Submitted 2 weeks ago by schizoidman@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/55094518
“The UK government wants technology companies to block explicit images on phones and computers by default to protect children, with adults having to verify their age to create and access such content,” the FT report said. “Ministers want the likes of Apple and Google to incorporate nudity-detection algorithms into their device operating systems to prevent users taking photos or sharing images of genitalia unless they are verified as adults.”
Puritanical bullshit… what the fuck.
Man, I was at tumblr when this was being implemented. It was so fucking stupid and everyone knew it.
UK war on …nudity?
It's not about nudity. It's about control. The government wants full control over your computer and mobile phones.
I don’t think it’s anything as sinister from the current government. I’m not saying it’s a good idea, but they’re more stupid and weak than they are totalitarian. British Labour has had an obsession with “tech” solutions for social issues since the start of the Blair years. Sometimes it works, but as often it’s mired in incompetency and corruption.
I suspect that this recent spate of apparent puritanism is because they recognise that gender-based and sexual violence are “issues” after the discourse around Adolescence, but they can’t/don’t want to do anything actually meaningful (improve welfare, job opportunities, life prospects) so are latching onto what they believe are “easy” solutions. No-one with power actually understands how net infrastructure works, or cares about privacy as a principle, but they do have a group think that also leads them to think that this might make some inroads with “the right.”
It’s all absolute garbage being slapped together by career politicians who don’t understand anything and are primarily interested either in their next election or their post-parliament careers.
Home of the [in]famous page 3 Girls
And decades-old The Benny Hill Show.
Even if you’re morally opposed to the various things this addresses, it is so immensely concerning and unwise to want a corporation to have this much control over your actions, daily life, and liberty.
I don’t think enough people talk about that.
This has been very obvious to a lot of people since mobile devices were originally invented. The notion that you are sold a product that you “own” but is still 100% controlled by the vendor - anyone who thought about it for more than a second knew that it would eventually come to this. Of course, nobody gave even that tiny amount of thought about it. Or they were too naïve to think that a corporation could ever be evil.
I miss the times when spyware was considered uncoool. Mobile devices are the undoubtedly the worst invention of the information age. (And social media is probably the second worst.)
Literally. Why should a corporation control when you wank?
I get that, but I don’t even mean it in that sense. A corporation should not have any control over what I do whatsoever unless I’m their employee.
I want them to ban porn so I feel dirty when I watch it.
If there was a decent salary, I’d do it
The only time a corporation should care, is when they are in the business of selling sex toys. Then it should only be in so far that you enjoy using their products and want to use them more.
Corporations should be pro sex or absolutely ambivalent. There’s zero reason for them to be against it.
Ahhhhhh just fuck off you useless cunts! Why don’t you fix the fact that we’ve got kids fucking starving in this country before worrying about if they’ve seen tits before they’re 18?!
It’s dumb shit like this that is really pushing me to KMS once my mother has passed on. I can’t stand sharing oxygen with these morons.
Never KYS for something that’s somebody else’s fault.
Look I’m just fed up with dealing with the slow burning of everything around me all because about a dozen people want extra zeros on their net worth and are tempting politicians to implement draconian laws with comparitivly miniscule bribes and I am obligated to spend 1/3 of my life and 2/3rds of my income satiating the desires of these bastards.
Fuck em. I’m done. I want peace, permanent peace.
At the very least take them with you.
The only thing that’s important for them and their ego is hallucinating problems and making up solutions which benefit nobody.
We live in an age where children and teens are getting their rights stripped because of said perceived “dangers” - real effort being done into something that will harm everybody. While realistic problems such as starvation and poverty get swept up under the rug.
Honest question, but have you guys in the UK always been dealing with the conservative morality police or is this a more recent thing? As an American, these people have been a constant detriment to a functioning society for… ever?
My understanding is that such forces have been comparatively insignificant in your country, but “comparatively insignificant” probably says more about how things are here than anything else.
