to act against the interests of its owner in a way almost no other product can. Client side scanning wouldn't be viable if people could just install a mod that disables it, and remote attestation would be a much harder sell if the availability of such mods were expected.

Maybe software copyright should require releasing the source and build tools just like patents require releasing the design...

ajb3• 1 month ago

Yes, but this is preaching to the choir.

The counter must be as visceral is the claim. They make an emotional pitch:your children are in danger, surveillance is the solution. The counter must show the dangers in visceral, emotionally relevant way. This surveillance is actually a risk to parents and children as well - that by the accusation of an opaque, unaccountable system, you will be labelled a pedophile, and your kids taken away. That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.

Abstractions like privacy,and categorical claims, aren't going to reverse this. A properly pitched campaign could do. Sure, complain that politicians and the public are dumb. That may make you feel better but it won't change this an iota. Talking to people in the terms they care about might.

lifeisstillgood2• 1 month ago

>> That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.

I 100% agree on the need to counter emotional fire with emotional fire. And this is the right way to combat this sort of overreach

However, I do think that “the choir” need to rethink what is and is not privacy - a huge amount of the benefits of having our every waking moment monitored by the virtual world (which is going to happen) can be lost if we don’t allow epidemiology to follow our digital selves.

Detecting one’s word use is slipping might signal a trip to the doctors or a thousand other digital tells that will help us improve our lives. If we have to fight against ads and digital searches for terrorism, at least let’s get the benefits too.

ajb3• 1 month ago

That's all very well, but we just plain don't have a legal, economic, or technical system which will allow separation of the good uses from the bad uses. Once data is in someone else's possession, there's f-all way to prevent it being used to do whatever the possessor wants. Even if there is a legal agreement, it's easily abrogated, or overridden by insolvency law, or by a company having a "we can update our terms" clause. Some of this I can imagine how to address - insolvency law could be changed, for example - but in the absence of a fully robust system, promises of "we will only use your data for good" are not credible. Those who actually want to use data for good should be on the side of robust assurance of that, not just plead that they can be trusted and that no accountability is needed.

varispeed6• 1 month ago

Don't forget all the pedos working for government to watch all the reported images.

mysterium2• 1 month ago

Characterising people who analyse reprehensible material in order to try to save children from abuse as “pedos working for government to watch all the reported images” is, quite frankly, disgusting.

areoform• 1 month ago

Signal should come out swinging. Here's a pitch.

The Government is going to put a snitch on every phone, tape every bedroom, and listen in every evening on every home. Every doctor's visit. Every therapy session. Every pub. Every street. Every store.

When the snitches phone home, what you type to your lover may get the cops sent to your home.

Artificial stasi in every desktop, laptop, tablet, camera, and phone. Around every corner. In every living room. No one will be exempt from their gaze.

Are you ready for your vacuum cleaner to phone home?

saltwatercowboy• 1 month ago

AKA The Witness in Nick Harkaway's novel Gnomon.

iugtmkbdfil8345• 1 month ago

Shrug. If they don't, they will lose the customers who do care about privacy and they won't lose the ones that don't .. right away. However, it will near guarantee further fragmentation and circling a new solution that will be recommended to normies by their techy friends or current batch of cool kids. We have been here before. The only way to win the game is not to play. Especially with government, the moment you start playing, you lose.

thenthenthen• 1 month ago

Signal the messaging app/platform? A funny thing is that Signal barely works (with VPN ofc) here in China. Sending media/images is impossible. Sometimes it’s blacked out weeks on end. Everything else seems to work fine ish (again with VPN ofc).

autoexec11• 1 month ago

Signal outright lies in their privacy policy. It opens with "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." but they collect and permanently store sensitive information in the cloud (user's name, photo, number, and contacts) and in some cases they even store the contents of messages. They've steadfastly refused to update the policy even as they introduced those features deceiving users about their risks. Signal can't really be trusted at this point.

dgellow5• 1 month ago

I’m afraid too many people would hear that and say „I don’t care“

ryanisnan3• 1 month ago

Signal is on the right side here. I think it's time for us techies to fight back by developing the future. I'm trying to do my part - https://mediaden.ca

Also looking to get involved with the meshtastic project.

purpleidea2• 1 month ago

Looks proprietary. Need fully open source to guarantee that right long term.

ryanisnan3• 1 month ago

I used to agree with this, but now I don't actually think I do. Apple's app privacy report can be used to guarantee network access for any iOS app - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102188

cantalopes• 1 month ago

Praise

michaelt3• 1 month ago

I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as.

Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?

Did they think they could lock things down to extract their 30% app store fee while enforcing rules through app review (and demonstrating censorship of sites like Tumblr) that politicians wouldn't want that same rule-setting, censoring power?

Did they think their employers were going to prevent that transfer, that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents, running a guerrilla campaign to overthrow the very system that made them trillion-dollar companies?

uniqueuid• 1 month ago

That was nicely put.

I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom.

So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.

vasco4• 1 month ago

A lot of harm would be prevented if people didn't do bad shit under the assumption the next guy will do it if they don't. You're the next guy.

gnerd00• 1 month ago

Twitter people expressly started their company with the idea of crowd-friendly semi-anonymous msgs on demand.

The game of GO delivers an idea where a very large construct can be built then in one move the entire thing flips to a different purpose... seems relevant somehow..

xeonmc2• 1 month ago

I often also wonders if ideological zealots ever thinks of this passage while pushing their agenda for control:

    ...and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast could even speak and cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.
    Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead,
    so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

TimTheTinker3• 1 month ago

Those who would think of such a passage (or any biblical passage) and those who push for a total-control agenda are disjoint sets.

Communism and fascism were both fueled by atheism (either explicit or functional), not a Judeo-Christian worldview.

"Ohne Gott und Sonnenschein bringen wir die Ernte ein." (Without God and without sun, we will get the harvest done.) - the slogan of East Germany in 1975 when people were hungry and it kept raining during harvest.

madaxe_again4• 1 month ago

I don’t think 1st century Rome had much in the way of digital surveillance.

Or even surveillance, for that matter.

Plenty of hubris, mind.

yason2• 1 month ago

My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is."

This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.

HiPhish4• 1 month ago

My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is."

I like to call those people "ventablackpilled". Being blackpilled is all about gloom and doom, but being ventablackpilled is beyond being blackpilled. It is when you actively want the world to be a worse place because you believe that that is how the world works.

Caracas288• 1 month ago

The critical mass of people who don’t use critical thinking as their main means of decision-making.

try_the_bass• 1 month ago

This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

What? I don't understand how this is a "two kinds of people" generalization, when the two categories aren't even mutually-exclusive?

One can think a law is bad and should change, while simultaneously recognizing the rule of law and following it.

It's pretty weird to try to pit those two perspectives against each other

Zak• 1 month ago

Somebody had to work on it before it was how the world is. When Microsoft proposed a scheme involving remote attestation and DRM in 2003, the New York Times published a critical article. Google SafetyNet a decade later barely got a whimper out of major tech outlets, much less the mainstream press.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/business/technology-a-saf...

cucumber37328423• 1 month ago

People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.

