Category Archives: Technology

Britain, Government, Internet, Legal, Society, Technology

New enforceable code for web giants

INFORMATION COMMISSIONER

FACEBOOK, Google and other social media platforms will be forced to introduce strict age checks on their websites or assume all their users are children.

Web firms that hoover up people’s personal information will have to guarantee they know the age of their users before allowing them to set up an account.

Companies that refuse will face fines of up to 4 per cent of their global turnover – £1.67billion in the case of Facebook.

The age checks are part of a tough new code being drawn up by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which is backed by existing laws and will come into force as early as the autumn.

. See also Internet safety: The era of tech self-regulation is ending

Experts claim it will have a “transformative” effect on social media sites, which have been accused of exposing young people to dangerous and illicit material, bullying and predators. It includes rules to help protect children from paedophiles online.

The code also aims to stop web firms bombarding children with harmful content, a problem highlighted by the case of Molly Russell, 14, who killed herself after Instagram allowed her to view self-harm images. Under the new code:

. Tech firms will be banned from building up a “profile” of children based on their search history, and then using it to send them suggestions for material such as pornography, hate speech and self-harm.

. Children’s privacy settings must automatically be set to the highest level.

. Geolocation services must be switched off by default, making it harder for trolls and paedophiles to target children based on their whereabouts.

. Tech firms will not be allowed to include features on children’s accounts designed to fuel addictive behaviour, including online videos that automatically start one after the other, notifications that arrive through the night, and prompts nudging children to lower their privacy settings.

Once the new rules are implemented, children should be asked to prove their age by uploading their passports or birth certificate to an independent verification firm. This would then give them a digital “fingerprint” which they could use to demonstrate their age on other websites.

Alternatively, the tech firms could ask children to get their parents’ consent, and have the parents prove their identity with a credit card.

If the web giants cannot guarantee the age of their users, they will have to assume they are all children – and dramatically limit the amount of information they collect on them, as set out in the code.

At present, a third of British children aged 11 and nearly half of those aged 12 have an account on Facebook, Twitter or another social network, OFCOM figures show.

Many youngsters are exposed to material or conversations they are too young to cope with as a result.

The Deputy Commissioner at the ICO, said: “We are going to be making it quite clear that there is a reasonable expectation that companies stick to their own published terms and policies, including what they say about age restrictions.”

A House of Lords amendment tabled by Baroness Beeban Kidron that ensures the new code will be drawn up and put into law, said: “I expect the code to say: ‘You may not, as a company, help children find things that are detrimental to their health and well-being.’ That is transformative. This is so radical because it goes into the engine room, into the mechanics of how businesses work and says you cannot exploit children.”

The rules will come into force by the end of the year, and will be policed by the ICO, which has the powers to hand out huge fines.

It will also use its powers to crack down on any web firm that does not have controls in place to enforce its own terms and conditions. Companies that say they ban pornography and hate speech online will have to show the watchdog they have reporting mechanisms in place, and that they quickly remove problem material.

Firms that demand children are aged 13 or above – as most web giants do – will also have to demonstrate that they strictly enforce this policy.

At the moment, web giants such as Facebook, simply ask children to confirm their age by entering their date of birth without demanding proof.

 

FOR far too long, social media giants have arrogantly refused to take responsibility for the filth swilling across their sites.

Many of these firms, cloistered in Silicon Valley ivory towers, are owned by tax-avoiding billionaires who are indifferent to the trauma inflicted on children using websites such as Facebook and Instagram.

At the click of a mouse, young children are at risk of exposure to paedophiles, self-harm images, online pornography and extremist propaganda.

Finally, however, these behemoths are being brought to heel by the Information Commissioner (ICO). They must ensure strict age checks and stop bombarding children with damaging content – or face multi-million-pound fines.

Such enforced regulation is very welcome and well overdue.

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Britain, Cyber warfare, Government, Society, Technology

We’re losing the fight on cyber terror

CYBER WARFARE

MICROSOFT boss, Brad Smith, has warned that cyberspace has become the new battlefield.

He has said that terrorists and rogue states are using it to mount devastating attacks on civilians.

He admitted tools created by technology firms were being turned into weapons – and called for a “digital Geneva Convention” to prevent a global arms race.

Mr Smith, president of the US tech giant, said cyber attacks had already caused real “human suffering” around the world, pointing to a virus which last year crippled NHS hospitals in Britain and caused thousands of appointments – including operations – to be cancelled.

Days before a peace conference in Paris timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary commemorations of the First World War armistice, Mr Smith, 59, also drew comparisons with the build-up of arms in the early 20th century and said history was at risk of repeating itself.

Tech firms need to do more to prevent the use of their services in hacking attacks and governments must come to a global agreement to halt the escalation of cyber attacks, he told Web Summit in Lisbon.

“We cannot remain silent in this century,” he said. “Like it or not – and I don’t think we should like it – the reality is we have become the battlefield. We will do the future an injustice if we don’t also recognise this new generation of technology has also created a new generation of challenges and threats.

