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UK House of Lords to propose mandatory CSAM detection software on smartphones

57 points iamnothere 3 hours ago 61 comments

bita_nidir 58 minutes ago | parent

I don't get the fuss. This is absolutely only going to be used to detect CSAM content, this year.

A_D_E_P_T 26 minutes ago | parent

I'd give it a few months before they scan every photo/video you ever take for other purposes. If you were at the wrong public gathering, I don't know if they'll even bother with parallel construction.

vorticalbox 17 minutes ago | parent

Pretty sure the current proposal will already require scanning everything.

To stop the “production” you would need real time scanning of the camera when taking pictures and video and disable the ability to save if csam is detected.

lynndotpy 24 minutes ago | parent

For what it's worth, I can not tell if you earnestly mean what you are saying, or if it is rhetoric with the implication "This is worth fussing over, and this will be used in the near future to scan for content other than CSAM".

unethical_ban 10 minutes ago | parent

Sarcasmgram detects that the comment was 99% dry humor.

david-gpu 17 minutes ago | parent

Very appropriate use of British understated sarcasm. Philomena Cunk would approve.

Varelion 54 minutes ago | parent

Maybe they should focus on fixing their country first

jeltz 5 minutes ago | parent

But they will not. This is why the British people I know are so apathic. All their major political parties suck and have zero interest in fixing the country.

whynotmaybe 52 minutes ago | parent

> Older devices could also be covered using a mandatory software update.

Highly curious about how they'll be able to do that.

Will they force apple to release ios27 for an iPhone 4?

londons_explore 37 minutes ago | parent

More likely they'll collect from phone manufacturers the IMEI of all devices which are updated, and then send police in to confiscate any device which is powered up and connects to a mobile network when not updated.

bondarchuk 51 minutes ago | parent

Kind of an aside but they finally removed the hedetary members this year (yes this year)! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords_(Hereditary_Pee...

Though there's still these lads I think? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_Spiritual

loloquwowndueo 50 minutes ago | parent

Hereditary?

bondarchuk 48 minutes ago | parent

Hereditary members of the House of Lords

cwnyth 31 minutes ago | parent

He was asking about your original spelling.

geye1234 23 minutes ago | parent

The hereditaries were far more civil libertarian than the political appointees that now make up the whole HoL, and would have almost certainly been against this.

ghusto 2 minutes ago | parent

They were the orderlies in the mental institution that is UK politics. Now they're gone we have this kind of shit.

NDlurker 44 minutes ago | parent

How do they plan on stopping creation, especially on older devices?

londons_explore 41 minutes ago | parent

An 'old phone amnesty', where you take all your old phones to the police station on a given day. Anyone still in possession of one after that date gets prosecuted, like they would for having an unlicensed gun.

numpad0 24 minutes ago | parent

Or on non-UK devices. This just inflates values in the UK of such devices and contents that UK will be unable to create, let alone compete with.

calgoo 20 minutes ago | parent

"Older devices could also be covered using a mandatory software update." So your already slow device will get a forced update to now make it compliant.

orangecat 41 minutes ago | parent

Bold move from a country that wrongfully arrested and convicted thousands of postmasters due to buggy software that determined they were stealing.

octo888 39 minutes ago | parent

Don't forget the 13 who committed suicide. :(

johnnyanmac 40 minutes ago | parent

doubful this will pass in its current form, but if it somehow does: countdown until yet another parent is arrested for pictures of their own baby in their phone.

cortesoft 38 minutes ago | parent

I can't help but think of the dad who was investigated by the FBI for having pictures he took to show his kid's doctor.

Are parents going to be arrested for pictures of their kids in the bathtub? Or at least are they going to be blurred?

octo888 36 minutes ago | parent

Probably. The government just made couples who record face sitting, without distributing, for their own use, sex offenders.

edit: But we live in a country where everything is illegal but rarely anyone is arrested for it so that's somehow ok /s

donkey_brains 10 minutes ago | parent

(Muffled) Oh no

chrisjj 26 minutes ago | parent

> Are parents going to be arrested for pictures of their kids in the bathtub?