Don't forget the selfish jerks who simply ask for whatever class of traffic that isn't them to be punitively regulated to their benefit.

(both literally and transferrable to other issues as a metaphor)

jjav4• 1 month ago

The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

Indeed. I can't understand the people who blindly believe any law is good just because. Stop, think. Is the law good? What's good about it? What's bad about it? Can it be abused? Then maybe it should be changed?

I advocate that every law should have an annual review to catalog every case where it has been applied. How many were sensible positive outcomes? How many were unintended consequences? How many were clear abuses of the letter of the law? Every legislator should vote on the record based on that annual review to either renew or cancel the law.

AnthonyMouse6• 1 month ago

That doesn't really answer the question.

Suppose there is some peon at Microsoft who is ordered to write code for Pluton and then does it because they don't want to be fired, expecting to hide behind the Nuremberg defense. The people in your second group will naturally disapprove of this.

But regardless of that, we can ask the same question of the person giving the orders. Someone in these companies initiated these programs, so are they merely fools who couldn't predict the obvious consequences that others did, or are they truly malicious?

dspillett• 1 month ago

My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted.

Some are also doing it for the technical challenge, especially those working on new tech rather than refining what already exists. Like the people who try to solve the great problems of mathematics/physics (or find interesting new ones) for the challenge of it (and sometimes refuse prizes & recognition if they do solve or otherwise discover something vital).

This sort of person is often blinkered to the possible extreme long-term outcomes, or are able to mentally separate themselves from them (“I just made the discovery, I didn't use it to do anything bad” or “I was paid for it, follow the money source and blame them”). Of course once a genie is out of the bottle, other sorts of people are more than eager to ask it for wishes…

aleph_minus_one2• 1 month ago

This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

There exist more kinds:

- the "rebel": "this is a law/rule, so I have to trespass it". This often holds for people who are either annoyed by rules or red tape or for people who see no hope of changing the law. An example are the "blade runners" in London who organize to destroy lots of surveillance cameras at once, in particular those that are used to enforce low-emission laws. [1]

- the "evil": "this is law, so I will (ab)use it for my personal gain".

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/ulez-cameras-van...

abustamam2• 1 month ago

This is spot on. My wife will walk to the ends of the earth to find a crosswalk because she doesn't want to jaywalk. I use my eyes to see if there are any cars and will cross when I deem it safe.

That said, I'm not going to pretend I'm one of those people who say "this law doesn't make sense, we must change it." it's more like "this law is not convenient to me right now and I am willing to suffer the consequences of breaking it" but frankly I'm not going to start a grassroots effort to try to change it.

nuc1e0n• 1 month ago

Replying to this comment so I can refer to it later.

bragh• 1 month ago

Oh, the people who work on secure boot, attestation, DRM, and other such features know very well, but don't care. This is because the claimed benefits for them, such as less hackers, less malware, less bot traffic, outweigh any possible downsides for the society.

JohnFen• 1 month ago

I think it's even worse than that. Our industry has a strong track record of only looking at potential upsides (and pretending they're certain) and not even seeing that there may be serious downsides.

It's a kind of blindness. The kind that is, in my opinion, is one of the major reasons why we ended up building a world that's more than a bit dystopian.

account428• 1 month ago

There is definitely a common type of computer security enthusiast for whom the need for security is absolute and costs don't even enter the equation.

wmf• 1 month ago

Did they think that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents...

Arguably this plan is mostly working for Apple.

shiandow2• 1 month ago

The phrase 'banality of evil' comes to mind.

account428• 1 month ago

Does that really still apply when the people in question make six or seven figures for it? At some point we should expect some kind of individual responsibility.

like_any_other• 1 month ago

Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?

Corporations are already hostile enough that it doesn't really matter:

The report says that between 30 and 40 Rockstar employees working in multiple offices in the UK and Canada were fired on October 30, all of them part of a private trade union chat group on Discord. - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/rockstar-accused-of-...

Leaked Amazon Whole Foods Docs: Workforce Diversity Helps Prevent Unions - https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403 (summarizing https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...)

Microsoft Are Fixated on “Hate Speech” With Lopsided XBOX Live Enforcement Strike System - https://www.techopse.com/microsoft-are-fixated-on-hate-speec...

HiPhish4• 1 month ago

I guess they think "someone is going to do it anyway, so it might as well be me so I can be the one who gets paid for it". But yeah, I'm sure there is also a good chunk of tech workers who are indeed useful idiots who think they are the last link in the chain.

Swizec• 1 month ago

Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?

Makes me think of the most sobering line I ever saw in a museum (Berlin): The biggest atrocities were committed by people with a spreadsheet and a performance goal.

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

It should be present tense. Especially in Berlin.

itishappy• 1 month ago

What defines a bad tech vs a good tech? Similar arguments can be made for most research including nuclear fusion, AI, vaccines, space, polymers, combustion engines, electric motors, semiconductors...

matheusmoreira• 1 month ago

What defines a bad tech vs a good tech?

Good tech empowers individuals and subverts authorities, corporations, oligarchs and governments. Bad tech subverts individuals and empowers authorities, corporations, oligarchs and governments.

SidewaysView• 1 month ago

Online is terrible for kids. Online is terrible for adults! Too many people don't have the agency or social skills to manage themselves. Conspiracy theories, anarchists and libertarians, misinformation and disinformation, weirdos and beardos and creeps of all description. People end up believing all kinds of things that just aren't real.

It'll be best for society if things are a little more regulated, a little safer. And I'm happy to help where I can. Listening to the terminally online about it would be counterproductive.

GZGavinZhao• 1 month ago

They're ultimately employees. Their employers hire them to write the code that the employers want. If they don't write the code, employers just fire them and move on to hire some other people to write code. As much as how ethically questionable it is, it's still very rare that people would give up their jobs to defend their viewpoint.

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

The practical alternative is sabotage. Write the code poorly, with obvious bugs. Don't sign the full URL so the user can just delete the drm=true parameter.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 1 month ago

Meanwhile Signal Corporation keeps trying to connect to updates2.signal.org even when the app is not being used. "Automatic updates", remote code execution by default with no option to disable

Silicon Valley has its own ideas of what "privacy" and "surveillance" mean

To those folks, it does not mean privacy from Silicon Valley companies

The Signal app will keep on trying to connect to the mothership

Because to the people who work on Silicon Valley software, that is not a privacy violation

The battle is over _control_ over software not privacy or surveillance. The later is not possible without the former

Silicon Valley does not want the user to have control any more than they want the government to have control

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

use simplex then. Signal is what it is and it's not trying to be something it's not. E.g. use of phone numbers.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 1 month ago

I don't use Signal

I test mobile apps on a throwaway phone to see what connections they try to make, if any

briandear2• 1 month ago

Why do people vote for large, strong governments that are able to take the power you suggest Tech is enabling them to take?

komali22• 1 month ago

It's starting to feel like ethno-nationalism is the answer.

See: the PRC. Support for surveillance is allegedly high. Anecdotally, talking to PRC citizens in circumstances where they don't need to worry about said surveillance (e.g., when they're vacationing in Japan and I want to pester someone and practice my mandarin), they generally like it. Makes them feel safe.

