Do they actually know how the technology works? They will have to scan everything inbound and outbound connections, basically managed devices.
Apple and Google have been given a three-month ultimatum to make it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images on their smartphones, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Monday.
Yeah bro we’re totally just scanning everything you send just on the off chance that a child (even though you have none and don’t know any) are takes your phone and uses it to send a dick pic haha no bro don’t worry it’s for their safety haha
And, because Apple cares about us, they can create the Personal Pictures Privacy Pro subscription. A plan where any compromising images are kept out of public dark web Facebook groups, for the low price of $29.95 per month.
Disclaimer: Privacy and security applied by your Personal Pictures Privacy Pro plan will be generated by mid-tier cost effective AI, which itself was trained on the work of the most affordable people who told us they were privacy and security experts.
I estimate about 3 months until an inevitable data breach where it turns out they actually keep copies of all of the images because of course they will.
Surveillance is not security. When fully formed Surveillance is slavery.
If one party decides to make the country an open air prison, all it does is secure political victory towards their opposition party that intend to reverse those changes. The flag might change, but the methods stay the same.
My partner sent me some dirties and the new iphone asked her if she was sure.
Creepy shit.
It’s all done on device on iPhone, not really that creepy. You can also disable it if you want.
You can disable it for now
- Demand <something impossible> to “protect the children” or else we’ll do <even more dystopian surveillance>
- <something impossible> is not done because, well, it’s impossible.
- Do <even more dystopian surveillance> whilst claiming “they gave us no other choice”
Just allow parents to disable their child’s camera, simple?
Actually, yeah. That offloads the responsibility to the parents. I think that solution actually works…
What sort of nightmarish personal responsibility world are you proposing? I don’t want to have to raise my own damn kids.
If Apple and Google are sending kids nude images, then their parents are showing them porn by giving them phones.
Let me guess, the solution is age verification for everyone?
Easy, just send every parent who gives a minor a phone to prison. Problem solved!
Starmer’s labour government has been an absolute shit show. Fuck the child safety act.
With Labour like this, who needs Tories?
deleted by creator
Wasn’t it a Tory policy that Labour adopted? Either way, absolutely awful and really does illustrate how little difference there between the major parties.
fuck the chi-
Oh no OH NOOO
“Fuck the child” safety act
Over reach dressed up as protection for children.
I don’t have kids myself so can’t say I understand how prevalent this problem is, but I can imagine it’s not as big of a problem as what politicians are making out. Certainly not big enough that this can be the answer, even if this legitimately required a solution, such a solution would surely be a last resort.
Easiest solution is awarness. Teach the parents how to monitor their children and how to use parental control. They can offer classes for this.
Its just crazy the amount of stupid laws that poo up in place of covering for poor parenting lol
On iOS parental controls let you choose to manage the child’s contacts. So they can only communicate with anyone you put in there. You can also block communication in apps. You can also block unapproved websites or let Apple block the ones in its list. You can set age restrictions on everything. You can be pretty heavy-handed if you want to. You can also buy the kid a dumb phone.
He may as well be saying that he needs to put cameras in every car to verify that kids are wearing seatbelts if they’re in the car. That would likely reduce more harm than this, but it’s also more obvious what the problem is.
Old_man_yelling_at_cloud-Simpsons.gif
deleted by creator
Make it illegal for their parents to give them phones and computing devices that can send and receive pictures. Problem solves.
No but seriously education for both parents and children. Because while I do believe these companies play their role in how children interact online and what they interact with, I don’t believe they’re going to be able to stop anyone from sending something or receiving something they want to send without invasive and possibly traumatic tactics that will effect people regardless of age group.
Fucking hell, can we get an age and qualification limit on politicians already?
I wonder what would happen if those companies simply told the UK government it wasn’t possible, and withdrew from the market?
Idiot’s in Ties are still Idiots.
What’s more likely, the prime minister is a clueless idiot who keeps making blunder after blunder and is too stupid to even consider asking for advice from experts in the field, or he’s paid by terrorists?
deleted by creator
I don’t know how likely the second one is. But both can be true.
Maybe hold the parents accountable. Betya then they’ll start caring about what their children are doing. Because yes, while there are adult perpetrators, there are also children themselves selling media they create on things like roblox servers. It’s a rabbit hole.
Bonus: you don’t have to invalidate everyone’s right to fucking privacy.
Extra credit: you can still tax the fuck out of these trillion dollar corporations that are ruining the world.
I’m not sure if I agree with this take. To me, it is similar to saying we shouldn’t give kids free lunches, cause it’s the parents responsibility to feed their kid.
Like yeah, parents should be feeding their kid. But it’s also unreasonable to think that every single parent is doing that. It’s just not realistic, so we should definitely be feeding kids when they aren’t getting it at home.