My perception is that it’s gotten worse in recent years, but there’s always been a weird, socially conservative streak, especially amongst the powerful.
I went to one of the super old, prestigious universities, and one of the most valuable things I learned there is that the British aristocracy is alive and well. We may not formally have a distinct noble class like there used to be, but in a way, we’re in a worse situation because we have so much of these entrenched systems that most people don’t know the half of. I think these kinds of people aren’t what you’re talking about when you mention the rise in the conservative mortality police, but it’s worth mentioning as one of the underlying factors.
The recent wave of stuff is more linked to right wing populism. Nigel Farage is a big figure in that, and the rise of the rhetoric feels like it’s been happening in parallel to Trump’s rise.
My belief about why this has been getting bad is that we had a Tory government for over a decade, starting in 2010, and their cuts had a terrible impact on the country as a whole. People who were living in precarity were increasingly fucked over, and as wealth continued to move upwards, the previously comfortable middle class were increasingly pushed into precarity. In terms of why the Tories were in power for so long, my opinion is that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, they were able to convince people that a country’s finances were analogous to household finances, and thus deficits are bad, and that you can’t invest in infrastructure unless you’re running a surplus. If anything, this hindered the UK’s economy in recovering from the crisis.
Labour didn’t provide a satisfying alternative to austerity, largely because under Blair, Labour had become increasingly neoliberal and distanced from its roots. In 2010, they campaigned on a platform of “we agree with all of the Conservative’s assumptions about how an economy should work, and that austerity is necessary, but we will do less austerity than they will”. If you believe that austerity is necessary, why on earth would you vote for that? They were Tory lite.
And so large swathes of the UK public were effectively disenfranchised, because no-one they could vote for was actually offering something different to ease their socioeconomic suffering — except, of course, for UKIP (and the Greens, but they have always struggled to appeal to the mainstream). Especially under Farage, UKIP was effective at offering desperate people something different — something to blame for their struggles. Of course, blaming everything on immigration is bullshit and will, if anything, make people’s lives worse because of how much the economy depends on immigration, but it’s a problem of desperate people with insufficient class consciousness, who feel like they have no other choice.
A longstanding cultural facet that underlies a lot of this is the idea of the “deserving poor”— an idea that we can trace right back to the Victorian poorhouse. Even when the UK has been more progressive (such as during a period known as the post-war consensus, which “tolerated or encouraged nationalisation, strong trade unions, heavy regulation, high taxes, and an extensive welfare state”^[1]. I think this is somewhat analogous to the New Deal in American politics, though it happened later), there has still been a lot of moral ickiness tied into how we think about poverty. It’s the idea that people who are poor due to poor choices do not deserve support from the welfare state, and that it is necessary to prove that you deserve help. The fact that this is an idea deeply embedded in British culture has meant that the UK has long lagged behind much of Europe in terms of reducing poverty. ^[2]
In the modern day, this means that if you want to get out-of-work benefits, you are expected to do an absurd amount of performative bullshit to show that you are searching for work. If you miss an appointment at the job centre, even due to circumstances that are not your fault (such as being hit by a car and hospitalised en route to the job centre), you can lose your benefits. You can appeal these things, but even if that’s successful, it takes an obscene amount of work. If you can’t work due to disability, then you will have to do even more work to demonstrate that this is the case, in a situation that can function like a catch-22 — too disabled to have the capacity to prove that you’re too disabled to work, so forced to do all the bullshit job hunting (which you obviously can’t do). They expect you to apply for, and work in jobs that are completely unsuited to your skill set. Like, if you have a specialised degree or skillset and your field is one where there are jobs, but it takes time for you to find openings, then fuck you, apply to be a janitor instead. There’s often been talking of policies that would involve people on out-of-work benefits being forced to do “voluntary” work in order to keep their benefits. I don’t think that’s currently in place, but it has always been disconcertingly popular a concept. The phrase “benefit scrounger” is a phrase that’s big in the British zeitgeist. Even people who rely on benefits of some sort like to think of themselves as being distinct in some way from “the bad kind of people” who get benefits. Even as those people are pushed further into precarity, they still maintain the idea that they are distinct somehow. Benefit fraud is such a tiny percentage of total welfare spending, and yet policies aimed to root out benefit fraud (which often cost more than they ever recoup, and primarily harm people who are not committing fraud of any sort) receive bipartisan support. The honest, struggling people who get caught in the crossfire of such policies are viewed as acceptable casualties.
