UK House of Lords to propose mandatory CSAM detection software on smartphones | Hacker News Reader

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

observer.co.uk

77 pointsiamnothere80 comments

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?

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

(Muffled) Oh no

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

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

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.

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."

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

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.

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?

I think the most reasonable concern would be having the image sent over the internet. I wouldn't be afraid of anybody in their office misusing the picture because they're trained and it's just another day in the office for them. Body parts are body parts, it shouldn't be morally wrong because of where the photo is, I think that's problematic thinking in my opinion.

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.

Because it's not worth losing your Gmail account or having to explain to everyone you meet that no, you're not a pedophile, and you weren't "caught with CSAM," it was just an over-zealous prosecutor responding to an automated report and a misunderstanding about some photos the doctor requested, and anyway that case was thrown out...

What's the problem with that? If you mean the channel, unencrypted email, then maybe I agree to some extent. If you mean taking pictures of children for the purpose of diagnosis I really don't follow.

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.

> 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.

>>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

90% of voters back the software? I'm curious what the "short description" they gave was. I'm surprised not more people are concerned about the surveillance aspect.

Because if you say you’re against it you might be concerned about the optics and whether you’re now on a list. This is the kind of chilling effect these motions can have. We’re racing towards a police state.

Racing towards? Brother, you are in one now.

This is what happens when multiple sinister interests align: Apple and Google will get to further cement their smartphone OS and hardware duopoly. Five Eyes will get extra surveillance and dissent suppression capabilities. Corrupt men of the Epstein class will get their crimes covered up because the public can no longer record or view the evidence.

We must never forget the Five Eyes global surveillance apparatus exposed by Edward Snowden [0]. And never forget that elite child predators are protected by governments [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein

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.

Kind of an aside but they finally removed the hereditary 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

Hereditary?

Hereditary members of the House of Lords

He was asking about your original spelling.

oh lmao thanks

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.

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

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.

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

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.

> It will prevent many tax evasions and crimes.

Careful now, useful idiots will come out of the woodwork to cheer for it when you phrase it like that.

I'm so happy they left the EU.

Is the EU meaningfully better? The EU has had its own push for such things.

We're coming back baby! Someone's got to stop the French and Germans arguing with each other.

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

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.

Maybe they can set up detector vans to search for old devices based on broadcast MAC addresses.

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.

"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.

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.

Yep.

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

Yea nah.

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)

Actually it's exactly because you got what you want that this is happening. The house of lords as it was would never have pushed this kind of thing. You got rid of the hereditary peers and here we are. Congratulations.

>> You got rid of the hereditary peers and here we are.

Who is this "you" in your post?

>>The house of lords as it was would never have pushed this kind of thing.

That is an astonishing statement given their previous stances on various issues. What gives you that confidence? But heridetary peers or not, house of lords doesn't belong in Britain of 2026.

The person who wanted them gone, which in this case is you. _You_, you.

> That is an astonishing statement given their previous stances on various issues. What gives you that confidence?

Watching the government trying to pass mental laws and having them rejected by people with no skin in the game.

Democracy doesn't work when everyone's in it for themselves, and the public are easily manipulated.

>>The person who wanted them gone, which in this case is you. _You_, you

Well I wanted house of lords gone and that clearly hasn't happened, so....I don't feel like I got what I wanted? Or did you just assume I wanted just heridetary peers gone? If so, how did you make that assumption?

>>Watching the government trying to pass mental laws and having them rejected by people with no skin in the game.

Oh you mean for instance like the house of lords has opposed reforms around homosexuality that had both parliamentary and public support, but few conservative lords kept blocking the bills? That was as recently as 1998-1999. What paragons of sensible law making.

Just for some context: 2022, USA,

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

> "Google has refused to reinstate a man’s account after it wrongly flagged medical images he took of his son’s groin as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the New York Times first reported. Experts say it’s an inevitable pitfall of trying to apply a technological solution to a societal problem.

> "Experts have long warned about the limitations of automated child sexual abuse image detection systems, particularly as companies face regulatory and public pressure to help address the existence of sexual abuse material."

Thanks for providing the tech and buddying up with governments, Silicon Valley! /s

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With the bonus irony of doing sweet FA about child porn.

They won’t prosecute them until they oppose the state. Then bam, straight to jail.

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

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.

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.

Saving and sharing would still function, albeit in a slight different way.

  - Saving, as before.
  - Sharing, works, but due to a glitch the recipient got a blank blank image/video. He'll sure reply to let you know, but unfortunately incriminate himself in the process.
  - Deleting, as before, no sorry, bugger, I/O error, can't delete this file. But support team has your address and is on their way.

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".

Sarcasmgram detects that the comment was 99% dry humor.

I can confirm your detector is functioning as advertised.

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

UK's got a Mumsnet Government

> 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?

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.

Probably a patch to the last major version available to that phone.

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

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

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

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…)

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.

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

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.

Have they tried investigating the Epstein Class?

Maybe they should focus on fixing their country first

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.

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