Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

a) define an ‘adult site’, yes Pornhub would probably apply, but Readit?

b) Who sets up the device? Is it a child who is given it as a present, who, I’m sure will enter their actual date of birth, or the parent who is firstly technically competent to do it, or is sufficiently tech-savvy to understand this stuff and have had the appropriate ’talks’ with their children.

Now ‘duty of care for their user’, except how can sites possibly know who or how old their users are, and whether or not they need protecting.

Which all circles round to age verification, and how do you do this without forcing everyone to hand over personal information to whoever provided the lowest tender bid - lowest for a good reason.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

What sites children should not be able to access until a certain age (these may be different eg social media at 16, porn at 18) would have to be universally agreed upon, so that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.

It would be up to an adult to set the phone up, but we are then faced with the same problem if some parents not being capable if doing it or that they couldn't care less.

The legal cases surrounding 'duty of care' have involved users of all ages. The last one involving a child could equally apply to an adult:

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Again define what is an Adult site, who decides which site would be adult and which would not, who ever that is has a lot of sites to look at and determine if it is adult or not. If it is the site owner who would check they have designated the site correctly

Would you for instance class the BBC news website as adult, would you class Cable forum as adult or child safe.

What about sites that are hosted in country's that do not conform to the rules that are laid down. Do you then ask the ISP's to block those sites however remember that can be circumnavigated by using a simple free VPN and many of those are based in country's that do not have to follow the Online Safety Bill rules.

This is the latest on the toothless OFCOM

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c624330lg1ko

Here is another question


I honestly think this will lead to yet more data gathering via age checking. However even the age checking is easily circumnavigated by anyone with a little knowledge.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

The Sunday Mirror (as per Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg) said earlier in a headline 'Kids Social Medua Ban Within Weeks'.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

It will be interesting to see how that works.


Kids are already banned from buying alcohol but some still drink it, for example.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

If this idea came to fruituon, which sites are designated as being age restricted would have to be mutually decided upon either country by country or worldwide.

Social media sites and pornography will be easy to define, but I agree that others aren't as clear cut. This site is self defined as a family friendly site but, like you say, should the BBC News website be restricted? On the one hand it may feature images and descriptions of the horrors of war, but should we be restricting news to young people, simply because it's unpleasant?

---------- Post added at 10:33 ---------- Previous post was at 10:28 ----------

Indeed, whatever measures they decide upon, there will always be some who manage to circumvent it. They could ban children from using/buying VPN'S, but some are free and they may be using their parents. Also, what about free WiFi that spills onto the streets? Would hotels etc wish to limit what their adult guests can access? If not, children could simply stand outside with their phones (assuming it wasn't password protected.)

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

It's no good trying to 'ban' anything, any one of us could compile a list of things 'banned' in this Country that are still being done regularly.

No matter how many times a child/young adult is warned about the dangers of doing something, there will be a certain percentage that still do it (look at deaths in water this week).

Unless we go full on 'North Korea' there isn't much we can do to stop 'bad things' on the internet without causing problems for everyone else.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Getting closer and closer with each day!

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Banning "whatever" isn't about stopping something completely, it's about reducing the number of incidents of "whatever" is.

Banning drink-driving hasn't completely stopped drink-driving, but it has reduced the number of cases and the consequent mayhem caused - there were 1640 drink-driving fatalities in 1979, and 230 in 2019.

Health and Safety Laws at work haven't totally stopped deaths and injuries at work, but they have reduced the number of workplace deaths from 620 in 1974 to 124 in 2024.

Saying you can't fix everything so you shouldn't try to fix anything isn't really an optimal way of trying to progress things...

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Yes you're right in what you say, but this 'Online Safety Bill' is starting to look like throwing the baby out with the bath water . .

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Yes, quite true Hugh, but the two examples you cite are absolute offences, irrespective of the age of the people involved. If you contravene said laws, and are caught, then expect to be punished.

But it is not illegal to view porn on the internet, nor have a social media account, or view some ‘dodgy’ content (for some definition of dodgy). The whole point is that the OSA is trying to legislate methods to block under 16s from viewing material that is mysteriously fully available to them on their 16th birthday. It’s not that under-16s need to verify their age, but everyone does. Everyone will be expected to hand over personal information to some third party just to access perfectly legal material.

This is what many take issue with, not the aims of the Bill itself. Will it cause more problems than it ever solves? And when it is pointed out that this regulation can and will only apply to UK-based companies and it will be trivially easy to work around - the proponents become more strident. Bans on VPNs, age restricted use of VPNs - which is a bit of a circular argument, special magical children’s phones, etc. all of which rely on a degree of magical thinking, similar to demands for backdoors into encryption while still keeping them secure - these two things are mutually exclusive.

Going back to one of your arguments, this is equivalent to not only making drink-driving illegal, but mandating that every single car in the UK is fitted with a breathalyser - you have to prove that you are sober before the engine will start. You have to first prove your innocence before you can go about your legal business.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

After you have presented your licence to the cars built in scanner, which then takes a picture of you using the built in camera, and uploads both to a central AI server that verifies its your licence .....

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

. . and then checks your driving habits (speed, indicators, mirror use, overtaking maneuvers, etc) and reports back to central AI HQ, which then issues a fine (£25) for each and every time you fail to adhere to the strict driving procedures as laid out in the digital form you need to accept as read and understood before the car will even start.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

I wouldn't worry too much. It won't be too long where cars will be self driving, in fact people won't usually own a car anymore. They'll simply book a self driving car as they do now for taxis, paid for via monthly subscription or single use charges for infrequent users.

Bad driving, drink driving won't be issues anymore, unless they decide that a sober qualified driver has to be present in driverless cars in emergencies to take over. Saw some footage in America where they get stuck in certain situations, so I don't think the states has such a restriction.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

So that's driving instructors and examiners out of a job then, and how will insurance work . . and at what price? :D