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Tech Execs Could Face Jail Time Under Revised UK Online Safety Bill (zdnet.com) 60

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Proposed UK laws could see top managers at tech companies be jailed if they fail to meet the demands of regulators. The laws, coming in the form of an Online Safety Bill, were introduced to Parliament on Thursday after almost a year of consultation. The UK government commenced work on the proposed laws in May last year to push a duty of care onto social media platforms so that tech companies are forced to protect users from dangerous content, such as disinformation and online abuse.

Under the proposed legislation, executives of tech companies could face prosecution or jail time if they fail to cooperate with information notices issued by Ofcom, UK's communications regulator. Through the Bill, Ofcom would gain the power to issue information notices for the purpose of determining whether tech companies are performing their online safety functions. A raft of new offenses have also been added to the Bill, including making in-scope companies' senior managers criminally liable if they destroy evidence, fail to attend or provide false information in interviews with Ofcom, or obstruct the regulator when it enters company offices.

The Bill also looks to require social media platforms, search engines, and other apps and websites that allow people to post their own content to implement various measures to protect children, tackle illegal activity and uphold their stated terms and conditions. Among these measures are mandatory age checks for sites that host pornography, criminalizing cyberflashing, and a requirement for large social media platforms to give adults the ability to automatically block people who have not verified their identity on the platforms. The proposed laws, if passed, would also force social media platforms to up their moderation efforts, with the Bill calling for platforms to remove paid-for scam ads swiftly once they are alerted of their existence. A requirement for social media platforms to moderate "legal but harmful" content is also contained in the Bill, which will make large social media platforms have a duty to carry risk assessments on these types of content. Platforms will also have to set out clearly in terms of service how they will deal with such content and enforce these terms consistently.

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Tech Execs Could Face Jail Time Under Revised UK Online Safety Bill

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  • Or for not giving the government surveillance access? Oh.
  • "make in-scope companies’ senior managers criminally liable for destroying evidence, failing to attend or providing false information in interviews with Ofcom, and for obstructing the regulator when it enters company offices."

    • On the surface it seems reasonable -possibly even a good idea.

      The more details I read, the more it reminds me of life in the movie Brazil [imdb.com] .

  • off to the gulag with you!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      it's disgusting authoritarian BS

      our politicians want to head there too: https://reclaimthenet.org/cong... [reclaimthenet.org]

      you can't have a democracy without free speech and nor is it compatible with a surveillance state

      Some Republicans support this too: https://reclaimthenet.org/lind... [reclaimthenet.org] (Lindsay Graham on board with forcing backdoors and eliminating privacy)

  • A raft of new offenses have also been added to the Bill, including making in-scope companies' senior managers criminally liable if they destroy evidence, fail to attend or provide false information in interviews with Ofcom, or obstruct the regulator when it enters company offices.

    That's a Ministry of Truth. And those of you on that side of "the pond" wonder why we Americans keep guns..

    • by splutty ( 43475 )

      None of those 3 instances has anything to do with either 1984, or "Ministry of Truth".

      Managers who destroy evidence, provide false information, or obstruct law enforcement are perfectly fine with you?

      I guess you like living in some sort of dystopia.

      • The problem lies entirely with government auditors coming in to snoop around, because they decided that they were displeased with something they read online. If you can't imagine how that's a power which could easily be misused, I really don't know what else to say.

        • Everyone powerful misuses power. The only antidote is transparency.
          • by znrt ( 2424692 )

            the problem is that transparency is not really feasible, and very specially not in power. i actually would support eliminating privacy if it were everybody's privacy across the board, not just the plebs'.

            how would you propose to implement that "transparency antidote" so that officials and ceos, institutions and corps, actually honor it? can you cite one model of transparency that actually works?

            • by splutty ( 43475 )

              How about we start with punishing them harshly when they're not being transparent? Oh wait. That's actually what this bill is about...

              And we've gone full circle.

            • The open source movement is probably the closest functioning system. I vote Pirate because they want open government, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to propose a working model myself.
              • by znrt ( 2424692 )

                and a good example of why that doesn't work with humans, primarily because it is rooted in bona fide and can't function without.

                yes, "open source" is transparent in several ways: you see the actual code, you see (mostly) who wrote what, and exactly when, and often even why and which public discussion led to that particular change. but that ends right there, on the technical side. regarding politics or deeper decision making you have zero insight. the deals of successful projects with corporations are usuall

      • You missed one: "Fail to attend". We held an Ofcom meeting at McMurdo Sound; you didn't attend. Off to jail with you.
    • Not going to justify parts of the bill (though I can't see a problem with criminal liability for destruction of evidence) but....

      If you think your guns will save your freedoms, then you haven't noticed that you're far more likely to end up in gaol in America than, well, just about anywhere else in the world.