The CPC has sold them on a vision of them as members of the state-race "Chinese" (which is not really an ethnicity any more than "American" is) and the surveillance as a thing that keeps them and their "Chinese" lifestyle safe from non-Chinese. Uighurs have to be extra surveilled until they're also Chinese, which, many are now according to the CPC.

So PRC citizens feel safe and cozy among in the country for "their people," not realizing this whole ethnonationalist concept is at best 100 years old, maybe even younger. During the Qing dynasty, there's a whole hell of a lot of people that think of themselves as "Chinese" that definitely weren't by the dynastic government.

I smell similar happening in Russia, the USA, and Israel, with State support. It looks like right wing groups are trying to pull it off in the UK and Germany as well.

wolvoleo• 1 month ago

I remember piping up about all those things. But the excuses were everywhere.

- Oh but you can turn it off so it's no issue (secure boot). Well yeah but more and more stuff just won't run then (eg iOS apps on Mac). It will become the norm to stay inside the fuzzy walled garden just like it already is on phones. And if you stray you will just be blocked from any app that does something useful.

- But companies need to be sure you are who you say you are (attestation). Yes but they will abuse that power if they can profit from it.

jmyeet• 1 month ago

People forget how we got here. Whatever your philosophical stance, history has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that giving most people complete control over their device has been an unmitigiated disaster.

Scams, stealing credentials, stealing money, botnets, viruses, losses of data, ransomware, etc etc etc.

What is better for most people is a locked down device like an iPad where each app has to be approved and they're incredibly sandboxed. 20 years ago we had people installing malware because a strange email promised them smiley face emojis.

When we transitioned from the single-user ODS-based Windows model (ie Win98/SE were the last of that line) to a multi-user restricted privilege model based on NT 3.0/3.5/4.0 (first as WinXP) it was meant to be better but privilege escalation was still too easy because of what users had become accustomed to doing and of what was needed to install software you downloaded.

Things like an App Store (on Mac and eventually on Windows) are actually a good thing. Signed apps are a good thing. Having to go out of your way to install unsigned apps is a good thing.

I really abhor "technical libertarians" because they never address these issues. It's all principle-based while ignoring reality, human nature and whether or not unfettered access gives users something they even need.

Also, other people pay the price. Where do you think these DDoS attacks come from? Compromised Windows PCs (primarily).

autoexec11• 1 month ago

Whatever your philosophical stance, history has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that giving most people complete control over their device has been an unmitigiated disaster.

I'd argue that giving governments and corporations control over our devices has also been an unmitigiated disaster. You could say the same thing about any kind of freedom though couldn't you? Freedom is so dangerous after all. Look at all the problems it's caused. Giving up all of our freedoms would surely make the world better right?

bigstrat20032• 1 month ago

People often misuse freedom. The answer to that is not to take freedom away, but to educate people on how to use their freedom, and only restrict those who have proven to be unable to handle it. Let's say your argument, that clueless users getting infected are an externality upon everyone else and thus they need to be locked down for everyone's good, is accurate (though I don't think it is). In that case, why should the majority of intelligent people be made to suffer because a minority can't handle the freedom? No, in that case the correct thing to do is to have a mechanism by which we identify people who are hurting others, and restrict them. Nobody would countenance the idea that because some people are irresponsible drivers, cars must therefore be unavailable and everyone pushed into using public transit. But that is the exact same logic people try to use to crack down on freedom of use for computers, even though they are nowhere near as dangerous as a car.

I really abhor "technical libertarians"...

Well, I abhor those who try to take freedom away from people. So the feeling is mutual I guess.

cortesoft2• 1 month ago

I am guessing they thought "My kids are depending on me to pay our mortgage and buy food"

autoexec11• 1 month ago

Yet they stopped thinking as soon as their wallet got involved and never considered that their kids also need freedom and the ability to use technology that works for them and not against them. Selfishness and greed are the problem. The kids are just a convenient but shallow way to deflect from that.

userbinator• 1 month ago

Or more likely these days, "I need to stay employed so I can legally stay in this country."

bigstrat20032• 1 month ago

Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means...

Your argument is flawed here. The truth is that measures such as secure boot do have real security benefits. They can be misused, like any technology can be, but that is not an inherent feature of the tech, but rather how it is implemented. And as the developers of such measures are not a monolith, it is unfair to paint them as merely trying to exert control. I'm not going to argue that some involved parties were trying to exert control. But lots of others were trying to implement a genuine security benefit for the users, and they don't deserve to be reprimanded as if they were some kind of apologists for authoritarianism.

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

There is no difference between the tech and how it is implemented.

michaelt3• 1 month ago

They can be misused, like any technology can be, but that is not an inherent feature of the tech, but rather how it is implemented. And as the developers of such measures are not a monolith, it is unfair to paint them as merely trying to exert control.

You can argue that exerting control is a good thing - a clever scam artist convinces a vulnerable user to paste an attack at the command line, and the benevolent OS vendor uses their control makes the attack impossible, no matter what the scam artist tells the user to do. A greedy software maker produces a spyware-laden, cookie-stealing update and asks the user to enter the admin password to install the update. The benevolent OS vendor uses their control to make such malicious updates impossible, even with the administrator password entered.

But even if the control is being used exclusively for good, it is, ultimately, control.

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

There's a selection effect. Some people thought these were bad and didn't implement them. Other people thought they weren't bad and implemented them. We use implementations from the latter group of people. Obviously.

Same thing is happening with age verification. We had the chance to just ask if the user is over 18 when setting the computer up, but we didn't do that so they're using a solution from a mass surveillance company instead.

stodor89• 1 month ago

Did they think

Pretty sure they didn't do a lot of thinking.

cryptonector4• 1 month ago

It isn't TPMs nor attestation nor DRM making this possible. It isn't secure boot either. It's walled gardens with secure boot -yes, secure boot- that the consumer can't bypass. Secure booting isn't the problem in an enterprise setting -- of course we _want secure booting_ in the enterprise. It's consumer devices that can't be jail-broken that are the problem. Although even then, the silly age verification laws and the people pushing them don't even care if the OSes run on walled garden devices.

MrDrMcCoy2• 1 month ago

Corporate devices that can't be jailbroken are also a problem. It's a right-to-repair and e-waste issue.

raverbashing2• 1 month ago

And yet you can secure boot Linux

michaelt3• 1 month ago

Although even then, the silly age verification laws and the people pushing them don't even care if the OSes run on walled garden devices.

Believe me, the people writing the age verification laws care a great deal whether the age verification can be turned off by the device owner.

The whole exercise would be pointless if teenage device owners could turn the censorship off.

photios• 1 month ago

These people have names and addresses. Getting them out in the open will help a lot.

I'm not saying we should lynch them, but a good deal of public shaming is in order. Who knows, their kids might pick a different vocation.

account428• 1 month ago

While I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea I'm not convinced its going to be effective. A lot of the leaders that ultimately approved these developments are already public figures and that doesn't seem to affect their motivations.

verisimi2• 1 month ago

They (developers) did what they did for money. Just like everyone else. And they would do it all again.

