The UK has finally passed the Online Safety Bill, something members of parliament have been wrangling with for several years. Under the law, children should be safer when venturing online and there are even clauses that could see tech bosses face jail time if they don’t comply with the law.
Under the bill, online platforms will need to ensure they remove content containing child sexual abuse, controlling or coercive behavior, extreme sexual violence, illegal immigration and people smuggling, promoting or facilitating suicide, promoting self-harm, animal cruelty, selling illegal drugs or weapons, or terrorism.
In addition to outlawing certain types of content on online platforms, this wide-reaching bill also creates new criminal offences such as cyber-flashing (sending unwanted sexual imagery online) and the sharing of deep fake pornography where AI Is used to insert someone’s likeness into pornographic content.
Furthermore, the bill will ensure that parents can more easily gain information about their children from online platforms if their child has died. This will obviously be useful in cases such as bullying leading to a child’s suicide, for example.
Under the law, Ofcom will be responsible for enforcing the new rules. If companies fail to comply with the law they can be fined up to 10% of their global revenue or £18 million, whichever is larger.
In more serious cases, bosses could face jail time if they don’t follow the rules. This was added for those cases where financial punishments don’t seem to be effective.
Ofcom is now in the process of creating codes of conduct for businesses to follow so that they don’t overstep the new boundaries. To help quieten fears of government overreach, Ofcom said that it is not a censor and that its role is to tackle the root causes of harm.
The new law is certainly a dramatic piece of legislation and services like WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage could all leave the UK if they were to be forced to break their encryption. The email provider Proton has also said it will fight the government in court so that it can keep offering end-to-end encrypted emails.
Source: BBC News