The trend of mass surveillance – Logan B, y10
Over the past few months, safety online has been a key focus in school, politics, countries and even continents. Now this is a good thing, right, well some are fearing that online safety is turning into significant figures examining everything we do digitally.
On July 25th, 2025, in the UK the online safety act came into place. The online safety act, a UK exclusive safety law, was voted upon in 2023 and the law passed, and, in that time, the necessary technology was produced to make the system “work”. In short, an AI system will scan your face or some form of ID before letting you go onto / view a website which contains potentially harmful content for Children and teenagers to see. And in effect of this law being put in place, the statistics show that visits by children to adult only websites has gone down.
Yet, members of the public and even technology experts are saying that this is an ineffective way of keeping our children safe, as methods of bypassing this system are so simple, both due to how advanced tech is but also how stupid AI is. VPN download rates in the past 2 months have skyrocketed as this allows for people to remove themselves from the UK where the law doesn’t apply. Yes, AI is very smart, but with realism being such a key factor in some games nowadays you can hold a face scanner up to a screen with an adult male or female on it and it lets you go through, no questions asked.
The solution to the problem has done nothing but create more problems with some questioning if it is even for the safety of children and more facing toward the path of the famous book by George Orwell “1984”. This is because forums which might not be classified as adult content such as sobriety help have been ID blocked to access these sites leading you to wonder why the UK government is trying to stop people from finding the help that they need instead of making firmer rules around children “owning” phones.
On Friday the 12th of September EU representatives from all countries met in Brussels to start the debate about chat control regulation. The chat control law has the aim of cutting down the spreading of abusive material throughout all chat apps, end-to-end encrypted or not. Much like the online safety act this will be done through the use of AI to check images and videos before they are sent to the person/s using another device in hopes of catching any abusive content before it can start circulating the spiders web of the internet. Many countries within the EU such as France agree that if they can stop the problem before it starts that it will be the best solution.
Post Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.