At a corporate level, no one cares about lots of freedoms, except if it is a selling point.

If 'keeping freedoms' is a selling point then the ideal position is to gain the kudos of appearing to support this whilst also getting the benefits of the loss of freedoms. Why not get both?

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

That's the Android way.

jjav4• 1 month ago

Did they think

Having argued these topics for decades, I think that a lot of people just truly can't foresee the inevitable consequences. I don't know why, the consequences seem obvious but because they are not spelled out, many people say it won't happen.

account428• 1 month ago

The problem is that even when you do spell out the consequences many of them will wave them away.

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

It's difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary relies on him not understanding it.

Nursie• 1 month ago

Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?

Why does that matter? If it's bad for politicians to usurp that power, it's already bad for corporates to have it in the first place.

I'd rather politicians use power in a way that includes democratic oversight than, say, Peter Thiel doing whatever the hell he likes.

KaiserPro6• 1 month ago

The people in the industry that I know were/are trying to stop fraudsters, script kiddies, nasty people, and governments from trying to exploit weaknesses and take unauthorised control of devices and services.

The problem with that is it generally requires a central point of trust.

Sure you can allow multiple points of trust, but for the unskilled user, that means that the little lock symbol becomes unreliable (or whatever)

Without commenting on the UK governments stuff (It is probably full of shit, but then thats what lobbying does) We as technologists need to engage with wider society and understand on their terms, the worries they have.

For this particular "proposal" it strikes at the core worry of today's kids. They are sadder, more insular, more dependent on mobile comms and exposed to much nastier stuff than millennials were at the same age.

AT my school in the very late 90s, a group of 14 year old girls went to the beach and took a disposable camera. Standard photos apart from one, which was a group of them topless. One of them brought them back from the developers into school. Somehow the topless photo was stolen and passed around various classes.

It ruined her month, even though she got the photo back. I suspect it left scars longer than that.

Now imagine not being able to get that photo back. Thats the problem for todays kids. One moment of stupidity and a lifetime of consequences. (under a certain age, if they took photos or videos of other kids, that makes them liable to be on a list, for life.)

You could say "oh education" but did you listen at that age?

Whats worse now is that there are no gates on what photos can be developed by the normal person. If you took any photo that was explicit, it almost certainly wouldn't be printed (hence why there were very little dick pics from that era).

Is what the UK government proposing workable? well looking at the OSA, almost certainly not.

However unless we, as a tech community engage with society, with useable answers that are understandable to the normal person, then we are going to be crushed by the weight of "something must be done". Absolutism is not our friend here. We need to engage and choose compromises, or lose wider freedom for ever.

jpfromlondon• 1 month ago

We as technologists need to engage with wider society and understand on their terms, the worries they have.

We were the vanguard blocking this to the public's benefit, now they've voted for it our only duty is to ourselves; to make sure the rules don't apply to us.

AnthonyMouse6• 1 month ago

The problem with that is it generally requires a central point of trust.

The problem with it is that the people who want to use a central point of trust as a chokepoint for censorship, surveillance and monopolization keep claiming that this is required when it isn't.

Sure you can allow multiple points of trust, but for the unskilled user, that means that the little lock symbol becomes unreliable (or whatever)

The premise being that if you have a monopoly then ordinary people can trust it. Only that isn't the case. A monopolist not only can be just as malicious or incompetent as any of the multiple players in a competitive landscape, they're more likely to be because the lack of competitive pressure allows them to be more abusive and complacent and more capable of capturing the government.

under a certain age, if they took photos or videos of other kids, that makes them liable to be on a list, for life

That seems like a problem caused by the law. Why is it possible for any actions taken as a minor to cause someone to be put on a permanent list when we recognize that minors aren't mature enough to be held responsible for that?

Now imagine not being able to get that photo back.

Now imagine what would be necessary to get it back. It's on some other person's private device. Either you invade everyone's privacy and private communications to check if they might have it or be privately sharing it, or they could be. The cure is worse than the disease.

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

In today's world the 14-year-old girl who took a topless beach photo of herself would likely be criminally charged as an adult for production, possession and distribution of child pornography. So there's something about how our legal attitudes have changed too.

cogman10• 1 month ago

were/are trying to stop fraudsters, script kiddies, nasty people, and governments from trying to exploit weaknesses and take unauthorised control of devices and services.

While I don't doubt that's a motivation, the problem I have is it's really a question of likelihood. I feel that in terms of security focus it's very common for people to put on blinders and ignore the likelihood of an exploit in favor of "Ooooh look at this thing that COULD be exploited!"

It's fundamentally the problem I have with how CVEs are reported and handled in general.

In terms of secure boot stopping problems. Yes, it does stop someone from rooting a device which is great. However, someone that has access to root a device almost certainly also has the ability to just install a virus in the OS startup scripts. Or to modify a user executable. Or to modify the user's PATH environment variable to inject a malicious app in front of a commonly used one.

That's what I wish security focused people would weigh more heavily when they evaluate these sorts of threats. "What other damage could a malicious individual do if they had the same permissions to pull off this exploit."

rbanffy4• 1 month ago

Politicians always had that power, because it was always technically possible. To think we could have done anything to stop it once there was a will to do it is naive. If you doubt it, just look at Palantir. People like us built that - Thiel and his minions only paid their salaries.

account428• 1 month ago

Boiling the frog is a thing. As is laying the groundwork. Governments are much less likely to pull off multi-decade plans than they are to make use of whatever technology is already out there.

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

And they got filthy rich. If I built Palantir instead, I'd be filthy rich. It's a pretty rational choice to build Palantir. Sadly.

6510• 1 month ago

I always think of the lumberjack tasked with cutting down the last redwood giant. He hesitated a bit and was somewhat reluctant to start. Several of his coworkers understood that it was slightly emotional and said they would do it if he couldn't.

mc32• 1 month ago

There were many reasons to deploy these solutions. Much of it from the perennial reason “we can’t have nice things”. Che was a murderous psychopath so I’m not sure what he was to do with freedom other than some college kids though he was edgy in the same way Manson’s followed though he was edgy.

circadian2• 1 month ago

Kudos to signal for coming out on side with this, and quickly. I only hope that this stance is quickly picked up as a counterpoint to the ever-so-strong narrative that more hastily concocted sledge-hammer legislation is the best step forward.

This step forward is instead of building understanding of, and solutions for, the erosion of communities, trust and empathy for others. I feel these things might (MIGHT!) be overlooked symptoms of poor investment, policies and governance for healthy society. Crikey, perhaps I shouldn't try and call that into account, it sounds like I might be cynical about politics. Oh dear...

purpleidea2• 1 month ago

Signal refuses to answer: Why won't they release/open source all of their backend infra automation scripts/tools/etc...

There's no reasonable reason why a 501(c)(3) won't put this out there to make sure there's redundancy so we could built an alternate network if they're compromised by some gag order.

Chu4eeno• 1 month ago

Probably because its leadership seems to have been taken over by more politically and less technically inclined people (for better and/or worse) who don't understand why it matters.