I mentioned above that I consider 2010 to be the start of a rise in the current trend of right wing populism, but another key “watershed” moment in my opinion was Margaret Thatcher in the 80s. Much like with Reagan, the political order that she was at the head of was ideological as much as it was economic or political. With her conservative government, she popularised the idea of “personal responsibility”, and severely exacerbated this notion of “the deserving poor”. Thatcher’s government is seen as the end of the post war consensus (which means a start to the withering of the welfare state)
You know how earlier, I mentioned that Labour shot themselves in the foot in 2010 by yielding to the Tories and letting them define the parameters of politics wrt austerity? Well that comes on the back of Tony Blair’s Labour starting that whole ball rolling with a heckton of privatisation and deregulation in the 2000s. Margaret Thatcher once said that Tony Blair’s New Labour was her greatest achievement, and I wouldn’t disagree there. It’s honestly funny how often I delve into the history of a particular fucked up thing in the UK and find that a lot of it can be traced back to Thatcher. For example, recently I was learning about the history of fibre internet in the UK, and I learned that this was yet another area in which Thatcher’s government fucked things up. It’s always fucking Reagan and Thatcher.
(Fun fact: when Thatcher died, the song “Ding dong the witch is dead” reached number 2 on the UK music charts)
It’s sad to see it happen. I come from a poor area up North. Many of my ancestors were coal miners who lived and died in the mines. The retail park I used to hang out at as a teenager used to be a colliery — the colliery where the miners first began striking in 1984. This area is now has a high proportion of votes going to Reform (i.e. Nigel Farage’s party, basically post-Brexit UKIP). I used to regard people who voted like that with disdain, because I subconsciously blamed them for their lack of class consciousness. Nowadays, I’m more able to feel compassion for them, and their desperation. I think modern society makes it very hard to build class consciousness and solidarity, and so right wing reactionary politics ends up feeling like the only option they have. After all, the miner’s strike failed. Entire communities fell into destitution and it felt like no-one with any power cared. In a sense, the current political situation feels inevitable.
This is why people like Mamdani, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn give me hope. Sanders and Corbyn weren’t successful in their respective bids for power to enact their policies, but I remember how hopeful people felt during Corbyn’s rise. People who previously had completely disengaged from politics were suddenly getting involved, and it felt like there was hope. Of course, establishment politicians went and fucked it all up, but it still stands out to me as an example of how desperate people are for an alternative to the current status quo. People are sick of being told that the economy is going great, even as their lives and their communities are falling apart.
[1]: Source for quote: Wikipedia page on the Post-war consensus
[2]: further reading on how the myth of the deserving poor has caused the UK to lag behind Europe
Jesus fucking Christ I hate this shithole of a country
We need a solid linux phone fast.
Gotta love how it’s “better” in these assholes’ “minds” to pretend sex doesn’t exist than to actually parent them on the topic that the kids are gonna find out about anyway - often in an unexpected and/or uncontrolled fashion. I’d much rather get ahead of that and make sure they know what they need to before they come face-to-face with it and are clueless - something much more likely to result in what is a supposedly (because they sure are picking the worst way to avoid it) undesirable outcome in the end.
It’s about surveillance. The nudity is a made-up reason.
I know this, but the general populace eats this shit up. They either refuse to believe that, or “think” it’s somehow worthwhile to “protect the children” (because they sure AF can’t be bothered to parent properly).
Bringing back the prudish Victorian era?
I could actually imagine Starmer flustered by the sight of an ankle.
In the end it isn’t about the kids , what they want is control and tracking of everyone.
