Britain's long-awaited Online Safety Bill setting tougher standards for social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok has been agreed by parliament and will soon become law, the government said on Tuesday.
Okay so how would this be enforced? Highly unlikely any messaging service that offers E2E is going to release a version without it just to satisfy the UK government. So this will basically be easily thwarted by using a VPN?
The bill was changed so it no longer bans e2e encryption, it’s now the responsibility of tech companies to provide protection “where technically feasible” which basically means fuck all
It gives something that can be argued about later, right? After other parts of the bill have begun to be implemented. So, further down the road if gvmt considers e.g. WhatsApp or Signal as having CSAM and not taking appropriate steps, then they can put pressure and WA/Signal can argue back about feasibility and merit.
Does that mean that when you’re sitting on a bench in the middle of a city, you could in theory snoop the passwords and banking details in clear text from the WiFi networks around you?
Okay so how would this be enforced? Highly unlikely any messaging service that offers E2E is going to release a version without it just to satisfy the UK government. So this will basically be easily thwarted by using a VPN?
That’s the lovely bit about putting a bill out there. The enforcement and feasibility is not the problem of the politicians anymore.
The bill was changed so it no longer bans e2e encryption, it’s now the responsibility of tech companies to provide protection “where technically feasible” which basically means fuck all
It gives something that can be argued about later, right? After other parts of the bill have begun to be implemented. So, further down the road if gvmt considers e.g. WhatsApp or Signal as having CSAM and not taking appropriate steps, then they can put pressure and WA/Signal can argue back about feasibility and merit.
Does that mean that when you’re sitting on a bench in the middle of a city, you could in theory snoop the passwords and banking details in clear text from the WiFi networks around you?
No. Why would it mean that?
Eliminating all forms of encryption would get rid of SSL and WPA encryption also, so yes you would be able to snoop out passwords from a park bench.
Yeah but they’re not in any way doing that.