The trade is we get (hopefully) people very dedicated to keeping the org developing the stuff alive and well-funded, and gaining mainstream acceptance/attention.

pseudalopex2• 1 month ago

Signal did such things always. They delayed years to clarify licensing to allow iOS forks. And hid server source code for a year to hide MobileCoin integration.

autoexec11• 1 month ago

Signal just can't be trusted at this point. They're probably compromised. My theory is that that's why the very first line of their privacy is a lie saying that it's designed to never collect or store sensitive data when they keep a list of your contacts forever in the cloud (and in some cases now even message contents).

aiisjustanif3• 1 month ago

People really should stop conflating the technical requirements for an optional back service, with they are always collecting our data and anything is a lie.

big853• 1 month ago

So, in this order:

1. You need a camera on your computer to allow a third party to verify your age before viewing adult content

2. It applies to social media too

3. It applies to your operating system too

4. Unless you age verify, the law demands your computer must be powerful enough to run an AI, or be internet-equipped and send your private photos to a third party, to detect and prohibit nudity. It must be capable of running in real-time, presumably, to work on Facetime calls and such.

Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices. Excellent news for Google, Apple, and Microsoft, bad for Linux and alternative operating systems. Remember when schools handed out Raspberry Pis?

Edit: And they are asking for this to be implemented for free in three months, because nobody knows how software engineering works. Great job

Bender• 1 month ago

With just enough fascistic pressure maybe Usenet can be great again. Just have to figure out how to filter known good content from the spam which I think can be solved with OpenPGP identities. Otherwise Tor and download managers for the patient people. Static generated galleries of pictures and videos spread across thousands of small sites. Some downsides of pushing people into dark corners is that all regulation goes out the window along with some tax revenue. Loss of tax revenue may be one way to get their attention.

ProllyInfamous5• 1 month ago

Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices.

They won't have to.

Instead, they'll just make some new essentially mandatory tech which older devices cannot run – update or stop existing, societally.

----

Phones and email already seem this way (i.e. "required") – from my perspective as an internet user whom doesn't use phone/email, personally. Nobody believes me when answering "no phone, no email" – free-est man alive - their loss is disbelief.

pesus2• 1 month ago

I am very curious how you make it in current society without a phone or email. It does sound incredibly freeing, but I'm definitely having trouble comprehending how it works.

bigbuppo• 1 month ago

"everybody wins"

dgellow5• 1 month ago

Email is the most free, decentralized communication channel we have. It’s fully async, so you consume it at the pace you want. What makes you against emails? Just curious

madaxe_again4• 1 month ago

This isn’t just your photos. This is all content displayed on the device, all content captured by the camera - everything. Full take. GCHQ must be wetting themselves.

londons_explore• 1 month ago

We all know this is the first political position. They'll walk back half of it, and what remains will appear to be a compromise, but was what was intended all along.

cryptonector4• 1 month ago

We should all write on our devices private nastygrams to whomever is assigned to watching our devices. The least we can do is mock them.

alkonaut2• 1 month ago

Does the law really require third party? Because having on-device functions configurable by parents doesn’t seem terrible at all.

EmbarrassedHelp5• 1 month ago

That's not what the UK is demanding. They want client side scanning malware that breaks DRM, circumvents encryption and VPNs, and bypasses other security features in order to scan everything visible on your screen.

dgroshev4• 1 month ago

It absolutely doesn't. However, the argument doesn't work when it's about connecting the "is the user a kid" bit to the existing and constantly running object recognition (phone cameras already run skin detection all the time to set white balance), so people invent "third parties" and "report people to authorities".

KaiserPro6• 1 month ago

So this is ill defined.

However the original proposal was pretty much aimed at phone manufactures. It is perfectly possible for current gen phones (and previous gen) to detect nudes in camera. Infact most phones do that already in order to adjust the exposure, its just you dont see that.

The problem for the UK is that they are not legislating technically. The original proposal was tightly scoped. The problem was, because of the way government runs in the UK it was shelved. Now that its not, the original scoping has been mashed, as its been blended with an child social media ban (quite what makes them think social media is ok for elder millennials++ is also interesting)

If they actually decided to make laws like they did for building materials or cars (ie all phones must conform to EU/BS standard x/y/z) then life would be much easier for everyone. But alas we have forgotten how to govern. something must be done now

dgellow5• 1 month ago

The fear towards adult content is so insane. I know it’s mostly a pretext, but a meaningful portion of the population will accept pretty much whatever restrictions because they are so afraid of their kids seeing naked bodies

mcurist2• 1 month ago

I saw boobs as a tennager and now I'm a terrorist

OnlyNoobsRunJS• 1 month ago

Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed on their fingerprinted tracking device and 2fa with their phone number, and have no idea what 'sensors off' does.

Palpable irony present when a chat provider whom requires personally identifiable information to use their service complains about privacy...

Terr_2• 1 month ago

Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed

"Yet you participate in society. Curious!"

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Terr_2• 1 month ago

Follow-up/P.S.: There's a Doctorow piece [0] which I think is relevant here. It's about how individual refusal (e.g. to quit your job at an employer when they require an authenticator-app) is an inferior substitute for "real" politics on both a practical and emotional level.

It's obvious why we might prefer to substitute voting or shopping for politics: they're activities you do alone. You don't have to find anyone else to do them with you. [...] Individual consumption choices don't change the world, but if you've been convinced that the only way to change the world is by voting with your wallet then when the world stays terrible, you can only conclude that your friends and neighbors have ruined by things by voting (shopping) wrong. [... and] every political disappointment in your life is down to your friends' personal defects.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/

pesus2• 1 month ago

Personally, I only have authenticator apps because my job requires them. I don't see any contradiction in being opposed to things you're forced into.

HiPhish4• 1 month ago

What's wrong with two-factor authentication? TOTP work without any network connection and only requires synchronized clocks to work. You could even do TOTP with pend and paper if you wanted (and were fast enough), no computer needed at all.

big853• 1 month ago

Two-factor is one thing. They're mandating client-side scanning in every operating system. This was previously rejected for obvious privacy reasons.

There are already phones with an anti-nudity feature as a parental control option, but the key there is that it's optional. The major pivot with age verification is that all devices treat all users as a child until they identify themselves with a third party. This allows a rhetorical paradox that the controls are only for children, when they apply to adults too by default.

notepad0x908• 1 month ago

Have they never heard of "the boy who cried wolf"?

First of all, age verification is not mass surveillance, it is possible to verify your age without disclosing who you are to the site you're visiting, and without disclosing what site you visited to the government. There are even age verification services (and I do despise them fully, this should be a government provided service!) that use only facial features to determine your age (you can call it surveillance, but not "mass").

See, the thing is, no matter how good your intent is, no matter how noble your cause, if you use lies and half-truths to further your argument or resist change, it only serves to undermine it all. For example "They do not deserve surveillance," is so disingenuous, if a site is required to verify age, the only children whose age might be verified are those who might have been exposed to that harmful content otherwise anyways, they're not being selected for surveillance, no one is trying to spy on children (or could possibly benefit from doing so using this method, since it is so unreliable), but they're framing it as it is so.

