Google's Statement on the UK Online Safety Bill [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Google's Statement on the UK Online Safety Bill [pdf]

bills.parliament.uk

74 pointsstefankuehnel47 comments

It seemed to me that Google were struggling to stay its their limit as a company which supports government initiatives and is trying to find a way of working within them, whilst pointing out that most of what is being proposed is totally unworkable. I think they did about as well as one can in that situation. They put in a couple of very strong warnings about what they would do if it wasn't changed but I don't think it'll have much effect without some much stronger arm twisting. The measures seem to me to have little to do with protecting children and would not be very effective in that respect, volunteer groups work at detection very successfully but the law and police don't really support them. What they do wouldn't really be covered by this at all. It seems something the security services and the control freaks in government want, and who's going to oppose it and be liable to being called a paedophile supporter?

What does the bill actually say?

To state that I don’t trust google here is an understatement. If google is pissed off, then my default position is that the government is probably correct. Not having all the facts, I could be coerced to a different position.

The bill says a lot of things, it started out bad and has been amended and amended many times over years.

I think the relevant points are putting things like requirements for age verification for anything possibly considered ‘harmful’ (like adult images) by way of, for example, requiring uploading an image of your Government issued ID or by using a face scan AI recognition system.

The main other contentious one is the power for Ofcom to direct companies offering encrypted messaging services to break the security model of end-to-end encryption to allow content scanning and surveillance. Most big platforms (e.g. Apple, Meta/WhatsApp, Signal) said they would withdraw messaging services from the UK rather than breaking E2EE. The Government recently kinda said they might not use that power but then have been quite keen to try and say they’re not backing down so who knows what that means…

Cloudflare falsely thinks I'm a bot so I can't actually read it, but I believe the full text of the bill is here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/58-03/0362...

. . . but that's exactly what a bot would say!

Ironically it looks like I can read the document by having an actual bot fetch it for me.

If I was a UK citizen I'd be pissed though (in the sense of being angry, not intoxicated). Everyone should be able to read the laws that their government is trying to pass.

Google gets a bad wrap for many reasons, I think mainly for its ad business.

UK gov on the other hand.. oh brother. Where to start and where to end? They have been an ongoing fiasco/circus for the past decade, to say the least.

Irrelevant to the specific topic, but in the "UK gov" front, I am still waiting for Boris Johnson and his minions to rake in the £350m every week and fund the NHS.

Back to the topic, for a country where intensive surveillance is BAU, it's no wonder they want to weaken and/or remove E2EE.

I wouldn't be surprised if in X years we hear that they (UK gov) have also tried to pull a "Room 641A" and failed.

System X was set up thirty to forty years ago to do everything Room 641A was supposed to do without needing to be anywhere near the exchanges. They could just sit in London and put in the numbers to intercept and analogue signal processors looked out for various key words and important lines could be fully monitored

> It seems something the security services and the control freaks in government want

i am writing this comment again: it's not the government that is pushing this. it's all the NGOs, various civil society organisation, even the opposition criticises the government for not going far enough (they wanted jail sentences for CEOs, making VPNs illegal, etc). and polls point to massive support for this from the locals.

it's not the government, it's society that wants this.

It's not a vote winner.

depends how you frame it. for example: “the government doesn’t want to protect your children”. but the way the opposition attacked the plans as weak or very weak tells me they’ve done the studies.

also, this:

> Richard Collard, head of child safety online policy at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, said: “Our polling shows the UK public overwhelmingly support measures to tackle child abuse in end-to-end encrypted environments. Tech firms can show industry leadership by listening to the public and investing in technology that protects both the safety and privacy rights of all users.”

It's interesting that so much of their letter is basically them saying "we can't automate enforcement of our rules", yet that hasn't stopped them doing that up until now on platforms like Google Play and YouTube (with obvious terrible results).

Maybe we should take their word for it, then? It's hard to imagine what enforcement even looks like, at their scale.

Then they’re operating at too high a scale

Most people find it hard to imagine what my work even looks like (I'm a software developer, approximately). Then I'm operating at... [complete the sentence].

Or if you don't want to complete the sentence, you may instead explain why abuse handling at scale is something people should understand while the 120-frame stack trace involved in my current task is too complex/difficult/whatever.

It’s not cheaper for smaller companies to do this kind of moderation. If it’s too expensive even with Google’s economy of scale, then it’s going to be even worse for small businesses.

How many people do you think they should employ at the job? Ten years ago China was already employing two million people to monitor the internet. Google and others employ tens of thousands of people round the world to monitor pictures or videos that their AIs flag, and it is a nasty job with a lot of burnout. Scale makes the job easier if anything.

Employing 2 million people is (relatively) easy. Train them for all applicable law in the world is hard.

That’s the scale of the internet though. It’s either google or 1000 smaller googles. The amount of work required doesn’t change.

I don't find it interesting — it's just another way to say that you can do lots more things if you're not legally responsible for the quality of your work.

I mean they were sued by Viacom for a billion dollars. Google didn't put ContentID in for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....

Why doesnt Katie explain that better education is needed, teaching kids how to recognise and avoid situations in the home, in public and online?

Keeping someone innocent and protected from the realities of life, can set them up for a lifetime of mental health problems caused by historical exploitation in a variety of ways, that will haunt them for the rest of their life.

If education is not the best way, what is?

