“Labour’s spyware plan for phones is straight out of North Korea”, writes Silkie Carlo in the Telegraph.
Quote:
The technological reality of Sir Keir Starmer’s demand is extraordinary: that every smartphone in Britain must be child-locked. That means two enormous changes for every one of us: first, our phones will restrict our internet access to child-friendly content only, and second, government-mandated AI software will constantly monitor our messages, video calls and photo albums for verboten activity.
The only way to escape Starmer’s Great British Firewall and get regular internet access is to undergo a digital ID check on the device to register yourself as an adult user.
Convenient, perhaps, for a Prime Minister who has failed to get a digital ID system through the front door.
This is a total reshaping of modern civil liberty – a remodelling of internet access, a strangulation of freedom of information, and a death sentence for online anonymity and privacy. That such extreme, illiberal measures could be more appealing to our politicians than the more natural and effective solution of parental responsibility reveals a deeper malaise in British culture.
The uncomfortable truth is that many parents no longer want the burden of supervising their children in the digital playground. Too many, stretched by work and time pressures, would rather outsource that responsibility – first to big tech as both the playmate and the nanny, and ultimately to the state to act as Big Brother.
and
But the price that the rest of the country will pay for the slide towards infantilising control of the internet is significant. In every other democracy, smartphones are portals to the largest library in human history. In Starmer’s Britain, those same devices are being devalued to become, in effect, state-controlled spyware in our pockets.
I use Firefox with the new built-in VPN. Anyone have any (technical) thoughts on this?
BTW. Two things.
1. Firefox is almost the only browser not built on Chromium (yes, Safari uses Webkit but that is very closely related to Chromium). Does this make a difference? I know there are some real minority browsers out there as well but Edge, Opera and obviously Chrome use the Chromium engine.
2. The Firefox VPN can be tricky to install and can conflict with Privacy Badger. Does on my machines. If the VPN doesn’t show-up first check you have at least build 149+ then do this:
Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and press Enter.Accept the warning prompt.Search for browser.ipprotection.enabled.Double-click the preference to change its value from false to true.Restart your browser, or wait a few minutes for the update to apply.
Very Agenda 2030.
And all stuff the officials and “experts” have been pushing for – for years.
Whether Sir Keir Starmer or Andrew “Andy” (“I am not a Cambridge graduate – I am Andy Cap, I am into ferrets and beer” – it is just so phony) Burnham are Prime Minister – the-same-things-will-happen.
I agree with the OP’s point that parents increasingly want out of actual parenting and want someone else to do it. This is true “Nanny State” and is scary. It is one of the reasons I never wanted to go into teaching. I’d want to teach maths and physics and not be a pseudo-parent, mentor, counsellor, role-model… That is the job of families and communities. I use the last word in the true, original, sense. There is some truth in the idea that parents (I am not one) maybe want this due to the pressures of modern life but the government (in the loose sense – not just our elected government) is using this like a dealer uses an addicts craving for heroin. They are increasingly degrading the voluntary civil institutions. A teenage lass wants a beehive on the land I’m a warden of. I’ve had to be DBS checked to show I’m not a nonce because that is assumed unless proven otherwise and the process is a complex farce. All I wanted to know was that she’d have help from an apiarist (she’s got that) and we’d not have a swarming. I also suggested the odd jar of honey* might be nice which I think is fair enough.
But yeah… I thought it was a great idea. The powers that er… be regard “safe-guarding” in the sense that any adult male is a possible peado. I was more concerned about stinging insects (when I found out she had a skilled bee-keeper to teach her then – OK) and that the proposed location was next to a stream with slippy banks. But what do I know about “safe-guarding”? I’ve only been warden here for 19 years.
This is the rigmarole that happens when a kid goes off-piste to learn a skill off their own bat, produce a useful product (and it’s gonna be good – the garden has all the right flowers and heather and stuff). I mentioned the odd jar of honey but (whilst nice) what matters more is the bees and they’ll really help the garden by pollinating stuff. Everyone wins!
*Note I didn’t use the term honey pot in a comment involving a teenage girl and the word “nonce”. Shit! I just did.
It would be far less intrusive and authoritarian to simply ban kids under X years from using smart phones.
Probably cheaper and easier to enforce, too.
Which sort of tells you that they are not attacking the problem they are claiming to attack.
@bobby b
It would be far less intrusive and authoritarian to simply ban kids under X years from using smart phones.
Which is better, but still not great. Parents don’t want to supervise their kids? I mean just install parental control software on it. I’m not in favor of totalitarian government but I am sort of in favor of totalitarian parenting.
It is curious, is it not, that Starmer and crew are so concerned about what kids do on their phones, but seem terrified to address the real, horrific challenges of actual little girls being forced into prostitution by horrific people who are protected from the law by the color of their skin.
I’ll say it again, Britain is so far beyond hope they’d need a telescope to get a glimpse of hope’s ass as it runs away.
Fraser Orr: “Which is better, but still not great.”