This isn't like "DRM" or "the nsa is spying on everyone", and there is a big difference between Signal (how are they involved in all this? is this just opportunistic politicking?) being required to verify peer-to-peer messaging from a porn site or or a live-cam site for sex workers requiring both parties to be age verified (where children do get trafficked!!).

Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea, i really hate it but the prevailing positions in areas of the internet like here is so irrational and unreasonable.

You can't flash your private parts at children, you can't take children to a strip club, they're required by law to check IDs (even night clubs are!!). if that same interaction happens on the internet, suddenly no age verification is needed?

Is it because this problem has been left unaddressed for so long that so many are just too used to "the old way of doing things" despite the ever increasing human suffering caused by lack of regulations and laws like this?

I hope legislators grow a pair and stand up to these tech-crusaders who will burn down the world so long as they feel their corner is safe and secure.

Shame on everyone who refuses to have a nuanced discussion on this and instead takes an all-or-nothing position against any sort of legislature that would reduce (not eliminate) the harm being done. To mean, such people are no different than catholics, teachers, administrators, and anyone else in a position to do something about harm against children but turned the other way because their little world would be too shaken otherwise. Hiding behind "mah privacy!!" doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to at least attempt to be nuanced about it, at least propose an actual solution instead of just "I don't what the solution is, but not this" or "parents are at fault, I don't care" or something lazy like that. I wish I didn't know that when it comes to their own interests, wannabe technocrats like these are ingenious in developing tech like homomorphic encryption, differential privacy and zero-knowledge-proofs; this isn't about anyone's privacy or mass surveillance, it's about preservation of the status quo, apathy and faulty slippery-slope fallacy thinking.

big853• 1 month ago

it is possible to verify your age without disclosing who you are to the site you're visiting, and without disclosing what site you visited to the government.

I can't believe people are really okay with a system where you have to show your real face to access websites. Cameras on phones went from a novelty to a government mandate so you can be observed.

There are various other potential methods to verify one's age, all of which are forbidden by OFCOM. Account age, zero-knowledge proofs, key signing, some kind of OAuth thing, physical tokens that require proof of age to buy, etc. The only permitted ones require your to link your real-life identity. This is a huge boon to the intelligence services and law enforcement.

Even among the few permitted verification methods, there are obstacles. Each site usually provides only one verification method at one verification provider. You may have to trust a company you never heard of before. Sometimes the photo fails (maybe their system thinks you don't look old enough) and they ask for ID too, or the photo fails and you are locked out of verification. Some services only allow credit card verification (e.g. Steam), so if you have poor credit you aren't able to even view the store page despite being of age.

What I say is, we don't need any of this. For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental Controls, and it worked fine. Many adult sites voluntarily use a <meta name="rating"> tag to ensure sites are correctly identified. The ability of adults to access adult content was not impeded. Parental Controls work better than verification because 1) many sites will not deploy age verification, and 2) it's trivial to overcome photo-based ID by holding your device up to a picture of an adult on a television set.

dgroshev4• 1 month ago

There are various other potential methods to verify one's age, all of which are forbidden by OFCOM. Account age, zero-knowledge proofs, key signing, some kind of OAuth thing, physical tokens that require proof of age to buy, etc. The only permitted ones require your to link your real-life identity.

This is just not true. See 4.17 here, for example [1]

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/cons...

notepad0x908• 1 month ago

The only permitted ones require your to link your real-life identity. This is a huge boon to the intelligence services and law enforcement.

Then let's talk about THAT!! why is that not the discussion instead of "nah, we'll find a solution some other day, for now, let's not solve anything"??

Even among the few permitted verification methods,

These laws are still being debated, what's permitted has not been decided, why is Signal not advocating for a privacy friendly alternative. Why are our options lose all privacy to the most horrible people ever who will do us harm versus let the children suffer!

You may have to trust a company you never heard of before.

Why do I have to? Why can't the government itself issue something as simple as a timestamp CA certificate signature for a secret that expires every few weeks, requiring facial/ID verification directly with the government to generate a new secret? the site only needs to verify that the signature is correct. a signed token you show random sites. and this is the most naive idea i brought up for discussion without things like zkp even considered. Lawmakers aren't being told by the likes of Signal "there is a better way to do this, let's discuss" they're being told "ignore what all the scientists, research, law enforcement, social workers are telling you so we can watch porn in secret".

For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental Controls, and it worked fine.

It absolutley did not work fine! the toll of human suffering is inexcusably abominable! I shudder in confusion between whose head i should rip off or why this damn planet hasn't been burned down to ashes already at the very thought of all that has been perpetrated using this technology. The internet multiplied and empowered many things, chief amongst them is human cruelty and apathy.

For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental Controls, and it worked fine....

Save your breath, even amongst those who genuinely wish to do well, they have employees and user generated content they can't keep up with. There is no excuse for this. Forget about the tiny span in human history that is the past 30 years. How many people died of industrial accident at the begining of the industrial revolution, how many people died because of car accidents before all the car safety and traffic laws were in place. Take that and multiply that by like a billion and that might come close to painting a fair picture of the internet. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. The internet isn't special, it's just a tool, a technology that connects people. Except billions are connected, and now they can abuse and harm each other across national borders , timezones and continents and maximize their profit from it.

HN and tech-world in general is like any other industry that caused massive suffering until it was regulated. I keep making the same simple comparison of a stripper IRL vs live cam porn over the internet, and no one in this thread even wants to attack that simple example that I picked because it isn't overly sensationalized and universally accepted that laws should force strip clubs to check IDs in any country on the planet. I didn't bring up pedos, human trafficking, revenge porn and so much more in between. and that's just the sexual dramatic stuff, not the seemingly harmless stuff that is easier to brush away and dismiss.

People can see your face and make decisions when they interact with you IRL, they can't over the internet. The problem is huge and the fact that the internet has been young and unregulated does not excuse looking the other way.

I can't believe I'm defending politicians' (however ill intended) agendas against HN/tech-world. but here we are. If things progress this route, I would even cheer as everyone (self included) loses any semblance of privacy or democracy because the alternative was these masses keeping looking the other way at human suffering instead of finding sensible middle grounds, especially when the tech is there. This is insane to me! things crypto-bros (both kind!) have been trying to make main stream like zkp and homomorphic encryption and so much more can actually solve a critical fault of the internet, and the choice is to just let people suffer instead of risking a potential slipper slope.

EmbarrassedHelp5• 1 month ago

There's no such thing as private or anonymous age verification. It doesn't exist.

notepad0x908• 1 month ago

zero knowledge proofs exist, don't they? also it matters "private from whom, and what". You can make what sites you visit private from the government, and your identity a secret from the site, but the inverse isn't true, the government would know the identity, and the site would obviously know someone visited it.

The problem with this whole thing is the expectation of privacy online for interactions where their IRL equivalents don't have such an expectation. Even if there was no harm being done to anyone, it isn't a rational argument if you subscribe to the ideal of equal treatment under the law.

mysterium2• 1 month ago

Thank you for writing this.

Of all the topics I’ve had to work with in my career, this one has caused me by far the most frustration. I like to think the hacker community is generally scientifically-minded and open to rational debate, but online discussion of this subject uniquely tends to cause people to hunker down, refuse to engage productively, and resort to name-calling. This might feel righteous, but ultimately leads to own-goals from us.

