General Politics Thread
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Anime1977
Stand User
The statement:
https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06-08-uk-surveillance-is-not-safety.pdf
Surveillance Is Not Safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy
Children deserve to be safe, protected, and nurtured. They do not deserve surveillance, funding cuts, and cover-ups. Children also deserve their human right to privacy, as does everyone. The UK governmentʼs demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the UK be scanned on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning, will not safeguard children. It endangers us all, whilst strengthening Apple, Google, and Microsoft's market dominance and their control over our most personal information.
Forcing all UK residents to prove their age and/or have all their content scanned, simply to exercise their fundamental right to communicate, is a perilous proposition. We know that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however sincere-sounding the promises of those who initiate them are, never remain narrowly scoped. Once created, they will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider “threatsˮ or “harmful content.ˮ
Promises that this system will only run on-device are cold comfort. Wherever it runs, including the “cameraˮ itself once it is in place on UK devices - its scope will be defined by the whims and proscriptions of the government to detect nudity today and political speech tomorrow. We know from history that once in place, there will be an inevitable authoritarian expansion of the kind of content and people these technologies will be expected to surveil. We also know such tools will be leveraged to automatically report people to government authorities. We have already seen law enforcement agencies ask for similar widely-scoped powers which are ripe for exploitation in an increasingly tenuous political landscape.
This proposal will not keep children safe. 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. What the UK government wants instead is invisible surveillance infrastructure, switched on by default and potentially rushed into law under cynical pretexts. All of this with scant care for the actual needs of the children they claim to be protecting or the horrifying and far-ranging consequences that will ensue in practice.
https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06-08-uk-surveillance-is-not-safety.pdf
Surveillance Is Not Safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy
Children deserve to be safe, protected, and nurtured. They do not deserve surveillance, funding cuts, and cover-ups. Children also deserve their human right to privacy, as does everyone. The UK governmentʼs demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the UK be scanned on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning, will not safeguard children. It endangers us all, whilst strengthening Apple, Google, and Microsoft's market dominance and their control over our most personal information.
Forcing all UK residents to prove their age and/or have all their content scanned, simply to exercise their fundamental right to communicate, is a perilous proposition. We know that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however sincere-sounding the promises of those who initiate them are, never remain narrowly scoped. Once created, they will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider “threatsˮ or “harmful content.ˮ
Promises that this system will only run on-device are cold comfort. Wherever it runs, including the “cameraˮ itself once it is in place on UK devices - its scope will be defined by the whims and proscriptions of the government to detect nudity today and political speech tomorrow. We know from history that once in place, there will be an inevitable authoritarian expansion of the kind of content and people these technologies will be expected to surveil. We also know such tools will be leveraged to automatically report people to government authorities. We have already seen law enforcement agencies ask for similar widely-scoped powers which are ripe for exploitation in an increasingly tenuous political landscape.
This proposal will not keep children safe. 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. What the UK government wants instead is invisible surveillance infrastructure, switched on by default and potentially rushed into law under cynical pretexts. All of this with scant care for the actual needs of the children they claim to be protecting or the horrifying and far-ranging consequences that will ensue in practice.
Anime1977
Stand User
While we need to wait and see how the UK government’s proposed final detection and blocking tools will work in practice, there is another intrinsic requirement that's making privacy advocates worried — mandatory age verification.
To determine whether a device is owned by an adult or a child, all users will have to go through ID checks. This, according to Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, "will only result in population-wide ID checks for all of us to use our phones, tablets, and laptops".
Beyond whether that's an ethically proportionate request, there may also be a serious privacy and security aspect. Current age verification methods have so far proven to be inadequate in protecting people's sensitive data. The exposure of 70,000 Discord users’ government-issued ID photos because of a third-party vendor should be a stark reminder.
This was among the reasons that led to a coalition of over 400 scientists calling for a halt on age checks until a "scientific consensus" is reached on the balance of benefits versus harm to the wider population.
This is exactly why, according to Baker from Open Right Group, on-device scanning cannot be done in a privacy-friendly way.
"It is going to harm everyone's privacy because everyone is going to have to go through a digital ID checkpoint just to access their device and to access the internet," he told TechRadar.
