Post by: kat on July 25, 2025, 10:58:34 AM
The UK's Online Safety Act (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/online-safety-act) is now live and in effect. All residents in the UK - minors and adults alike - will now be required to verify their identity to services or websites that provide content that's not specifically for children under the age of 18 (17 years or younger). Depending on the server this may means scanning an 'identity' document that includes a photo or owners image, such as a passport, or by verifying using a 'face scan'. In both (or all) instances, this personally identifying information (PII) is uploaded/sent to the verifying party.
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Important note: this isn't specifically about content that would otherwise be considered 'adult' or "18" or "R" rated, but content the Online Safety Act considers "harmful" or "inappropriate", e.g. "this includes [but is not limited to] taking specific action to prevent children from encountering pornographic content, and content that encourages, promotes or provides instructions for suicide, self-harm and eating disorders." ["How the Online Safety Act will help to protect children (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/how-the-online-safety-act-will-help-to-protect-children)"]
In a nutshell, the Online Safety Act places a "legal duty", a "burden of responsibility" to keep children safe, into the hands of third-parties and other entities or people, not the parents or those directly responsible for their general well being. In addition, the upload or sending of identifying documentation to third-party's does not guaranty this process is being serviced through legitimate entity's specifically because of the third party burden - this won't necessarily stop bad actors hijacking this requirement for their own ends, it's astonishing this doesn't appear to have been a consideration, the Government instead relying on bad actors not acting badly ("criminals better not criminal") - in other words, law abiding citizens most affected.
Post by: kat on July 29, 2025, 05:17:25 PM
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Repeal the Online Safety Act
We want the Government to repeal the Online Safety act.
More details
We believe that the scope of the Online Safety act is far broader and restrictive than is necessary in a free society.
For instance, the definitions in Part 2 covers online hobby forums, which we think do not have the resource to comply with the act and so are shutting down instead.
We think that Parliament should repeal the act and work towards producing proportionate legislation rather than risking clamping down on civil society talking about trains, football, video games or even hamsters because it can't deal with individual bad faith actors.
100,000 signature were needed for the topic to be considered up for debate in parliament, which it surpassed in 1 day; at time of writing the petition has ~400,000 signatures - what should happen with these is that once they reach the set goal, a date is then set for a discussion of the issue. In this instance this will not happen as the UK government responded to the petition directly saying they have
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...no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
Reading the full response, the government is obligating compliance to "harms" defined by OfCom, the non-governmental organising (a Blairite Quango [quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation] established in 2003) tasked with policing all content and media in the UK, but its framing seems to obligate compliance in a negative sense. In other words, OfCom isn't directly advising with regards to compliance, they policing for non-compliance (which in theory means just about anyone).