Katie O'Donovan is Public Policy Manager for Google UK with responsibility for economic policy. In this role Katie has developed Google's economic and digital skills programmes to ensure online opportunities can be realised across the UK and is responsible for engagement with the UK government on policy initiatives to ensure the UK remains a world-leading digital economy. Katie is also responsible for Google's Brexit Policy and work on young people’s online behaviour.

Prior to working at Google, Katie developed wide-ranging experience working in government and policy as a special advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Research and Information Unit at No10, and as an advisor to David Miliband. Katie also established the communications and policy team at Mumsnet helping the website grow from a forum startup to online institution. Katie is a board member of the Internet Watch Foundation.

[1] https://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/network/katie-odonovan/

https://ie.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-o-donovan-a13b0092

Good lord, it's difficult to think of a place I'd less like to see in the history of someone in a role like this than Mumsnet.

Education can lead to critical thinking, and critical thinking can lead to behaviour that's more difficult to control.

Curiosity killed the conservative.

Control is what these kinds of people want more than even money. They want the world to behave how they think it should behave. Education is not how to achieve that end.

They shouldn't have to be educated about dangers, the dangers should be entirely exterminated so that everyone can remain innocent and naive for their whole lives, and we never have to have difficult conversations.

Google seems pretty comfortable with making automatic content scanning a legal requirement, and it's easy to see why: it nips the competition in the bud. They can afford to spend billions on this, other can't.

Also, it gives them more reason to collect more information which they love. And it ties in nicely with their idea of "trusted" devices and browsers which ban things like adblockers

After reading this, I'm not sure if Google are on my side.

It's pretty clear: they're not.

>After reading this, I'm not sure if Google are on my side.

Google stopped being on your side a very long time ago

on our side

Corporations are never on your side. At best their goals are temporarily aligned with yours, but it is always fleeting.

Not always. Some of them still value customers and are at least attempting to go in the correct direction for society. This one, not so much.

It seems like lots start off like that but it never lasts. I think it's an effect of having shareholders: it all boils down to money in the end

The moment a company begins their push for IPO is the very moment the enshitification and anti-user bullshit starts.

Every once in a while, those corporations are held to task by other non-public entities, but as soon as they drive the non-public out, enshitification begins.

'Corporations don't want money. They want all the money - all of it, all of the time.'

They aren’t on your side, but don’t make the mistake of thinking there’s 2 sides and 1 must be on your side.

We’ve seen governments around the world not be on the people’s side many time (for UK specially, see brexit)

> We’ve seen governments around the world not be on the people’s side many time (for UK specially, see brexit)

What do you mean? People voted for Brexit. Boris and his government delivered it. What would you rather like them do, a press release in the lines of "Oh, forget it, it was just one of Nigel's dumb ideas and we were daft enough to ask" after the vote?

Certainly not after the vote. The is a violation of democracy.

But it they didn't have to propose it. And they didn't have to advertise it.

And it would be one thing if all sides earnestly believed the benefits - instead better members of the party should have checked the dumb ideas (this is the point of parties)

Well, they advertised and proposed it rather than losing votes (quite a predictable party move, Nigel knew that too). I'm pretty sure Cameron believed it would never pass. But it did. That's why he quit afterwards. It was one of those "oh shit" moments.

If you think that’s how it worked then you’re as naive as the voters who were manipulated.

(2022)

> Thank you for inviting Google to give evidence to the Online Safety Bill Public Bill Committee, and for your subsequent invitation to provide written evidence.

So, they've now provided written evidence. But they haven't responded to the invitation to appear before the committee.

It sounds like they're saying "Sure, here's our evidence. We're not prepared to answer your supplementary questions." Will Goo be sending someone to appear before the committee?

They appeared before the committee six months before they wrote this letter.

Thanks.

[Edit] By "haven't responded", I meant haven't responded in that letter, which was the only context I had.

First dot point:

Developing and updating new community guidelines on YouTube, that we strictly enforce, on a range of harmful content, including suicide and self harm, scams, elections misinformation, harrassment and hate speech;

YouTube actively advertises videos of investment scams to me.

In our experience, algorithmic tools are effective at identifying CSAM and certain types of violent extremist content, but will struggle to accurately identify other, more context-dependent forms of illegal and harmful content.

So Google aren't against automated scanning of anything and everything, it's the potential of mis-classification that they're concerned about.

This would leave UK users with a poorer quality Internet relative to elsewhere.

Elsewhere will catch up though.

We believe that protection of children should be considered holistically, and their right to access information and to privacy must be respected in much the same way that we would expect for adults

Sarcastic chuckle at the arrogance and meaninglessness of this commentary.

The whole Advertising section is worth reading to get an idea of the value Google believes it is offering to the world.

I don't think even ChatGPT would have done a worse job of explaining this

> So Google aren't against automated scanning of anything and everything, it's the potential of mis-classification that they're concerned about.

They can live with a half-assed solution that only benefits then, but if it means they have to do more work and assume liability then suddenly it's not so great

> The Bill does not currently require Ofcom to consider the impact of compliance measures on children’s rights to access information, and on both children and adults’ privacy. This is a signicant omission, given the impact that any form of age-verication also has on adult users (who would also need to go through some form of age assurance to access services)

This is an interesting way to address some of the problems in the bill (though I can see why Google wants it in particular)

(It's also an interesting way of phrasing your lobbying: "the bill does not currently take into account [thing that we want it to take into account]" - phrased in a way that makes it seem like a silly omission by the lawmakers)

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