Internet News

Republican Louisiana state representative Laurie Schlegel pushed through her bill  HB 142 earlier this year requiring age verification for any website that contains 33.3% or more pornographic material. The law takes effect from 1st January 2023.

According to Schlegel, websites would normally verify someone's age in collaboration with LA Wallet. An app available for anyone who has a Louisiana state ID or driver's license. Other options are also allowed.

It will be the website's responsibility to ensure age verification is required when accessing their site in Louisiana. There are no censors to enforce the law, instead the law allows residents to sue porn sites for any claimed harm to children caused by viewing porn on a website without age verification.

There is legislation in Washington, D.C. that looks to implement something like this on a national level. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced a bill similar to Schlegel's.

The Online Safety Bill is back in Parliament. It had been stalled for five months whilst the government made a few changes. A Parliamentary debate on Monday (5th December) revealed the shift in policy direction for the first time. It's relatively small change, with big implications.

According to the government, the Online Safety Bill is supposed to protect children. However, from a digital rights perspective it is probably the most worrying piece of legislation ever imagined to date. The government's focus is on the content it wants to ban, with little attention paid to the impact on freedom of expression or privacy. The lack of definition or precision in the text leaves wide open loopholes for over-removals of content and the possibility of government- imposed, privatised surveillance.

The emphasis was on new amendments to be tabled early next year. Self-harm content, deep fakes and the sharing of non-consensual intimate images, will be defined as new criminal offences and illegal content.

The subtle policy shift turns on a requirement for large online platforms to tackle the so-called "legal but harmful" content. This is a legally-problematic, grey area. It is about content that is not illegal but which the government wants to ban, and understood to include eating disorders, self-harm, and false claims about medicines.

The government has announced a plan to delete this requirement, but only for adult users, not for children. An amendment will be tabled next week.

A further, legally problematic, amendment requires platforms to allow adult users to filter out these kinds of harmful content for themselves. The idea is a kind of filter button where users can select the type of harmful content that they don't want to see.

In tandem, there will be an amendment that makes online platforms enforce their terms and conditions with regard to content that is not addressed by the Bill.

We have seen drafts of some of these amendments, and await the final versions.

This filter, together with the requirement to enforce terms and conditions, and an existing requirement to remove all illegal content, is what the government is calling its "triple shield". The government claims this will protect users from the range of harms set out in the Bill. It also claims the move will protect free speech. This claim does not stack up, as the underlying censorship framework remains in place, including the possibility of general monitoring and upload filters.

Moreover, the effect of these amendments is to mitigate in favour of age-gating. The notion of "legal but harmful" content for children remains in the Bill. In Monday's debate, government Ministers emphasised the role of "age assurance" which is a requirement in the Bill although it does not say how it should be implemented.

The government's position on age-gating is broader than just excluding under-18s from 'adult' content. The Secretary of State, Michelle Donelan, said that all platforms must know the age of their users. They may be required to differentiate between age-groups, in order to prevent children from engaging with age-inappropriate harmful content to be defined by the government. The likely methods will use biometric surveillance.

MPs have also passed an amendment that confirms chat controls on private messaging services. This is the "spy clause" , renumbered S. 106 (formerly S.104). It's a stealth measure that is almost invisible in the text, with no precision as to what providers will do. The government's preferred route is understood to be client-side scanning. This completes a trio of surveillance on public posts, private chats and children.

Twitter's Trust and Safety Council is no more, an email sent to its members who remained after last week's resignations reveals.

On Friday, three members of the council resigned, citing disagreements with Elon Musk over the safety and well-being of Twitter users under his ownership.

Musk replied to a thread started by Anne Collier, one of the members who resigned from the now-dissolved body, by tweeting:

It is a crime that they [the Council] refused to take action on child exploitation for years!

The email announcing its end said that Twitter's new phase requires reevaluating how it incorporates external insights into its products and policy, adding that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this.

Irish President Higgins has signed the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill into law.

The OSMR Act 2022 amends the Broadcasting Act 2009 to establish Coimisiún na Meán (a multi-person Media Commission), dissolve the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, establish a regulatory framework for online safety, update the regulation of television broadcasting and video on-demand services, and transpose the revised Audiovisual Media Services Directive into Irish law.

The regulatory framework for online safety will be overseen by an Online Safety Commissioner, who will be empowered to make binding Online Safety Codes to hold designated online services to account for how they tackle the availability of some of the most serious forms of harmful online content. The Commissioner is also empowered under the Act to introduce an individual complaints mechanism on a phased basis, focusing initially on children and to order the removal or limitation of availability of specific items of harmful online content, either on foot of a complaint or on its own initiative.

