Your own pocket Starmer

“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.

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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.