No. Because this magical new software will prevent such pictures.

gambiting 13 minutes ago | parent

We both know that if it's not built in straight away, it will be upgraded to report you without even notifying you of the fact. Exactly how the Apple csam detection system was supposed to work before apple backed off - if a picture was deemed csam your phone would automatically report you without telling you about it.

cperciva 25 minutes ago | parent

Honestly, doctors need training about what they should or should not ask parents for. When my daughter was a month old her GP asked me to take photos of her diaper rash and email them in. "Uh no, not going to do that."

jeltz 18 minutes ago | parent

No, we should instead stop sexualing children. And we should ban this kind of mass surveillance.

unethical_ban 15 minutes ago | parent

They should be able to ask for that in a secure manner with security and retention controls and guardrails for how that data is accessed. In other words, email is not ideal.

Or, if your time and money allows it, deny that option and take your kid into the doctor in person.

Bjartr 15 minutes ago | parent

Is the concern the doctor, or someone in their office misusing the pictures? Or is it the fear of having such an image on your phone or sent over the internet at all? Or is the concern that the very concept of such an image being recorded is morally wrong? Or is it something else?

Liuser 14 minutes ago | parent

Real question, why not? It seems like a reasonable request barring needing to go into the office. My comms and images with our pediatricians are through their app (not email), which they constantly remind us is under strict HIPAA compliance.

octo888 38 minutes ago | parent

UK's got a Mumsnet Government

nik282000 33 minutes ago | parent

Cool, so 800 tech illiterate senior citizens are mandating updates for _all_ legacy smartphones.

dennysora-main 33 minutes ago | parent

I think it's very interesting. The detection function needs to send data back to the cloud, right?

Does it need to be written into the Kernel? Or how does it work?

I think we're probably not far from the world of Watch Dogs. As for whether it will become 2077, we'll have to wait and see.

chrisjj 24 minutes ago | parent

Good question. If so, we will be prevented from taking photos when offline. And will pay extra data charges when not.

numpad0 27 minutes ago | parent

> there was a “ghastly worldwide industry” of child sexual abuse material being created, and that Britain was one of the biggest consumers of it,

They're talking about anime and how UK is not making any, nor is it significant market of to be infliential to, yet nevertheless consuming it in ever larger quantity over the years, unilaterally receiving cultural influence with no leverages, not even cash flow that can be choked off. Lots of these "CSAM" stuff is inflated with imaginary kids and trafficking angles to hide that intent, but it boils down to that.

Otherwise the action taken would be to assigning more police officers or otherwise assigning more resources to support kids IRL. They're not doing that. They only want speeches suppressed.

I don't know why they don't just tax social media for it, though. CDN bandwidth for foreign user-generated contents can be measured. Maybe because they just don't like fictions at all, but that ship had sailed like, thousands of years ago.

gambiting 20 minutes ago | parent

>>Otherwise the action taken would be to assigning more police officers or otherwise assigning more resources to support kids IRL. They're not doing that. They only want speeches suppressed.

My county went from 56 youth support officers to just 2 in the last few years. But yes, government(s) that cares about children /s

sneak 27 minutes ago | parent

This is not about CSAM, it is about an infrastructure for large scale censorship and tracking of publishing and publishers.

Anyone talking about CSAM has missed the point entirely.

jonplackett 19 minutes ago | parent

Yep.

The ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ argument that already got IDing everyone online through as a social media age gate.

gambiting 26 minutes ago | parent

The house of lords should absolutely fuck off back to the dark ages where it belongs. Useless institution that keeps interfering with democracy(case in point - recent assisted dying bill)

DrHungers 24 minutes ago | parent

This will create more attack vectors, make phones more ineffeciant, make massive piles of people innocent of wrongdoing put prosecuted and jailed for sending pics of their kids to their family and doctors, and generally increase the power of the state to surveil its citizens to an extreme degree, on par with the worst totalitarian dictatorships.

