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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> "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...

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

But think of the children!!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Context

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

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

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

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.

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.