The UK wants your iPhone to check your age

In yet another demonstration of its addiction to surveillance, the UK government now wants your smartphones to stop you from looking at images containing nudes unless you pass an age verification check. The Financial Times reports the UK will soon “encourage” Apple and Google to build nudity-detection algorithms into their operating systems by default in an attempt to tackle violence against women and girls.

At first glance, this seems like a good idea, as it might protect people against various forms of abuse and could help in the battle against child pornography.

Critical to the notion is the concept that operating system vendors, rather than individual apps, will become responsible for age verification. Apple already offers Communication Safety tools within Parental Controls. These already detect nude photos and videos in apps such as Messages or FaceTime. 

Unintended consequences? They’re already happening

However, just like the UK’s many other surveillance-centered decisions, it is subject to unintended consequences:

First, it seems highly probable the algorithms required to police people’s devices will deliver false positives, likely including fine art portraits. It’s important to note that instances of this have already happened in response to the UK’s poorly-crafted and badly implemented Online Safety Act (OSA): one social media post of a painting by Francisco de Goya was restricted for UK users, reports the BBC.

Second, in the event the OS does detect a false positive, what happens next? Does the law imply perfectly innocent culture vultures will end up having to explain themselves to the authorities for daring to look at art? 

The third and biggest negative consequence is the same as it has always been: once you have smartphone operating systems working to analyze the content on your devices for one thing, what is to stop those systems working to identify other forms of content on the device?

With the UK moving in this direction, what is to stop more authoritarian governments from instructing operating system developers to monitor and prevent distribution of other forms of communications and content. It’s enough to drive the entire population to use of VPNs.

Protecting the innocent, or criminalizing debate?

None of these arguments is new. All have been raised in response to UK government overreach before; sadly, the current political class don’t seem to want to listen to those pleas. 

That’s not a good sign for a country that may well have already forced Apple to open up encrypted data to investigation despite strong resistance. The decision to force Apple and others to place backdoors in their devices was not discussed at the election, while the arrogant lack of transparency around that decision is cause for concern in any so-called democracy. 

It’s also true that the accompanying Online Safety Act (OSA) is already being applied in ways that creep far beyond its original stated intention. An excellent joint briefing from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch, and Index on Censorship describes a plethora of ways in which the OSA is unfairly restricting people’s day-to-day activities.

They tell us that the OSA may yet force the Wikimedia Foundation to withdraw Wikipedia from the UK. They also say the way the OSA is crafted means freedom of expression is being curtailed, even while the process of age approval has been farmed out to third-party companies that are themselves under little oversight. We have already seen people’s private data leaked.

Road to nowhere

To some degree, the UK government’s latest attack against online freedoms is to be expected. It is par for the course in an administration that is both enslaved to and displays little understanding of technology, is resistant to considering the social impact of it, and has little regard to the importance of free expression to legitimize democratic dialogue. It’s a government that combines legislative incompetence with authoritarian overreach, with little understanding of how bad these laws will be abused by even more politically abusive entities tomorrow. At the very least, the current raft of proposals need work.

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