“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.