      • That's because in most of the rest of the world you can just bribe your way out of going to jail, and in the worst of the worst places this is expected behavior and you go to jail if you don't pay the bribes when stopped and prompted by the police.

        • And yet you're still vastly more likely to end up in gaol in America than in any country where you can't bribe your way out.

          Speaking of freedom, justice in America is largely for the rich. You have to accept a plea bargain otherwise.

  • Boris Johnson is an evil, lying, traitorous sack of human excrement who should be shoved into a prison cell for the rest of his filthy life...or better yet, exiled to Russia to live with his oligarch buddies.

    If I were unfortunate enough to live in the UK, the statement above could easily be taken by the government as an example of dangerous or abusive speech. This bill isn't the start of the "slippery slope". It's half way down and picking up speed.

  • Because, you know, Slashdot editors...

  • You cannot impose you laws on another nations citizens.
  • Thanks. That's a good reminder never to do business in the UK
    • Not a great fan of governments grabbing private property or singling out groups for "special" examination but in this case these people (big tech) have been leading the way.

      What's the motto they are so found of when they destroy someone's life "You have free speech but not freedom from consequences" ?

      Well what goes around comes around.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Because freedom from consequences is fascism. It's what oppressive regimes want for themselves. If you dare criticise them, you disappear or worse.

        The only way freedom from consequences can exist is if only you have freedom of speech, and nobody is allowed to criticise. Because if people hear criticisms of what you said, they might behave differently towards you.

  • Really couldn't happen to better people. You have a business that depends on legal exemptions that are granted by the legislature you have to understand sooner or later the legislature is going to come to collect like a loanshark on steroids. What's more when they started putting their thumbs on the scale in elections that wasn't going to be allowed to pass uncountered.

  • What we need, imho, is to mandate that users must have option to control / tweak the material parameters of the algorithms that select what is shown and not shown to them

    Or failing that, at least a clear disclosure of what algorithms are running and what are they promoting/demoting for various groups/types of users. (Maybe incl the data set used to train and the parameters it's trying to maximize or such)

    And maybe a small per post charge beyond say 10-20 posts per day.
    That could even go towards some indepe

    • Likely it does or would flag Office as ransomware because the software can communicate over a network and has the ability to encrypt and decrypt data via remote user access.

      As to the rest of it, it can all be made moot by completely eliminating those black-box algorithms that arguably never benefits the user and only benefits the corporation.

  • ... risk assessments on these types of content.

    How many "types of content" are there? Facebook/WhatsApp and Instagram will have to charge their subscribers so they can pay lawyers to censor each post. A fee of 50 pounds/month, plus license verification will ensure children (and many adults) are protected.

    • by splutty ( 43475 )

      You make that sound like a bad thing.

      • You might "not love" Facebook but people still want to chat and there are other forums on the internet. This kind of regulation will have a chilling effect on all of them.

        The owner of a forum might face jail time if some user posts "disinformation" in its feeds? yeah, sure, every admin is ready for jail time, it's part of the job. And we know exactly which information is true or not, because we spend all day tracking lies.
  • You know those laws which just get bigger and bigger as many loosely-related subjects all get loaded in, until you end up with a giant bill that no-one can actually read entirely? Yeah, it's one of those. It's going to pass, because it's one of the government's signature bills - the Conservative party has a comfortable majority and the whips will make sure of that. But I am sure that some of the provisions would not if they were individual acts, rather than all bundled together.

    • by Whibla ( 210729 )

      You know those laws which just get bigger and bigger as many loosely-related subjects all get loaded in, until you end up with a giant bill that no-one can actually read entirely?

      Slight hyperbole, as there are plenty of rights advocacy groups who have, or will, read the bill in its entirety, and pass their findings on to individual ministers and members of the Lords. However, as you point out, most ministers will never read more than the cover page, and will vote purely as instructed. C'est la vie. I did find this line, from the impact assessment rather funny though: "Businesses are expected to incur the following transition costs (all in 10 year PV): reading and understanding the r

  • Under the proposed legislation, executives of tech companies could face prosecution or jail time if they fail to cooperate with information notices issued by Ofcom, UK's communications regulator.

    Members of the board of Ofcom are appointed by the secretary of state. You could get jailed for not complying with an "information notice" made by an appointed-not-elected board. Does this seem bad to anybody else?

  • I can't wait to see Tim Cook behind bars begging for mercy and release because he's getting raped every night...
  • Extradition treaties between nations only exist due to mutual goodwill and the belief that there is rough equivalency in legal jurisprudence between the nations. When that starts to fall apart, treaties fail.

