- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure. This isn’t about child safety; it’s about the end of private devices and the death of the “nothing to hide” fallacy.
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This is the UK, not China. Or at least, it’s supposed to be.
What are we, a bunch of Asians?
That’s based on government surveillance, not skin color. As reductionist as it is, China has been the poster boy for government surveillance since the 90s at very least.
While China has surveillance, it’s generally different methods and to different ends. Assuming certain documentaries can be trusted in the first place, you’re looking at naming and shaming operations for social rules at street crossings and censoring shit like racism and misogyny from social media, things it can’t even do amazingly since they’d have to surveille 1.4 billion people, about 5 times the population of the USA.
Even under central planning and a huge industrial base, we’re not looking at an easy job. Assume general techniques update every ten years, now you have to retrofit a city you built a decade ago. Even with automation, you’d need a huge base of trustworthy people to monitor multiple fronts, all while keeping your nation profitable enough to sustain all this.
China has been seen as the poster boy for government surveillance since the 90s at the very least by Western propaganda.
Fixed that for you.
It’s not just propaganda though. By basically all accounts China is a highly surveilled country.
Good thing Android doesn’t include Google by default
I dont think that will last much longer. We have to work harder on linux phones
How? Android is open source. You can just fork it
All Android forks are, to maintain compatibility with the used apps (LinageOS, e/OS, Degoogled Android …)
Ok you fork it and create a FOSS mobile OS. If it was that easy we would already have alternatives. The core is open source but google has been and is trying it’s best to slowly take over the OS. I’m honestly not very knowledgeable about android so I don’t remember the exact details.
We’re moving towards a world where everyone has an approved device for official purposes and anyone who wants privacy has a second Linux/alternate android OS device for everything else 😬
Guess i’m going back to no internet, then, probably for the best.
Does the UK require ID to buy good 'ol analog porn magazines?
No but the camera network with constant facial and object recognition will probably track it all anyways.
The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure.
Nothing has gone through parliament yet. That’s not to say that a majority of twats couldn’t be found there. But crucially I think this is not something a floundering PM can decree on his own authority. So far this threat is about as believable as any statement by the incumbent American president on Iran.
There was never a better moment for linux to shine than now. C’mon smart people, do something for the dumb stupid generic user. An actual good usable linux distro for phones, bring back firefox os.
What the hell is this take. Firstly your cooling the average user dumb which is just kinda rude and untrue, Also developers are working really hard to build the best possible Linux experience for everyone. how about you actually chip in before shaming them for not working hard enough. And Linux is already user friendly enough for most people, arguably more user friendly than windows. People just want to stick to what they know, also vendor lock in, and most people don’t know how to install Linux and will just use the default operating system. I don’t think Linux devs can do anything to fix any of those problems.
Chill out, dude. Drink some water. I don’t know how the hell you got offended by my comment. I pointed out this is a perfect opportunity for another phone os to popup (hopefully linux based) in a jokey way, even calling us users stupid (look up “c’mon, do your thing/do something”. I can’t believe you’ve never came across this meme before). I never said devs aren’t doing enough, you assumed that. Linux user friendly enough for most people? The most trivial thing for you can be really complex for others without experience. First time you can’t fix something exclusively using the UI, people will bail. Users need to be able to solve things intuitively. “touch button, thing happen”. There isn’t anything intuitive about opening terminal to install an app from the repository because the default app store version is broken. This is where you’re right: people will stick to what’s familiar. Someone bought a pc that came with Linux and gave it a try. Installed google chrome and it wasn’t loading videos, looked up quickly how to fix it and the first link, or even a chatbot, told them to open the terminal and type a bunch of nonsense. User will close the browser and ask a cousin or whatever to install Windows for them because they just wanted to watch youtube while studying (even though the steps for the fix were just copy/paste). And you missed the point confusing enthusiasts with regular users. Nobody will need to learn how to install an os that comes by default on the phone, but no company will want to ship a phone with an os that doesn’t have potential or a big userbase of enthusiasts (those are the ones that will learn how to install Linux). Android started as a startup that showed something with potential before eventually being bought. Graphene os, despite being based on Android, is growing well, so much so that they partnered with Motorola to ship enterprise phones with it installed. It’s just silly to think there is nothing the community can do. People created amazing stuff before, and will do it again when some feel like it.
C’mon smart people, do something for the dumb stupid generic user.
Pay them. I’m sure they’d be happy to do it inexpensively if they can live off their labor.
There was never a better moment for linux to shine than now.
Maybe so. Maybe so.
But I’m not so sure there is a long term tech solution. It’s a political problem. Ultimately, if the gov requires let’s say a trust attestation for the use of web sites, they will have to comply, or leave the market. Sure, you can run Linux. But now you can’t use it to bank, to shop, to access gov services, to pay your bills… If they push hard enough, even mundane shit like get a weather forecast or w/e. Google would already love this. It locks everybody in.
