⚠️ The Online Safety Bill would "make Britain a global role model for repressive regimes."
@Mer__edith, President of @signalapp, calls out the proposals that'll lead to "government-mandated mass surveillance applications on every UK smartphone."
Fancy authoritarianism through the back door? Well, the Online Safety Bill does just that. It gives Ofcom the power to require companies to scan our messages.
So we hit the streets of London with a message to Parliament: Don't Scan Me!
Client-side scanning is like having a “government-supplied CCTV camera in every room of your house.” It puts faith in “an unknown algorithm to detect bad things, which get reported to a private moderation team provided by the people who built your house” - Matthew Hodgson, CEO of @element
"Open Rights Group warned that what it called “a form of chat surveillance” is being slipped in through “a back door measure” in the legislation. Its paper went on to call for E2EE private messaging services to be put out of scope of the bill entirely."
False positives have damaging consequences. Yet the Online Safety Bill requires providers to report matches of child sexual abuse material to the National Crime Agency.
Given the uncertainties around the tech, it should be approached by policy-makers with caution.
This week we hit the streets in London to send a message to the UK government: Don’t Scan Me! We’re calling on lawmakers to support Lord Clement-Jones’ amendment to the #OnlineSafetyBill that would remove private messaging platforms from the surveillance measures.
"Few would consent to the state putting CCTV in everyone’s bedroom to crack down on the abuse of children. But that is effectively what a technology notice could mean: a CCTV camera in everyone’s phones."
"Weakening end-to-end encryption would reduce everyone’s safety online, including the children this bill is trying to protect. Without strong encryption, the sensitive data of millions of people would be at risk."
Proton calls on the government to revise the Online Safety Bill to protect privacy, free speech and encryption.
Treating an entire population as a suspect whose private messages must be scanned is neither necessary nor proportionate to tackle public policy issues. The spy clause in the Online Safety Bill (UK) must be removed. It's a tool of mass surveillance.