Of course it is, because nobody is willing to try and quantify or qualify the harms that seeing pornography has on a young person. It’s just “adult content” so we’ll go so far as to put VR headsets on everyone and ask them to verify their age or else they get a PG, low-polygon representation of reality!
Soon: Police sirens have been detected, video recording terminated.
The UK is turning into a really proper shithole country
American here…first time?
that will quickly turn into “continuously monitor your users’ screens for what they are doing so you can detect nudity” where the real aim will ofcourse be surveillance and selling highly personal data. I don’t know about Apple but google will be all over it.
Apple just has better image control
What a joke world we are living in. UK is getting too crazy with their "protection children" and introducing age limits by people providing their password and IDs. And chat control. And now this again, blocking these pictures would require massive privacy issues and closed source operating systems that will lock the user down like North Korea.
Meanwhile their prince Andrew was ‘protecting’ the children right
What makes it worse is that the legislators are technologically illiterate. I don’t expect politicians to be experts in everything, but I do expect them to listen to experts.
Take chat control, for instance. Experts said that it would end up being harmful because the more legit sites would implement age controls, and that this would drive traffic to the less legit sites that aren’t implementing such controls — sites where there’s a much higher likelihood of harmful content like revenge porn, non-consensual porn, etc…
And then when the completely predictable consequences of chat control arise, then the legislators have the audacity to be like shocked-pikachu.jpeg. And then they continue to ignore the experts and ask stupid questions like “how do we ban VPNs?”
200% agreed! They have no fking clue what the hack those "legislators" or "regulators" are doing. Have zero technical knowledge and they think you can breach encryption or something. Its simple a lot of incompetence and I hope they get punished by it.
As the dad of a teenager, I am “encouraging” him to put nudity blocking systems on his phone.
oh shit would you look at that i just taught him how to go around me and hide his behavior better im sure there will be no future consequences whatsoever
The important thing isn’t that your kids don’t see porn, it’s that they feel the requisite amount of shame and never talk to you about their sexuality.
Also, it’s one more thing we can criminalize in a surveillance state. So now we can more easily extort horny people with fines and prison if we feel the need
Seems more reasonable to put UK-blocking systems on them…
Ain’t that the fucking truth…
Kier Starmer is a nevernude. Pass it on.
I bet he takes a bath in a swimsuit
Year of the linux phone
If they make it obligatory, sudo systemctl disable uk-spyware
(I know that in that case it would be illegal to disable, solvable with sudo systemctl enable uk-spyware-spoof)
Gargle my balls, m’lord.
They’re doing their part in UK politics. Tories stole everything they could and drove it all into the ground until everyone got sick and elected labour. Now they’re raising taxes to put money back in and doing everything they can to make sure they’re hated enough that there is no chance they get re-elected. Then, Tories can just walk back in and take all the money coming in from the new taxes again. It’s a beautiful cycle of the general population getting fucked from both sides.
what do you really expect from the nation of cucks who couldn’t be bothered to execute/exile their royalty when the rest of europe did?
Why, yes I would like to get literally cockblocked by Google and Apple. Thanks UK! /s
100 members of the lords vs one adguard filter
Fuck you. My phone. My rules. Open source OS it is for my next phone…
Looks like click-bait. It is a proposal from by one old fart in the 800 member House of Lords. Not a serious Bill.
Read this thread…
www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/…/nubbach/
Having said that, it is important to nip such ideas in the bud.
They’re obviously going about it the wrong way, but this is inching towards the right way to go - keep age verification like biometric verification, encrypted and on-device. That’s a million times better than getting random pron sites to ask for your biometric data.
If they’d started with this thought and then kept thinking from there, they could have ended up with something decent and effective, rather than the current shitshow.
Make it the software that comes with the device. So Samsung can install some child protection app and we just uninstall it. Anything bad ever happens on a kids phone? Why did the parents uninstall it?
Make the parents take the responsibility.