Its funny, every time I talk to a brit they seem very intelligent and reasonable but then they've been happily electing people who make their country into an extreme surveillance state, labor & conservative both. I think their accent just makes them sound smarter than they are.

calgoo 18 minutes ago | parent

Every time i talk to a brit around these things it just ends up with a: "well they can decrypt it in ~10 years anyway so why try... These are people in IT, people that works with security and networking just giving up directly.

gambiting 16 minutes ago | parent

I've lived here for over 16 years now, and if I had to sum up Brits in one word it would be "apathy" - there's no point in fighting for anything because nothing ever gets better. Friends will admit in private conversations that they are concerned about surveillance but they aren't going to voice this anywhere because there's no point and it probably won't even affect them so why bother. There is a small group of people who still believe in protesting, but after several people were sentenced to 5 years(!!!) in prison for planning(!!!!) a protest, that had a chilling effect on various organisations around the country. Not to mention the entire farce that is aggressive criminalisation of anyone who even dares to mention Palestine Action around any kind of protest.

unethical_ban 12 minutes ago | parent

Apathy and nihilism are self-fulfilling. At least in the US, courts sometimes ask what "a reasonable person" expects of a certain statement or legal requirement like privacy. If the culture publicly shrugs its shoulders, that is taken into consideration. The absolute bare minimum people can do is care, and say it with their voices to other people, and vote.

calgoo 22 minutes ago | parent

The worst part is in the end: “We will also give the police the powers they need to keep pace with criminal use of emerging technologies in order to keep our children safe.”

Which means that not only will it blur it, it will also report it and you will be processed for a picture of your kid for the doctor or when the "fail safe" software fails.

Lerc 21 minutes ago | parent

What could possibly go wrong with a government having the ability to stop people from seeing things that they consider bad.

metalman 20 minutes ago | parent

How many of them still have Ghislane on there speed dial? and palsy walsy pics of themselves, the prince formerly known as royal, Jeffery, and a few junior massage trainies.

lazzurs 19 minutes ago | parent

Yea nah.

efdee 19 minutes ago | parent

I'm so happy they left the EU.

cs02rm0 18 minutes ago | parent

The UK is running so fast towards ever increasing authoritarianism. I can't see it stopping.

They were pushing out today that they're going to add, well, what they call a ban for under 16s, which really means strong ID for everyone else, to access eBay and Vinted in case kids use the messaging functions on them.

It'll be TCP next. Then you'll need government permission to blink.

userbinator 17 minutes ago | parent

As usual, the UK seems to be driving towards 1984-style dystopia.

darkhorn 16 minutes ago | parent

Interesting. The first laws in Turkey started to around 15 years ago with the only purpose of protecting children. That is how the first internet blocking started in Turkey. Now they block any negative thing about the government. But CSAM is not active in Turkey because why would it be? It is not about children but opressing political opponents.

At this point why they don’t record everything from our microphones? It will prevent many tax evasions and crimes.

gmerc 15 minutes ago | parent

Have they tried investigating the Epstein Class?

sailfast 14 minutes ago | parent

What a bunch of morons.

Remove “illicit” from this headline and you get a better idea of what’s happening.

Perhaps they should focus their energy on reducing pedophilia in their leadership and monarchy instead of spying on their people? (Oh right that’s the whole point of this legislation in the first place… Nevermind…)

hn_throw2025 13 minutes ago | parent

The HoL have no manifesto, no democratic mandate, and should be proposing jack shit.

sikozu 6 minutes ago | parent

This is an insane proposal, what they really mean is protecting the children is a front for surveillance since you'll look bad if you don't care about children.

ChrisArchitect 5 minutes ago | parent

Title is: Fight to block child sexual abuse images unites peers and MPs in cross-party campaign