On the same token, I don’t see anything wrong with trying to protect kids from talking with strangers, or getting sent explicit material, when their parents don’t know or care how to do it themselves.
then enforce child predator laws. or rape laws in general. thats a REAL rabbit hole that will disgust any normal person. the problem is that nobody wants to deal with the actual problem so they outsource it to privacy nightmares like what we are seeing now
I don’t think it HAS to be a privacy nightmare. It’s possible for all of this to happen securely on device.
That being said I do not trust most corporations to implement it securely.
The lunch analogy is too generic for the complexity here and I think it breaks down entirely given the innate assumption that a parent’s responsibility is only a parent’s responsibility, which isn’t true.
Should the government provide free school lunches? Absolutely. That requires funding and legislative will. The government has a responsibility (well, theoretically) to protect and serve its people, including children and families. An overlap of responsibility if you will. Free school lunches does not infringe on anyone’s rights and instead betters communities, eases burden on struggling parents, and helps students perform and receive proper nutrition. And should a family or student wish to not receive a school lunch, they are free to opt out and bring their own. It doesn’t require scanning every student’s lunchbox or installing surveillance infrastructure in every kitchen. The intervention is proportionate to the problem.
Starmer’s proposal isn’t. Preventing nude image sharing at the device level requires either client-side scanning of all communications or breaking end-to-end encryption entirely. That’s mass surveillance infrastructure installed on every phone, affecting every adult, every journalist, every abuse survivor using encrypted messaging, every person who has ever sent a legal private image to another consenting adult. And unlike our lunch analogy, a family or student, nor an unaffiliated person altogether, has little to no option to opt out should they use one of these major platforms/devices. The harm of the intervention is categorically larger than the harm it addresses.
A better analogy: should a parent leave alcohol or an unsecured firearm accessible to a child? No, and we hold parents accountable for that. We don’t require routine home inspections of every household to verify compliance. The accountability lands on the person who chose to bring the dangerous item into proximity with the child and who controls access to it. The parent pays for the phone. The parent pays for the data plan. The parent hands the child the device. The tools to monitor and restrict that device already exist, provided by the large platforms, on routers, etc, and are largely unused.
The problem is real. The solution being proposed requires dismantling privacy for everyone to address the failures of some. There are targeted interventions that haven’t been exhausted. Those who stand to benefit are not the children, but the companies able to profit off the data collected and the governments able to invade privacy where there wasn’t said existing infrastructure to do so.
This is a controlling party (government/private companies) abusing a moral panic which has been common throughout history. Just look at the Patriot Act.
I mostly agree with everything you say, except for one thing.
I’m pretty sure it’s technically possible to detect nude images, on device, 100% securely, without anyone ever knowing it was detected. This probably isn’t the approach that some corporations will take, but as far as I am aware, this is how the current nude detection on iPhone works. It’s all on device, and just blurs it so the user has to accept a warning before seeing the content. If you control your phone, you can disable it. If it’s a phone setup for a child, the child cannot disable it. It’s up to the parent to specify what the child is allowed to do.
Fair point, and I’ll concede, but only partially, as it is nit what is being discussed here. Starmer’s proposal isn’t asking for Apple to expand their system, it’s mandating platforms to comply and make it impossible, and the platforms can choose how to do so. On-device detection that never leaves the device is a meaningfully different privacy profile than server-side scanning or breaking E2E encryption. Apple’s Communication Safety feature works roughly as you described and that architecture is less invasive than the worst case scenario. If every implementation were genuinely on-device, opt-in, parent-controlled, and open source verifiable, it would be a different conversation.
But that’s where my concession stops.
We can only take a corporation’s word that it’s truly on-device and nothing is retained. The history of that promise is not encouraging. There have been multiple instances across the industry of companies guaranteeing on-device processing only for that data to appear in breach disclosures afterward. Closed, proprietary systems cannot be independently verified. We’re being asked to trust the architecture of companies whose entire business model is built on data extraction.
There’s also a false positive problem. Google has already implemented similar detection and there are confirmed cases of users having their entire Google accounts permanently locked after photographing their own child in the bath. Emails, photos, Drive, business files, income streams, all gone, with no meaningful appeals process. The harm from a false positive in a system like this isn’t a minor inconvenience, it’s potentially catastrophic and irreversible.
And then there’s the infrastructure problem. The Patriot Act is, once again, the prime example. You build the architecture for one stated purpose and then it gets legislated into something broader. Age verification is the live example happening right now. It started as self-attestation. That wasn’t sufficient so it became on-device ID verification. That wasn’t sufficient so it became third party trusted providers. Private vendors like Persona and kID. Both of which have had documented breaches after promising on-device verification themselves. This is literally the documented trajectory of every surveillance infrastructure built in the name of protection.
It’s never a matter of if they legislate it further. It’s when. And who profits from the expanded version.