Firstly, to make one thing clear, it’s _absolutely_ possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. A technology called Privacy Pass exists that separates the roles in the age-verification question. This would make it possible to have a solution where the government can attest to your age without knowing what website you’re trying to visit (e.g. pornography, or an online casino, or just purchasing alcohol online). This is just a matter of fact. I’d recommend reading RFC 9576 for more details on the separation of roles here, it’s a really nice protocol.

There seems to be some misconception that privacy-preserving solutions for age verification aren’t permitted under various legislations. I don’t know where this comes from, but certainly Ofcom _mandates_ the minimisation of unnecessary data collection. This doesn’t mean that suboptimal technologies aren’t in use, but there’s certainly nothing precluding the use of fully privacy-preserving solutions.

We should be pushing for privacy-preserving age verification. It’s easy and convenient to say it’s the job of parents, and label anyone who doesn’t use parental controls as a bad parent, but at the end of the day, a government’s job is to look after its citizens regardless of whether they have good parents. If instead of engaging productively we stonewall the topic based on a vaguely-directed-but-intense distrust of Government, then governments will implement it anyway, and the solutions will be bad. We know this is the case, because it already happens.

I participated in a very productive workshop last year with representatives from government as well as various privacy-conscious companies, including Mozilla. I was pleasantly surprised at how productive we could be when we all worked together on this. We all walked away with a much better understanding of some of the problems, some of the nuances involved, and some possible paths forward.

EmbarrassedHelp5• 1 month ago

What the UK is trying to do here is evil and authoritarian. Its the sort of thing people brushed off as conspiracy theories not long ago. It is completely and utterly unacceptable.

brikym• 1 month ago

100%. The public tend to get very angry when police kill innocent people. So the govt want to squash any uprising which is exactly what they've been doing by taking down any video that allows people against the status quo to coalesce and coordinate. They want people to very energetic about voting for one of a few awful options which amount to /dev/null.

Morromist3• 1 month ago

I recently talked to a brit who expressed their fear of... knives. It blew my mind. The UK has one of the lowest murder rates in the world, 5 times less than the US, but they're so incredibly afraid.

They are just plain embracing a culture of paranoia, cowardice and extreme surveillance. I wouldn't care because I don't live there except the dystopian tech and business models they're developing ends up crossing the seas.

jjgreen2• 1 month ago

There is (seriously) agitation in the UK to ban pointy kitchen knives ... first hit on DDG for example https://theconversation.com/why-stopping-knife-crime-needs-t...

trashb6• 1 month ago

Because in the UK people believe, media enhances this, they can get stabbed for little to no reason or over a small argument due to mostly due to social tensions but also poverty. In the US it seems you have a high chance of not getting stabbed/shot if you don't agitate. So I think the paranoia about knives does not correlate with the likely hood of getting stabbed but with the unpredictability of it.

I agree that this is the wrong direction to develop into.

a962• 1 month ago

Ingsoc is here and it's been warmly welcomed.

windowliker• 1 month ago

How long until we find out the politicians have written in an exemption for themselves and the security apparatus? I hope my pessimism is unwarranted in this case, but it certainly isn't unfounded.

iugtmkbdfil8345• 1 month ago

Meh, at this point it is pretty much standard clause. They are all copying each other's homework.

t0lo• 1 month ago

At least we all know who western politicians are controlled by now and why they are really doing this.

Havoc• 1 month ago

The UK gov is just getting worse and worse at law making

varispeed6• 1 month ago

and civil service is blindly following orders.

ksec2• 1 month ago

You should watch Yes Minister. They certainly don't.

EmbarrassedHelp5• 1 month ago

The UK should just be banned from modern technology until their government has evolved socially enough to respect privacy. Companies need to pull out and stay out, because that's the only way the UK government will learn a lesson.

Morromist3• 1 month ago

I'm sure when this law goes through they won't stop and will shortly be lining up some even crazier surviellance tech.

I'm thinking something that automatically scans your computer for porn or other things, like ripped film mp4s and sends it to the goverment to be analysed.

Or perhaps little gps trackers that children are mandated to wear at all times.

dgellow5• 1 month ago

Unfortunately most companies don’t care about privacy of their users

jamesu• 1 month ago

Its been getting pretty bad for a long while now. On the topic of UK privacy, there's an interesting requirement that if you are a "data controller" processing "personal" data for "non-exempt" purposes, you need to register with the ICO to go on the register. Even can apply to individuals.

Sounds great until you realize anyone that does that effectively gets their residential address publicly doxxed and archived by archive.org (unless they can use a separate company address or spend money on a po box). And to make it worse, unless you have an obvious named company it's basically useless for looking up data controllers.

BLKNSLVR2• 1 month ago

Surveillance is not education, and it is education that will reap long term improvement.

Education is hard but effective whilst surveillance is easy and ineffective. Guess which option politicians take?

trashb6• 1 month ago

Guess which funding is getting impacted to enable this kind of law.

BLKNSLVR2• 1 month ago

...and the race to the bottom finds another pathway to acceleration.

greenleafone7• 1 month ago

They know. That's not why they are doing it.

leavenotracks• 1 month ago

I didn’t mind Starmer but this is finally giving me the leg up onto the anti-Starmer bandwagon.

What a dreadful legacy to leave - a sad attempt to get the biggest possible bang for the smallest possible buck. Also, 3 months? Perhaps that is as long as he expects to be pm.

varispeed6• 1 month ago

Probably Palantir folks are giving him an offer he can't refuse. One last push before retirement into the sunset.

varispeed6• 1 month ago

I am ready to receive Apple's or Microsoft's AI buttplug with government spying software installed.

doublerabbit• 1 month ago

The good news, it's inserted and installed. The bad, it doesn't bring pleasure.

coretx• 1 month ago

You don't give a stranger the keys to your house but we run their code every day. This is wrong regardless of there being surveillance present. We all know where it went wrong and can't say we did not know.

briandear2• 1 month ago

This is a country that has arrested people for social media posts. It’s also a crime in the UK to offend someone.

Orwell identified the genetic defect in the British genome 80 years ago.

gambiting• 1 month ago

>This is a country that has arrested people for social media posts

And if you saw these media posts, I'm sure you'd agree with those arrests in majority of the cases.

>It’s also a crime in the UK to offend someone.

Is that what American "news" tell you? Because it's absolutely not true.

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

What were the posts?

dgroshev4• 1 month ago

This is really disingenuous coming from Signal who pioneered secure compute architecture for a number of useful features [1][2]. On-device checks are no more "surveillance" than Signal's private contact discovery is, and the same slippery slope argument applies there.

It's also technically incoherent: the exact same kind of "surveillance" is already applied by every single phone, because that's how the Photos app (or whatever it's called on Android) searches for cat pictures based on the text "cat". I can't recall any Signal statements about cat recognition technology leading to "reporting people to government authorities".

The "cover-ups" link right in the beginning is a real mask-off moment though. This is not a measured statement informed by the reality of modern Britain. It's an American view informed by the twitter cesspool and divisive rhetoric of the far right. It's a real shame to see Signal falling so low.