I encourage UK’s government to sit on it and rotate. And Keir Starmer can go do one with rusty barbed wire.
My God. At least the US’s fascism makes sense. Make it make sense!
The war with China is coming and both the US and the UK want to minimize the impact of protests. It will be inevitably nuclear because China cannot be beaten conventionally. So people will feel a bit compelled to protest which could put to test the usual means of population control.
I did not downvote but you’re asserting several things that you can’t possibly know. 1. War with China is coming. 2. It will inevitably be nuclear. 3. This is being done to prevent people from protesting when #1 & 2 occur.
Gotta blur out those women’s ankles.
I will never buy a device that cockblocks me. I was talking shit about the nothing phone yesterday but I guess imma save up to buy it.
neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
OMG. These plans are getting on my nerves.
When a parent gives a kid their device and sets the child’s birthday, then enable these. If the birthday is over 18, the let them do what they want.
Let parents parent the kid and get the government out of my life.
FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Or just don’t fucking age gate shit.
Seriously who the fuck cares if a kid sees a titty?
Mondez@lemdro.id 2 weeks ago
Worse is that it likely won’t be able to distinguish between intentionally titilating material and material intended to educate. Only over 18 are allowed to learn about human physiology after submitting identifying information.
krooklochurm@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I’ve been watching porn since I was 10.
That’s all. Porn is great.
sleen@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
There already should be a distinction between what is a child and what is a teen - there is a huge difference and these laws don’t take that into consideration. The only thing these laws do is remain as an ageist weapon that creates motives to discrimination.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Especially with titties, you think your five year old can’t deduce that those bumps on women’s chest have a nipple on it just like theres. Even if they can’t I doubt that revelation will be traumatic or earth shattering.
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
BLOCKED!
NSFW, sorta?
MudMan@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
It's kind of unfortunate how much this has been encourage by petty online fights. People were very excited when "will somebody think of the children" was applied to, say, some social media content or gaming loot boxes because the Internet did not like those things, so they were very happy to ignore the pre-existing parental control devices and request blanket bans. Then people remembered that a bunch of old, prudish people on both sides of the political aisle don't like porn and it was too late.
Man, people love the "they first came for" argument online and I should have guessed the first time it really pays off in the 21st century it'd include the absolute most depressing things possible instead.
Anyway, this is bad and I don't like it, but UK politics are almost as bad as US politics, so I'm happy to let both stew in their own cautionary tale juices.
evilcultist@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
None of those other things should require any sort of identity or age verification, though. In the case of loot boxes, government should be able to tell companies, “hey, you can’t sell that here”. In the case of age verification and nudity scanning there’s a whole host of issues from the fact that people don’t find loot boxes to be taboo or embarrassing to the fact that people do find nudity and porn embarrassing, to the fact that any scanning systems will false flag, to questions about who has access to the data that is submitted and how long it is stored, to how easy it could be to misuse the systems to go after disadvantaged groups (we all know LGBT content will intentionally be covered by this, whether they’re open about it or not, right?), to whether or not the system will be used for other purposes that either aren’t being said aloud or won’t be realized until after it’s implemented.
mannycalavera@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
That seems the most sensible way of doing things. Apple probably doesn’t want that outcome though because then they’ll be liable for the implementation rather than, for example, the social networks or websites.
Always gotta be thinking about the Apple shareholders.
thejml@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Honestly, No. I don’t want my phone making decisions for me or my kids. If its site by site, they can just go somewhere else.
As a parent, I’m far more worried about shitty social media algorithms that push narratives and online bullying and misinformation than I am about nudity. People have bodies, sex happens, it’s normal, whatever. I’d rather my kid learned about all that instead of being sheltered away from it until they turned 18.
If anything, normalizing nudity and acceptance of different body types is probably a good thing for kids to learn, especially females where a constant narrative of “skinny, pretty, perfect” is being shoved on them and shaming them for not being a super model is considered the status quo.
Let me make that decision as a parent, don’t try to protect my kids for me.