“Tools we have created have been turned by others into weapons. If a hospital loses access to its computers and electricity, people’s lives are put at risk.

“We need a moral revolution with this technological revolution. There are lessons from a century ago.”

Mr Smith said almost one billion people were estimated to have been victims of cyber attacks in 2017 alone. Power stations, hospitals and other vital infrastructure will be at even greater risk as more objects are connected to the internet, he warned. He said last year had been “a wake-up call” for technology companies, following the devastating Wannacry and Notpetya viruses that swept through computer systems across the world.

More than one third of NHS trusts were affected by Wannacry, with almost 7,000 appointments cancelled.

The virus, known as ransomware, locked staff out of computer systems and demanded payments to allow them access. The UK and US governments blamed North Korea for the attack.

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Britain, Culture, Government, Society, Technology

Whose job is it to keep us nice online?

SOCIETAL: SOCIAL MEDIA

Imagine and visualise a debate that you’ve just had on stage at the Cheltenham Literature Festival concerning a neat little modern conundrum: ‘Is social media the curse of our age?’ Imagine, too, that you and your fellow panellists have agreed that it probably is. In this scenario, should you, or should you not, tweet about it?

We would assume that people normally would. But maybe you would be unsure. What would be your motivation? Would you be publishing an event that you’d found fascinating? Quite likely. Or would you just be craving the sort of “like”-induced serotonin surge you and your fellow panellists had just been talking about, given your addiction to social media networking? What demons were ruling you? What damn tech tricks made you feel that you ought?

And so it goes viral after comments from the Festival audience stick with you. The young woman who saw social media as the vector of the eating disorder she suffered from as a teenager, but who now was using social media platforms to rebuild her sense of self-worth. The older man who, after tweeting in support of Boris Johnson’s comments on burkas, had been shocked to find himself subject to an onslaught of fury, including people trying to get him sacked. Or, another man, say, active on platforms but tired of competing with screens for attention and convinced that the world around him was narcissistic and utterly crazy.

There might be a sense of social media acting the heavy beast squatting upon all our shoulders, forever seen in the corner of an eye. It might also be an overdue reminder that your own thoughts about all this can get a little lofty. Yet, we could trot out the gotcha about the billionaire moguls who run these platforms banning their own children from using them, even while marketing them to yours. We could talk for hours about the damage being done to the fabric of our democracy.

For most people, however, concern about social media has nothing to do with any of that. Instead it is about obsession and compulsion. It is about self-worth and self-harm. It is about friends and relatives developing new violent politics that seem to have come from nowhere. It is about teenagers living their lives as a constant performance on apps that their parents barely comprehend, for audiences that they can scarcely imagine. It sits in the lives of many as an ever-grinding mill of misery, even when they cannot imagine life without it, and they feel that something must be done.

 

EARLIER this year the Government let it be known that it was working on a white paper of proposals to tackle the nebulous business of online harm. Matt Hancock, then culture secretary, declared that Britain was to become “the safest place in the world” to be online. You’ll maybe understand the urge of ministers and can probably see where this is going: “something must be done”. But does this rule out making anyone less fearful?

In some areas, certainly, legislation is desirable and overdue. Criminal hate speech, libel, grooming, copyright violation, fraud and violent radicalisation are all areas that technology companies should be taking far more seriously. We really should have no objection to them being forced to do so. Likewise, there is growing evidence that the chemical hits of serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline that drive online behaviour creates a dependency culture, in the manner of nicotine or cocaine. The notion of a cigarette packed-style warning on your Snapchat or WhatsApp might seem ludicrous today but it could become a necessary measure to help improve physical and mental wellbeing.

The pervasive public miseries of social media, though, are more low level. They involve not hate speech but vitriol and nastiness; not extremism but political polarisation; not libel but rudeness and disrespect. Not grooming, even, but sexualisation. They involve, in other words, forms of speech that today are free and uninhibited, and where the government almost certainly plans to make less free.

Who will complain? Feel the way the wind blows. The public sees a harm and worries about it. Paradoxically the users of social media are increasingly censorious, blocking undesirables and avoiding certain platforms. In parliament, the very bedrock of democracy, you have a cohort of MPs radicalised against popular free speech by some 100 tweets a day threatening rape or murder, or by calling them traitors or fascists.

Many will wish that social media giants should be policing themselves more effectively, yet simultaneously doubt they ever will. Tell those same people that the state ought to do it instead and they will balk, hard. You will remember the instinctive illiberalism of so many politicians in the Leveson battles over press regulation. You might be feeling it is coming back.

Next time, when it’s those hated tech behemoths who pilfer the revenues from traditional media organisations, will even the press be prepared to put up a fight? They must. Like it or not, what was true with the press is even more true for social media. Except in areas of outright criminality, liberal democracies do not curb your freedom of expression. They may fret about it, lambast it, implore others to close their ears. Yet the moment they shut it down they are liberal no more.

This fight is coming. It is likely to be ugly and all the nicest people will be on the wrong side. Trolls, those ugly creatures who once lived under bridges, now reside right behind the screen you’re looking at. Prowl they will. But you have a choice.

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