(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


ICYMI: @LordJimKnight (who has abandoned Twitter) proposes in the #OnlineSafetyBill that platforms must know the nationality and/or physical location of their users, lest VPNs (etc) are used to circum

2023-05-06 08:47:05+00:00

This proposal is misconceived, illiberal and practically totalitarian; the Internet is not designed with the concept that data (i.e. speech) has a nationality, and therefore the obligation would be on platforms to obtain and maintain nationality or physical location of their users (rather than utilise communications metadata) in order to hamper people who might use a VPN.

Compare: It was Facebook’s proposal to add a [Chinese] “nationality” bit to user-profiles, in order to support Chinese censorship as part of their pitch to enter the Chinese market, which led to me quitting the company in 2016, blowing the whistle internally, and shocking the engineering force — thereby helping sink the proposal which subsequently and finally evaporated during the Trump anti-China era.

Again, to reinforce: the internet’s infrastructure does not support what Jim proposes:

It’s not like some Customs & Border Force officer can reach out through your computer’s screen and demand to know who you are, where you are located, and what your (singular? dual?) nationality is; and… it’s manifestly illiberal (not to mention: contra to the popular idea that platforms should be gathering less data about their users, rather than more) to oblige global platforms to track “Britons” for special treatment; for clarity: not only should platforms not have to track Britons, but also why should Britons have to be tracked, globally? And how would that be proportionate?

Source (PDF) of this masterpiece: https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/50887/documents/3349
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/63231
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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