    As countries around the world continue to try to impose their own local authority on people outside their country (Canada is also trying to do this with their media control bills, the US is legendary for it, now the EU and UK are also getting into the game), *at some point* extradition treaties are goin

    • Nothing a good lawyer can't fix. Make everything legally privileged information. Have you meetings on a Lear jet in international airspace, and documents split on private servers (anything cloud based is not good, therefore legally gettable). Make the contract so any 'interference' results in huge losses - meaning less tax. If the UK locks up a US Journalist - there will be trouble, The ultimate solution is a proxy poster outside of the UK, posting defamatory or truthful material. They want registration to
  • Just implement communications software in a way which requires physical presence attestation (using unique per-pair encryption keys shared via NFC) to add people. Now you get to say you have no bots spreading misinformation and that “internet grooming” is impossible, as people have to have made physical contact and expressly consented to add each other beforehand.

    Any attempt to take an entity to court for not censoring communications would fail as the safeguards are already beyond what is con
  • Just nuked my website yesterday which was an online mobile app generator for android and ios. I'm not going to jail for running a website no one gives a shit about in the first place. Apple declared it 4.3.0 design spam anyways... Giving up.. I expect man other smaller sites to follow suit as well. Maybe the internet will get cleaned up a bit now at least, but should be a huge blow to innovation. Why even try? The big tech companies will always win anyways...
  • by Harvey Manfrenjenson ( 1610637 ) on Saturday March 19, 2022 @09:02AM (#62371499)

    This article sends a chill up my spine, not simply because of what it is reporting, but because of *how* the story is reported. Consider the following sentence: "The UK government commenced work on the proposed laws in May last year to push a duty of care onto social media platforms so that tech companies are forced to protect users from dangerous content, such as disinformation and online abuse."

    This sentence would not have looked out of place on the front page of "Pravda". It wouldn't look out of place in a Russian newscast today. Note the vaguely uplifting, we-love-Big-Brother tone: the government "commenced work" on the laws, as if constructing a pro-censorship law was essentially a piece of labor requiring the "work" of experts, like building a dam or a power plant. More importantly, note the presence of an absolutely crucial planted assumption: "misinformation" is "dangerous", and "abuse" is "dangerous".

    One of the foundational principles of free speech, of course, is that misinformation is *not* dangerous; that if one allows many different points of view to flourish, the readers will be able to read the different points of view with a critical eye and arrive at the truth (or, at least, at an informed opinion). If you don't believe in that principle, you just don't believe in freedom of speech.

    A quick Google search tells me that ZDNet is part of Red Ventures, a giant media conglomerate based in the US. Their websites include not only ZDNet but CNET, Lonely Planet, TV Guide, MetaCritic, GameSpot, Healthline Media, Bankrate, and many others. It's an extensive list of media outlets, many of which existed independently before Red Ventures ever came into being, and naturally there is nothing to tip the reader off that these websites are all run by the same corporate interest.

    There is probably a point to be made here about consolidation of the news media. Certainly, it seems that whenever you read something that put out by a giant media conglomerate these days, you increase your chances of coming across anti-free-speech messages. The Internet was supposed to put an end to all that; it was supposed to lower barriers of entry so that *all* journalistic points of view could be easily published. It doesn't seem to have worked out that way.

    • One of the foundational principles of free speech, of course, is that misinformation is *not* dangerous; that if one allows many different points of view to flourish, the readers will be able to read the different points of view with a critical eye and arrive at the truth

      That is not a foundational principle of freedom of speech, it's false, and has repeatedly been demonstrated to be false. The people that wrote the U.S. Constitution definitely didn't believe it if that's worth anything to you.

      You don't need to believe misinformation isn't dangerous, or that speech isn't dangerous, in order to believe in the principle of free speech. Pretending speech isn't or can't be dangerous runs counter to believing in the power of speech.

      With enough information, the truth eventually

      • Lastly, misinformation is not a point of view. Misinformation is calculated to maximize the delay and minimize the coverage of the truth. Its goal is to interfere with your ability to make a decision. This is clearly dangerous speech.

        In a world without perfectly reliable information sources, it is important to have multiple sources of information, *as well as* multiple points of view. It's up to the reader to distinguish between information that is probably-true and information that is probably-false. So perhaps I should have said "different points of view and different information sources", instead of simply referring to "different points of view".

        It's not entirely clear to me why my post upsets you, since in the end you seem to come

  • If a country where you are not based is giving you legal shot about your virtual operations there, just ban their TLD and users identifying with that nation.

    No business is under an obligation to provide a service in a country where it doesn't wish to operate.

    Easy-peasy. Let the nanny state die in isolation.

  • Facebook is based in the USA, it's European office is in Dublin ... it does have an office in London but nobody that this bill applies to works there
    Twitter is the same ...

    This appears to apply to nobody they could actually enforce it on ...

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