Updates to the regulation of television broadcasting and video on-demand services will bring video on-demand services under statutory regulation for the first time. Providers of such services will, as broadcasters currently are, be subject to binding codes and rules, including in relation to advertising, accessibility and impartiality in news and current affairs.

Coimisiún na Meán will have a modern suite of robust compliance and enforcement powers, including the powers to appoint authorised officers to conduct investigations of suspected non-compliance, to require the provision of information and to seek administrative financial sanctions of up to 20 million euros or 10% of turnover. Ultimately, providers of regulated services under the Act who remain in breach of the rules may be subject to criminal prosecution.

Apple has announced it will provide fully encrypted iCloud backups, meeting a longstanding demand by EFF and other privacy-focused organizations.

We applaud Apple for listening to experts, child advocates, and users who want to protect their most sensitive data. Encryption is one of the most important tools we have for maintaining privacy and security online. That's why we included the demand that Apple let users encrypt iCloud backups in the Fix It Already campaign that we launched in 2019.

Apple's on-device encryption is strong, but some especially sensitive iCloud data, such as photos and backups, has continued to be vulnerable to government demands and hackers. Users who opt in to Apple's new proposed feature, which the company calls Advanced Data Protection for iCloud , will be protected even if there is a data breach in the cloud, a government demand, or a breach from within Apple (such as a rogue employee). Apple said today that the feature will be available to U.S. users by the end of the year, and will roll out to the rest of the world in "early 2023."

We're also pleased to hear that Apple has officially dropped its plans to install photo-scanning software on its devices , which would have inspected users' private photos in iCloud and iMessage. This software, a version of what's called "client-side scanning," was intended to locate child abuse imagery and report it to authorities. When a user's information is end-to-end encrypted and there is no device scanning, the user has true control over who has access to that data.

Apple's image-scanning plans were announced in 2021 , but delayed after EFF supporters protested and delivered a petition containing more than 60,000 signatures to Apple executives. While Apple quietly postponed these scanning plans later that year, today's announcement makes it official.

In a statement distributed to Wired and other journalists, Apple said:

We have further decided to not move forward with our previously proposed CSAM detection tool for iCloud Photos. Children can be protected without companies combing through personal data, and we will continue working with governments, child advocates, and other companies to help protect young people, preserve their right to privacy, and make the internet a safer place for children and for us all.

The company has said it will focus instead on "opt-in tools for parents" and "privacy-preserving solutions to combat Child Sexual Abuse Material and protect children, while addressing the unique privacy needs of personal communications and data storage."

Constant scanning for child abuse images can lead to unwarranted investigations and false positives. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on how faulty scans at Google led to false accusations of child abuse against fathers in Texas and California. The men were exonerated by police but were subjected to permanent account deletion by Google.

Companies should stop trying to square the circle by putting bugs in our pockets at the request of governments, and focus on protecting their users, and human rights. Today Apple took a big step forward on both fronts. There are a number of implementation choices that can affect the overall security of the new feature, and we'll be pushing Apple to make sure the encryption is as strong as possible. Finally, we'd like Apple to go a step further. Turning on these privacy-protective features by default would mean that all users can have their rights protected.

Apple Inc. announced this week that it will offer full encryption for data in its cloud storage system worldwide, which not surprisingly has been met with consternation from hackers, thieves & snoopers but joy from customers.

The move means that all content, chats, photos and videos, will have end-to-end encryption under Apple's Advanced Data Protection feature. For the average consumer, this is a win, and for the average privacy advocate, it's a victory in an ongoing fight with the authorities.

We applaud Apple for listening to experts, child advocates, and users who want to protect their most sensitive data, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote today. Encryption is one of the most important tools we have for maintaining privacy and security online.

The foundation was equally pleased that Apple also stated that it had finally decided not to implement its CSAM photo-scanning child protection technology.

The authorities, on the other hand, have denounced the move, especially the FBI, which has a history of battling with Apple over trying to get its hands on user data.

Apple will also likely run into problems concerning the U.K. government and its online safety bill. The bill gives the U.K. government broad powers to force companies to ensure content on their platforms aligns with what it calls internet safety. Many privacy advocates have condemned the bill as a new kind of censorship.

A Canadian Senate committee amending the Liberal government's controversial Bill C-11 has added the requirement for online platforms to verify the age/identity of users accessing pornography, a move internet law experts say is likely unconstitutional.

Sen. Julie Miville-Dechene proposed the amendment, stating that online undertakings shall implement methods such as age-verification methods to prevent children from accessing programs on the internet that are devoted to depicting, for a sexual purpose, explicit sexual activity.

The committee passed the amendment, with seven senators voting in favour, five opposing it and two abstaining.

The amended version of the legislation must be approved by the full Senate and then go back to the House of Commons before it becomes law. #

It if does pass into law, it would be up to the CRTC to decide how to implement the age verification requirement.