The Telegraph – Labour’s spyware plan for phones is straight out of North Korea
Who wouldn’t want children to be protected from explicit and nude imagery on their phones? The Prime Minister’s threat to tech companies this week that they must take action to prevent children seeing adult content or face punitive new laws is a strong political sell. But the policy is not quite what it says on the tin.
The technological reality of Sir Keir Starmer’s demand is extraordinary: that every smartphone in Britain must be child-locked. That means two enormous changes for every one of us: first, our phones will restrict our internet access to child-friendly content only, and second, government-mandated AI software will constantly monitor our messages, video calls and photo albums for verboten activity.
The only way to escape Starmer’s Great British Firewall and get regular internet access is to undergo a digital ID check on the device to register yourself as an adult user.
Convenient, perhaps, for a Prime Minister who has failed to get a digital ID system through the front door.
This is a total reshaping of modern civil liberty – a remodelling of internet access, a strangulation of freedom of information, and a death sentence for online anonymity and privacy. That such extreme, illiberal measures could be more appealing to our politicians than the more natural and effective solution of parental responsibility reveals a deeper malaise in British culture.
The uncomfortable truth is that many parents no longer want the burden of supervising their children in the digital playground. Too many, stretched by work and time pressures, would rather outsource that responsibility – first to big tech as both the playmate and the nanny, and ultimately to the state to act as Big Brother.
YouTube promoted its strong parental controls, including strict limits on its video feed, at Westminster Tube station this week with giant billboards reading “Choose how much time your teens spend scrolling. Even zero.” As someone who has held big tech to account for many years, I find this wholly refreshing and welcome – and you might think that MPs would welcome power being put back in parents’ hands too. But think again.
The billboards sparked anger from MPs – Jess Asato, a Labour MP, said the ads had “backfired” among parents in Parliament as “we’re being told to solve the problem app by app on our own”. Well, would that really be too much to ask? Shouldn’t parents know what apps are on their children’s phones, and how they’re using them?
Starmer’s national child-lock policy is performative authoritarianism. It is disturbing that it is so popular. In practice, children will be no safer at all and, of course, many will simply use adult-registered phones. Parents overwhelmingly buy their children’s phones and allow them to set them up – only a third of parents use the extensive parental software controls already available to limit children’s phone use. A child need only access a parent or sibling’s ID to set up the phone to get regular internet access.
But the price that the rest of the country will pay for the slide towards infantilising control of the internet is significant. In every other democracy, smartphones are portals to the largest library in human history. In Starmer’s Britain, those same devices are being devalued to become, in effect, state-controlled spyware in our pockets.
And why stop at smartphones? What about all the horrible things unsupervised children can see on tablets, games consoles, laptops, and desktop computers? If we accept the principle of passports for internet access now, we should expect ID gateways across millions more devices soon.
Moreover, why stop at scanning for nudes? What about the multitudes of other online “harms” one can experience, that the Government has long targeted: from content that can affect mental health to so-called “misinformation”? How long before scanning software begins flagging speech a future government simply doesn’t like?
No other country in the world has plunged its population into a child-restricted internet and required ID for regular web access. The Home Office proudly plastered digital ads across the internet this week heralding that Britain will be the “first country in the world” to introduce these so-called child safety measures – an ID gateway to the internet, population-wide spyware and a chokehold on Britons’ internet access. But it’s not a “first” to be proud of. Who exactly are we competing with here? Iran? North Korea? China?
The question is not whether children should be protected online, but how. Every generation inherits liberties it did not have to fight for. The test is whether we can pass them on intact. If Starmer’s Great British Firewall becomes a reality, future generations will not remember it as a child safety policy. It will be remembered as the moment Britain introduced digital gatekeepers.
If we accept that adults must gain permission to access the open internet, we will only be handing the next generation a new fight for liberty.
The Telegraph – Labour’s spyware plan for phones is straight out of North Korea
The post The Telegraph – Labour’s spyware plan for phones is straight out of North Korea appeared first on Big Brother Watch.
Source: https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/facialrec/the-telegraph-labours-spyware-plan-for-phones-is-straight-out-of-north-korea/
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