UK Tells big Tech to Block Nudes – in 3 Months

The UK is giving Apple, Google and other big tech firms 3 months to create safeguards on phones and tablets that find and block nude images of kids to disrupt trafficking in kiddie porn.

The PM announced the measure in a speech in London this week.

The proposal would apply to both new and existing devices.

Adults will need to use age verification in order to access adult content.

For the moment, the government says there will be no data collection, no monitoring and no reporting. The device will simply block content it doesn’t approve of. Likely, that would be the next step.

Trying to understand why the government might do this – they say that 90 percent of child sex abuse reports in 2024 had content that kids generated themselves. This could significantly reduce the victimization of kids.

The UK is already considering sweeping social media restrictions to protect kids. While this type of control is legitimately designed to protect kids, kids are way smarter than the controls and many kids quickly figure out how to get around them. The UK is already piloting potential solutions with volunteer guinea pigs.

But of course, nothing is perfect.

First of all, to do this in three months means that the companies will slap something together, test it a tiny bit and roll it out. Not exactly conducive to a well thought out strategy or a secure one.

Then you have to figure out how to deal with a family device that is shared among family members. One user is a kid; another an adult.

Of course you have the simple problem of determining what the definition of appropriate is. Not to mention how to reliably distinguish between, say, a 17 year old and an 18 year old.

The preference would be to do this all on the device because that might simplify the encryption back door problem.

If this is implemented and you are using last year’s phone model, or, god forbid, your phone is 2 or 3 years old, and the testing is done on the device, your phone will likely slow to a crawl. Time for everyone to buy brand new top of the line phones so that the government can efficiently eavesdrop on you.

One expert, the CISO for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, says it will make the majority of devices used in the UK today unusable. That of course won’t stop the government.

Of course this will improve Microsoft, Google and Apple’s market control because newcomers won’t be able to implement these requirements.

If you have to move all of the user’s data to the cloud, who pays for that bandwidth and how do you secure it? What form of backdoor to privacy do you need to create in order to implement this.

Not to mention, the law has not even been drafted yet, not to consider debating it in Parliament. And, companies can’t really implement this until the law is passed because they won’t know what they are supposed to implement.

Also, consider business users; they, apparently, would not be exempt from this and their corporate, proprietary, potentially trade secret, export controlled,even defense controlled information would all have to be accessed by their phone maker and potentially moved to the cloud. For some companies, that would effectively require them to ban the use of phones and tablets. I am sure that will make UK companies more competitive.

One more thing to consider. If you are an American company and you send employees to the UK, that government mandated spyware would automatically be put on your US phone. At least at this point there is no discussion of removing it when you leave the UK.

Stay tuned, this is clearly not fully baked.

Credit: The Record and CSO Online

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