A gov can make life VERY difficult for noncompliance, by leaning on the things you want to do. Sometimes, a site that isn’t local like a bank can say, fine, we’ll leave that market. But the bigger the market, the less they wanna do that. What happens if the US follows the UK into this? And then Australia or Japan piles on? Plus, some things are local by definition. Like your bank. If it’s required to block non-trusted (I threw up in my mouth a little bit…) devices, it will have to do that.
I’m not sure Linux can save us. Maybe it can buy us a little time. But in the end, this needs a political solution. Not a tech one.
There will be two forms of the internet. One will be the clearnet, where everything is monitored and controlled, and the other will be Tor and I2P, where you still have freedom to be an actual person. Also, mesh networks like MeshCore and Reticulum.
The internet can be gated because it requires you connecting to central infrastructure and a central operator has to assign you an address where something like reticulum requires no central authority because it’s based on public-private keys and so anybody can connect to the network permissionlessly
problem is most smart people are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to work for big tech. If open source can start paying developers the same then we’ll start to see competition
I’d argue that everything big tech produced in this last decade with all that expensive workforce is somewhat unnecessary. If I have a 2026 Linux computer with the capabilities of a 2016s win/mac, I am totally fine and I can do everything I want to do with it.
Story about that. A while ago I sent a $$ contribution to an OSS author who’d built an app I liked for Linux.
He wrote me back. He said mine was the only donation he’d got in the past 2 years.
That’s the life of many OSS authors. And yah like you say, the top programmers can go get 1-300K’s of dollars or euros or w/e working for big tech.
Many core linux contributions in the kernel or w/e do come from highly paid programmers at big tech co’s. So there is that. But run of the mill programs and apps that are still useful day to day, many of those are done for no money.
The number of apps people created to make something more convenient for themselves and then decided to share with the community is very high.
It’s never been about protecting children, that’s how it’s been sold to the people who aren’t paying attention. That always works, that or “terrorism”.
Prompt people to fear for their kids, or fear other people, and they can be manipulated. Fear and anger are much stronger than love and compassion, unfortunately.
That always works, that or “terrorism”.
Seems like a good place to leave this link. For those who haven’t seen it,
Timothy May, 1988, the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse.
Fun fact. Timothy May was also the guy who discovered in 1979 that low level radiation was causing memory errors in computers.
ultimatum: build device-level scanning to detect “illegal images” or we’ll pass laws to force your hand.
As if Google and Apple wouldn’t be more than happy to do this, if they aren’t already.
Apple proposed something a few years ago, when governments were making similar threats, that attempted to strike a middle ground. The idea was that upon uploading an image to iCloud Photos, a on-device scan would be run on that image and an encrypted report generated to be sent up along with the photo. There was differential privacy involved, the report would also sometimes be generated for entirely normal photos, so seeing a report didn’t necessarily indicate anything, and they had set it up such that the server would only be able to decrypt the reports if it had a sufficiently large number of photos that had been actually found to be CSAM by the local scan, so there would have to be many false positives to incorrectly get flagged.
It was incredibly controversial, and they ended up not doing it after all. In my opinion, it’s probably the lightest touch and most responsible way to do something like this, and obviously they always pick the most worthy cause for invading privacy… but I still viscerally dislike the idea that my computer would have code designed to try to get me sent to prison under certain circumstances (not that I’d ever be triggering that code with anything but a false positive of course). Somehow it’s worse than just saying “in the cloud you have no privacy, your photos aren’t encrypted on our servers, and if you upload CSAM we’ll drop a train on you.”
The amount of stuff their LLMs must’ve seen by now.
good thing it doesn’t need therapy. lol
They probably use ‘Eliza’
Apple and some (most? All?) androids already do this…
May I see some evidence for that?
https://www.deseret.com/business/2026/06/10/apple-releases-new-parental-controls/
In addition to existing software that blurs nudity in messages and FaceTime calls, which is turned on by default for users younger than 18
Thanks for taking the time to respond. It helped me understand because the ops linked article is an incomprehensible rambling blog post by someone who should be prescribed ai writing tools to improve their output.
As far as I can tell there is no automated reporting in either sensitive content warning or safety core (the android version, which sounds like a music genre) by design and scw is off by default unless you’re a child account and sc is on by default(? Not actually sure about this one, all the Android kid parents I know use third party systems instead of the built in stuff so I’ve literally never seen it in a default state). Which is what I assumed you meant when you said they both already do that.
It’s crazy that they’re trying to shift the enforcement of their age verification law to the device os. Hard to think of a precedent for that!
At what point do we stop carrying around a phone? Or should I call it the snitch in my pocket.
Nah, just remove Google from your phone.
Or buy one that already has done that. Costs a few hundred
Fascist governments need this level of privacy. If everyone’s a criminal then its easier to think this is a good idea.
