30
votes
UK's Online Safety Act is exactly the obvious failure predicted
Link information
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- Title
- Didn't Take Long To Reveal The UK's Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About
- Authors
- Mike Masnick
- Published
- Aug 4 2025
Theres plenty of other things they could have done to help protect their citizens, but those things didn’t have the benefit of collecting mass surveillance data and they would have cost quite a bit of money so obviously thats a no go when your government is hostile to its own citizens.
I keep seeing this but the law doesn’t really help the UK government do that at all. It’d be more convincing if they had an API or something that websites had to use to validate age, but OFCOM just issued guidelines on how to validate age.
Given that the vast majority of websites are not UK homed, if anything it’s helping foreign countries collect data on UK citizens.
The main justification from UK politicians is a combination of puritanical views along with the view that this is regulatory action against foreign (mostly US, in this case) tech companies. There’s a view that, essentially, foreign social media companies are poisoning the minds of young Brits with gasp pornography.
I don’t think there’s much to do with surveillance, although the UK is quite good at that. But this isn’t it.
They didn’t provide any service for checking IDs?
I was thinking they provided the ID checking service, and then used that to collect information about how and where an ID was being used.
This scenario really makes no sense, cause you’re right, they’re essentially making US/foreign companies collect UK citizens information and we already know they cant be trusted with it.
Nope. They provide 7 sanctioned ways to prove the age of users, none of which give any information to the UK government or have any interaction with the UK government.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/age-checks-for-online-safety--what-you-need-to-know-as-a-user
Like in the US, there is no mandated or universal government ID in the UK.
There is an EU pilot project in the works that claims to be a zero knowledge system, that can only give an answer of “adult” and “not adult”. That has its own problems, but it does seem like the UK have chosen the absolute worst implementation of age verification.
Love the doublespeak.