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UK watchdog probes TikTok (and Reddit, Imgur) over children’s data | POLITICO
Reading between the lines it looks like the ICO wants to act as the age verification czar rather than staying in its lane & leaving that to Ofcom; I wonder why… but I suspect it’s a lingering hope of one day being giant-killers. The … (ICO) said on Monday the investigation was in response to
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Dr Jessica Shurson on the (perennial) arguments that “…if only you *knew* how bad CSAM abuse is” — you would be willing to give up secure & private instant messaging
https://x.com/JessicaShurson/status/1894286676387672540 The “come to the NCA and you’ll change your mind” is so patronising. I prosecuted CSAM cases and it was horrific. It doesn’t change my mind any more than it did the FBI’s when they started promoting e2ee after the salt typhoon hack
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Retrospective: The Man Behind Biden’s Sweeping AI Executive Order | POLITICO | End of the techlash in sight?
I deplore what’s happening in the USA, but there’s a side-game I’m watching closely & more neutrally: advocates for the past ~15 years of proactive tech fearmongering are gone from their positions of leverage. This will cause change both good & bad, but I most fear… …but I most fear that we’re headed towards a
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Fun: “what five things did you do last week?”
It’s a long time since I’ve seen one of these terribly useful automatic text generators: https://www.opmreply.com/ Via Cark
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France, too, pushing to make it illegal to have privacy online:
French parliament will consider a law that would require the installation of backdoors in VPNs and instant messengers like Signal or WhatsApp. Fine of EUR 1.5 million for non-compliance. https://www.senat.fr/amendements/2024-2025/254/Amdt_73.html Via:
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Biden Justice Department downplayed U.K. demand for Apple ‘back door’ | The Washington Post
This has been in the works for a long time; it doesn’t matter if it’s Conservative or Labour “in charge”, the UK Home Office hates private communication amongst individuals: The U.S. Justice Department told Congress in November that there were no major disputes with the United Kingdom over how the two allies seek data from
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Signal will abandon Sweden if the Swedish government’s data storage proposal is passed | SVT Nyheter
Via Google Translate, quote: The encrypted messaging app Signal is growing – now even the Swedish Armed Forces use the app. But the government wants to force the company to introduce a technical backdoor for the Police and Säpo. – If it becomes a reality, we will leave Sweden, says Signal’s head Meredith Whittaker, in
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Nice little blog post from Matt Green, although I’ll note he skipped the implicit Q2(b): “if surveillance was to apply only to UK persons, how would they be defined or distinguished?”
I’ve heard several times now: “Perhaps they could just spy on Britons?” — but given how easily folk are using VPNs & fake data to circumvent the ADP block, what would “a Briton” mean, and would establishing that not mean KYC-ing the whole world? Three questions about Apple, encryption, and the U.K. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/02/23/three-questions-about-apple-encryption-and-the-u-k/
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James Ball on Twitter
What’s happening with Elon Musk and the centralised data of the US federal government is the kind of worst-case scenario Tony Blair and other ID card/central data acolytes have always dismissed as baseless fear-mongering, btw. https://x.com/jamesrbuk/status/1893694844578443327
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NB: you can’t call for big platforms like Apple to literally *break a law* like the Investigatory Powers Act, unless you are also content for them to wilfully break (e.g.) *GDPR*
This is something which I have had to explain to several civil society organisations in the past year; the general thinking is “it’s okay for $PLATFORM to break $SPECIFIC_LAW if I personally consider [that law] to be illiberal & misconceived.” But… The truth is: you expect platforms to obey the law, and if they don’t
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Government has made UK user data ‘less secure’ with Apple row – Experts | The Independent
“So actually, the only thing that the UK government has achieved in all of this is to disadvantage UK users … “They’ve made that corner of the internet less secure for us.” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/apple-government-cybersecurity-data-protection-sky-news-b2702490.html It’s a bit of a change from the sales pitch for the Online Safety Act
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