We have just had a warning about the risks of rushing supposedly ‘safe by design’ technology. The HMD Fuse child-safety phone, previously promoted by ministers, was taken off sale after serious security vulnerabilities were discovered in its safeguarding system, including flaws which a researcher said could expose a child’s live location and allow protections to be disabled.
That does not mean every on-device safety system will contain the same vulnerabilities. But it demonstrates why giving software deep access to our cameras, screens and private communications creates additional security risks that could harm children.
Adults will be required to go through an ID check point with an unregulated age verification company to disable this software. Millions of people could be faced with either sharing their biometrics or official IDs or having a phone they paid for bricked with blocking software. Since the introduction of the Online Safety Act, the British public is being increasingly pushed to compromise their privacy before they can access content or use tech features. Despite this, the Government has refused to regulate the burgeoning age verification industry.
While there might be merits to an opt-in system that parents could set for accounts that they setup for children requiring all adults to opt-out of on device content scanning through age verification is disproportionate to address the harms.
The privacy implications of having all photos subject to intrusive scanning or requiring people to submit their sensitive data for identification purposes are too high a cost.
There is a clear risk that once on device content-scanning software was enabled it would be fairly easy to expand they categories of content it detected or censored.
It could also go beyond scanning images to people’s private communication. If implemented the operating system would be empowered to prevent an end-to-end encrypted application such as WhatsApp or Signal from delivering an otherwise private communication on the basis of an automated assessment of its content.
Blocking images on devices would rely on “nudity-detection algorithms” built into the operating system, but nudity is in itself not always of an inappropriate sexual nature. It can also be artistic, educational or of historic importance – or simply an innocent snap of a child’s bathtime. The BBFC recognises that nudity can appear at every mainstream classification, including U, with the rating depending heavily on whether the nudity is sexualised, its detail, duration and context.
As with any scanning technology, there’s a risk of both false positives, and weaponised false negatives that can have unintended consequences. Forcing adults to use broken scanning systems risks falsely blocking medical images that people need to share with their doctor, journalism about children, artistic expression through such mediums as life drawing, breast-feeding support, sex education, or historic reporting on atorcities like the ‘Napalm girl’.
It also creates the risk of “targeted adversarial false-positive attacks on the classifier.” In this type of attack a bad faith actor could potentially engineer lawful images to trigger blocking systems deliberately.
There are effective ways to protect children online without hard-coding surveillance into everyone’s device or strong arming everyone to verify their age. The focus should be on educational methods, specialised policing of sextortion and child abuse offences, and a targeted application of this technology as part of parental control packages or on devices marketed and sold as devices for children. An opt-in mechanism for parents and people who choose to use this technology is a more proportionate response, one that doesn’t ransom privacy for free expression on a population scale. Adult devices should not be treated as child devices by default.
For more than a decade, UK governments have introduced successive child safety measures, responding to public concern about the availability of content that is either unsuitable or harmful to children, or due to harmful interactions ranging from bullying.
If you live in the UK and have a Facebook or Instagram account, you have probably received a message when you’ve logged in asking you if you “Want to subscribe or continue to use our Products for free with ads?
Musk’s latest venture, image generation in Grok that until Wednesday lacked sufficient guardrails to prevent the easy production of non-consensual sexual images and even child abuse images, provoked an Ofcom investigation and further EU Commission action as well as the promise of UK emergency legislation against apps that provide such images in less than a week.
Our report, “Hostile and Broken” released today, explains why e-Visas risk creating tens or hundreds of thousands of errors, with people potentially turned down for jobs, or unable to enter the country, as the result of electronic failures of the new online, real time re-checking inherent in the UK e-Visa scheme.
Meta, the company that runs Facebook and Instagram, has announced plans to repurpose most of the personal data that they ever collected about you, to train their “artificial intelligence (AI) technologies” — without, of course, asking your permission to do so.
As the House of Lords finally begins scrutiny of the UK data protection reform, Open Rights Group urges peers to support amendments that would strengthen the independence and effectiveness of the UK data protection authority, and bolster the public’s right of seeking a remedy against an infringement of their rights.
On a cycling forum, members who are rightly worried that their forum may be blocked by default filters, Skydancer posted a response he was given by Diane Abbott: I do not believe that the arrangements to protect children from hard core porn online will affect a forum to discuss cycling!
The motion laid down by Labour says: That this House deplores the growth in child abuse images online; deeply regrets that up to one and a half million people have seen such images; notes with alarm the lack of resources available to the police to tackle this problem; further notes the correlation between viewing such images and further child abuse; notes with concern the Government’s failure to implement the recommendations of the Bailey Review and the Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection on ensuring children’s safe access to the internet; and calls on the Government to set a timetable for the introduction of safe search as a default, effective age verification and splash page warnings and to bring forward legislative proposals to ensure these changes are speedily implemented.
The Digital Surveillance report – to be launched at a public event on Monday – gives a history of surveillance policy, looks at the current state of the law, examines why technology poses a problem and offers alternative, more targeted and more accountable approaches.
Since we published our report ‘Mobile Internet censorship: what’s happening and what to do about it‘, jointly with LSE Media Policy project, a number of people have been in touch with us asking what to do if they discover their site is blocked incorrectly by mobile networks’ child protection filters.
Open Rights Group and Tor have established that UK mobile networks such as Vodafone, O2 and 3 are filtering UK users’ access to Tor’s primary website (meaning the HTTP version of the Tor Project website, rather than connections to the Tor network) on pre-paid contractless accounts.
To coincide with the start of the London Conference on Cyberspace, eleven organisations and experts on freedom of expression and privacy online have today written to the Foreign Secretary stating that Britain’s desire to promote these ideals internationally is being hampered by domestic policy.
In the sixth of our series on the challenges facing the new government, Jason Kitcat looks at proposals for changes to the way our elections are run, including dangerous calls for e-voting.
Wikipedia have announced that they are blocking Phorm as they consider the scanning and profiling of our visitors’ behavior by a third party to be an infringement on their privacy.
It’s difficult to tell which of today’s developments the UK’s major ISPs should be more worried about – the fact that Sir Tim Berners-Lee has publicly stated that he would change his ISP if it started employing systems, like Phorm, which could track his activity on the internet, or the news that UK digital rights gurus the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) have today written an open letter to the Information Commissioner, urging him to look at the legality of Phorm.
The Electoral Commission and the separate review by Ron Gould that the Commission instituted have published their reports on the Scottish elections of May 2007 The Gould Review in particular identifies a number of important issues, many of which ORG addressed in our own report on the elections published this June.
In a speech to the National Council of Voluntary Organisations this morning, Gordon Brown announced he would be convening a Speaker’s conference on voting reform: Today I am proposing to the Speaker that he calls a conference to consider, against the backdrop of a decline in turnout, a number of important issues, such as electoral registration, weekend voting, and the representation of women and ethnic minorities in the House of Commons.
While the Department for Constitutional Affairs have left us in the dark with no news at all about the e-voting pilots due for May 2007, The Open Rights Group and FIPR have been hard at work.
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