[1] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

[2] https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/

pcthrowaway• 1 month ago

It's also technically incoherent: the exact same kind of "surveillance" is already applied by every single phone, because that's how the Photos app (or whatever it's called on Android) searches for cat pictures based on the text "cat". I can't recall any Signal statements about cat recognition technology leading to "reporting people to government authorities".

Are you suggesting that the automatic scanning of photos on a phone (which has led to wrongful arrests[1]) is not surveillance?

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-...

Nevermark• 1 month ago

Surveillance replaces ostensible individual fringe threats with a clear dangerous pervasive and (for practical purposes) irreversible threat that monotonically aggregates increasing centralized leverage over every aspect our lives, direct and indirect.

Knowledge is power. Forced revelation of our inner lives puts each of us in a position of vulnerability.

Even when "not abused", the very real latent threat actively takes away freedoms of thought and action.

It is extreme abuse.

It undermines any sense that the state works for the people, when it operationally embodies a maximalized one-way threat over all citizens.

AI collation exponentially compounds the threat, the passive and active damage.

One of the wisest ethical/safety concepts ever: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."

Democracy that sets up the levers of total autocracy is the greatest possible perversion and threat to democracy. Democracy only works as long as it recognizes government is the greatest threat to freedom. And that strict limitations on its power over citizens is the only defense.

TheOtherHobbes2• 1 month ago

Governments have been pushing surveillance since the earliest days of the consumer Internet.

The earliest example I can remember is the Clipper Chip. That was dead three years after it was proposed.

This current idiocy - proposed by a PM who promoted a very good friend of the most notorious paedophile in recent history to ambassador, against the recommendations of the civil service - is similarly doomed. Three months to implement huge changes to every OS on the planet? Like that's even remotely likely.

smashah• 1 month ago

Not even Saudi Arabia does the kinda draconian bullshit the UK is doing nowadays. This is what happens when your government is occupied by foreign agent traitors.

vivzkestrel• 1 month ago

- does anyone have actual studies or reports or arxiv papers or something that actually concludes that surveillance is not safety?

- how do you know that it doesnt cut down crimes or deter criminals or make identifying criminals easier?

- no seriously think of me as the stupidest person on the planet and explain to me why everyone is super duper paranoid about surveillance

- what other methods do you recommend for tracking , catching criminals, terrorists and anti social elements?

themoose8• 1 month ago

Is it possible the child nudity detection could be done on-device, fully private? This wouldn't amount to surveillance.

The statistics on global child porngraphy rings are quite shocking. The UK is a big market consumer for these images/streams.

trashb6• 1 month ago

Detection, even if "on-device, fully private". Is meant to notify others, the person viewing the image already knows what they are viewing. I would argue that the notifying of others of what (kind of imagery/category) you are viewing, is the main violation of privacy, even if the actual imagery is withheld.

Actually withholding the image may make it harder to fight the accusation (in court) if wrongly categorized.

For now the category argued seems to be "nude children" but what safeguards are there that prevent another category "politically sensitive"?

naishoya4• 1 month ago

safeguards?

Are any of us expecting that there are safeguards in today's global political environment? in tomorrow's?

Honestly, the only safeguards against abuse of surveillance are that the surveillance not happen in the first place.

Once it has happened, the only safeguards keeping the owners of the system from using it to coerce and control the masses exist in the form of pitchforks and ropes wielded by the masses, and the days when that was a real potential for repealing any such coercion and control are fully in the distant past.

These systems are made possible and installed beyond the reach of any constituent based consent - see the current condition of Ring cameras, Flock, and the many tools created by Palantir et. al and much like the boiled frog analogy the citizenry has sat in their movie theatre and restaurant seats telling each other soothing lies about how the goal was to make us even safer from ourselves and now we are steps away from the fully immersive per-person verified identity and 24-7 observation of what everything, everyone read, writes, says, and does. Exactly as the 'foil hats' have been telling them would happen if they didn't speak up sooner.

Tough cookies, we all get exactly what we deserve for letting it get this far out of hand. It's no use crying over spilt milk.

trumpdong34• 1 month ago

When it false triggers 10% of the time and then sends a screenshot to a human for decision making, it's the same thing.

naishoya4• 1 month ago

There are three kinds of figures that come from the parties wishing you to be afraid so that you will give them full control of your life: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Don't be made a fool of by believing any of those. And don't be doubly fool by acting as if any of those are the reason for this kind of surveillance.

rbanffy4• 1 month ago

Surveillance is a tool. It's neither right nor wrong, good or evil. It can be used to create safety (as it is by police forces, when authorized by judges, in compliance with democratically voted laws), or can be misused to create terror (and, as we've seen before, it never needed cellphones for that).

We should guard against the misuses and create enough legal frameworks to protect individuals' privacy (and aggressively uphold those protections). Private companies already do that - if I query a database for PII without proper approvals, or I query it outside the approval's boundaries, it'll take a couple minutes for me to receive something between a harshly worded e-mail and a visit from a couple large people who appear surgically incapable of smiling.

trashb6• 1 month ago

Surveillance is a tool. It's neither right nor wrong, good or evil.

What is it a tool for, it is a tool for observing while no person is present therefore breaking privacy.

  Privacy, a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people.

Any tool is (as long as it exists) always used for right or wrong, good or evil. However what might be good or evil is very subjective. Both in the moment and looking back on the use of the tool. Therefore it might be best to consider not creating the tool at all, instead of the current we'll try it and see what happens rhetoric.

rbanffy4• 1 month ago

What is it a tool for,

A nuclear weapon is a tool. You can use it to blast a city-killing asteroid, one you just noticed, into pieces that'd burn in the atmosphere (and miss the city). You can also use it to mass murder an entire population.

it is a tool for observing while no person is present therefore breaking privacy.

The capacity exists, but it's not necessarily used all the time. We should create the legal frameworks to protect ourselves from the misuse of the technology.

rimeice• 1 month ago

I also can't stand the privacy violation of CSS. But

Child safety looks like well-funded education, robust social services, and meaningful guardrails on the very AI technologies and platforms the current government is eagerly courting.

is such a weak, unrealistic, slow and idealistic solution to the real suffering of children. I was hoping this thread might offer up some better alternatives.

ibejoeb• 1 month ago

From https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-plans-to-stop-childre...:

Despite [iphone age verification] children can still take, view, share and save nude images. The government therefore wants Apple and Google to block nudity across the whole device by default, so they can only be deactivated via age assurance.

We tolerate the systematic child rape and run cover for the perps, but teens sending n00dz is a bridge too far. It's time for the UK to nut up and start holding these kids accountable. This works well, too, because it's deactivated on the devices used by adults, so they can continue to view their child porn, I guess.

Is there another reading of this?

toephu2• 1 month ago

"One of the most prolific criminals in all of San Francisco tells @adam22 that “crime in San Francisco is over with” because of Flock cameras + drones. He complains that he can’t even do drivebys anymore.

It’s simple: when the risk of getting caught is too high, crime plummets."

https://x.com/rahul/status/2063984276610114001

Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

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