Agree. But, if “kids” were actually Starmer’s real concern, this would be better. But he’d much rather have no net anonymity, and a digital currency, and Big Brother in his cabinet.
You’ll never get some significant percentage of parents to give a carp about what their kids do. You and I and – well, normal parents – don’t need to be told to keep our kids off of porn sites and islamization sites and beheading-lesson sites and (gasp!) those horrid libertarian-right sites. The people that DO need to be told this would scoff anyway.
But I wouldn’t have actually been too uncomfortable with telling my pre-16 kids “no, all you can have is a flip-phone. If you want internet, come home and use the fam computer.”
Point is, Starmer is not driven by his love of kids. (Well, not THAT way, I mean. Who knows about the other way.)
I foresee a brisk demand for unencumbered phones with offshore telephone numbers, smuggled into the country and sold, possibly alongside guns, to anyone with no questions asked.
Problem with this is, you cannot equip a significant percentage of Brit society with such phones. They will be a niche thing. The only people who will go through the trouble of buying and using them will be the already-convinced.
You need the vast bulk of a society to be able to see the free conversations of X to change a society. You need to win minds over, not just impress the already-joined. Samizdat needs to be generally-available.
But I DO see a money-making proposition here. 😉
@bobby b
Point is, Starmer is not driven by his love of kids. (Well, not THAT way, I mean. Who knows about the other way.)
For sure, I guess I was just emphasizing your point about how transparent the excuses are.
As to smuggling in phones, it kind of sounds like what they do in prison: a statement that I think needs no further explanation.
I for one welcome the beneficial caring review of all my on-line activities by our benevolent overlords.
bobby b – this is not really about children, it is about general totalitarianism (although, yes, the regime does want to control what children see and hear – but not for sexual reasons, for POLITICAL and cultural indoctrination reasons, it also want to control what adults see and hear – Agenda 2030 and all that).
And it makes no difference, on this, who is Prime Minister – this comes from the officials and “experts”.
…and if adult registration is introduced this is one law that will never be repealed by any future government. It is authoritarian catnip.
It would be far less intrusive and authoritarian to simply ban kids under X years from using smart phones.
You’re going to have to build loads more prisons to lock up all the kids using smartphones.
“Pocket Starmer” – sounds sinister indeed.
There were clues to the kind of authortarian, “Precauationary Principle” sort of man he was back in the Plague, when he was forever throwing doubt on the need to lift lockdowns.
Paul Marks writes of Andy Burnham: “I am into ferrets and beer”
Best comment of the day.
Is it such a huge problem that the media are making it out to be? Have no children but old enough to remember the controversy about ‘video nasties’ corrupting children. A lot of mainstream output these days would probably come under that category.
Dyspeptic Curmudgeon: “unencumbered phones with offshore telephone numbers”
Or off-planet, maybe? A satellite phone that connects through Elon Musk’s Starlink?
Johnathan Pearce – it is just so fake, so phony, A Cambridge graduate pretending to be a man-of-the-people. Andrew “Andy” Burnham is an establishment puppet – he would carry on with everything, from wild government spending to “Diversity and Inclusion” (i.e. the gradual genocide of the British people – via demographic transformation), he would not change course – it would be more of the same.
If the people in the by-election vote for Mr Burnham it will be difficult not to totally despair. The establishment will CORRECTLY read such a result as a green light to just carry on their project of destroying the British people – and this is an international project, Western nations (Western peoples) are being gradually destroyed in general – NOT just by mass immigration and the natural increase of hostile populations, but also by the “Social Revolution” (which started many decades ago) which was very much top-down (it was not organic social change) and always had the intention of destroying the traditional family and collapsing the fertility rate.
We live in a Western world where the most “paranoid conspiracy theories” are now reality. Where great historic Western cities, such Vienna, London and New York, are falling.
Unusually, I don’t think those commenting are on top of how bad this is. The age verification process is to be handled, I understand, by various private companies who will gather information about you in order to verify your age. It is more than likely that they will be hacked and once they are that information will be available to those with bad intentions. Your privacy will be lost and irrecoverable; identity theft anyone?
It seems that the miserable and inept Starmer sees this policy as part of his legacy. When it comes to the policy that the government should be able to look at your Apple and WhatsApp messages he is being totally hypocritical; this is the man who vanished his WhatsApp messages about the appointment of Mandelson.
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” – Ayn Rand
“America is now run by savages in suits.” – Michael Hurd
I cannot think of anyone in the world today who better exemplifies a savage in a suit than Keir Starmer. At least Ghengis Khan was honest enough to look like a barbarian.
“It seems that the miserable and inept Starmer sees this policy as part of his legacy.”
He may be miserable, but he is not to be defined as inept. He knows exactly what he is doing and why. Look at him more closely. He’s evil.
Steve D
Yes he is evil – but he will be replaced by someone just as evil, or worse.
All puppets of the establishment – an international establishment that is filled with hatred not just for the British people, but for the West generally.
And this includes the NON Marxist parts of the international establishment – such as the Economist magazine, which is not Marxist, but is still utterly sickening. Indeed evil.