What do people think about this? So many things on my social media feeds are blocked atm I don’t know what they are or aren’t. No way to unblock them without changing a lot.

Well ultimately it is a bit annoying, but you can just verify yourself. Dont know why people are so paranoid that there’s gonna be a leaked database of everyone whose accessed porn.

And you can just get a VPN to dodge issues too.

There are ways but it’s a pain

Mollycoddling society...

Death Standing 2 works apparently.

But I just leave my VPN on all the time anyway.

Horrendous act horrendously implemented. Third-party companies, all of them different, all with long privacy policies about what they'll do with one's data, many of which do not leave me confident that they will delete it or otherwise not make use of it - I see it as enough of a risk that I am not putting my ID in any of these. I submit it to companies associated with banks because there are financial checks and security, this is somewhat more risky and I am not going to be the person with their ID leaked from one of these, even if that ID was just me making sure I wouldn't be blocked from random-ass subreddits, because of the implication.

Having lived with censorship that requires VPNs to circumvent, one of the best things about leaving China was having access to a free internet again, and now that (is in part, it is for now, nowhere near as restrictive) is no longer the case.

Though its aim, stopping minors from seeing porn, is laudable. Which makes it worse. as the worst part is the stupidly wide-ranging scope of the act that means that sites ranging from Wikipedia to forums like our own could potentially be liable for minors seeing user-generated adult content*. I know some forums shut down over it because the consequences could financially ruin them, and they're not in a position to implement age checks such that they'd be cleared. Hopefully that at least is toned down but the discourse around this is not going to be good because any naysayers against it could very easily be cast as porn-obsessed.

This is the sort of thing Lib Dems should be against and it's depressing that none of the major parties in the UK seem to be, I've seen some Reform figures speak out against it but I think that won't last long with reality if they're called upon to defend it, their base is the sort of hang-the-pedos ban-everything puritans that is just fine with this.

(Seen limited success with google image driving licenses, it doesn't work for all of those but where it does and these 3rd party companies are telling the truth about deleting the data, no harm no foul for an adult privately verifying themselves, but VPN is by far the safer method anyway)

*thus more than ever, there is zero adult content on here and mods will remove and ban with extreme prejudice.

I will say at this point I don't feel like I understand why Labour are apparently speedrunning down this authoritarian, plus, "we don't need evidence for any of this first, just do something!" path.

This online safety act. Taking away the rights of trans people based on no evidence whatsoever that harm was coming from the status quo as-was. U-turning on the winter fuel thing with the result that older people now get even more guaranteed free money taken out of the taxes of working people, when older people already get a guaranteed 12k a year each out of the same pot and working people and the disabled under retired age get no such thing.

I was under the impression that not taking a stance on Gaza was trying to avoid retributive actions from Israel and America. But it would seem to fall into the same 'because I say so' pattern...

The Online Safety Act has not been rushed through. The process started under the last government. They were slow to implement it precisely because it is so difficult to get the legislation right.

4 minutes ago, Suedehead2 said:

The Online Safety Act has not been rushed through. The process started under the last government. They were slow to implement it precisely because it is so difficult to get the legislation right.

And yet it remains absolutely diabolical on all fronts.

If there’s no rush, why now? Why not take even more time to get it right and gain trust with the public, building or outsourcing infrastructure that people can be satisfied (to whatever extent) their data is actually protected with? The whole thing just reeks of trying to pick up unfinished Tory business and taking the political credit for having pushed it through and done the job without any consultation as to what needs reviewed.

Iz has already touched on it, but I’m very familiar with ID checks, facial recognition etc for the digital part of my job. There’s legitimate reasons for financial institutions to request such information, but blindly putting faith in however many different vendors or risk upsetting the ‘think of the children!!1!1!!’ lot? I’ll sit it out. Won’t be long before the data implications of this end up causing something along the lines of - and far more dangerous than - PPE 2.0.

15 minutes ago, Suedehead2 said:

The Online Safety Act has not been rushed through. The process started under the last government. They were slow to implement it precisely because it is so difficult to get the legislation right.

And yet the legislation is not right at all. Unknown private companies are holding sensitive data that is now a massive cybersecurity risk. Face scans and ID scans getting leaked would be disastrous - for a current example, see the Tea app leak. Though government providers holding that kind of data is not good either, you want some sort of private tokenisation system administered by the government, separated from any of your own personal data. That would be fine if implemented correctly.

I've also yet to see an argument for why this was a necessary implementation over the previous system of parental controls. ISPs turn on content filtering by default and an account owner (an adult) has to turn it off. Every device can be configured with parental controls. Parents have the ability to control what their children see on the internet (for the most part), and if they are seeing adult content, then the parents have not used these restrictions.

The purpose of a system is what it does, this forces all adults into either giving away their data, or blocked from seeing anything the government deems harmful, which is a deeply illiberal path that we do not want to be going down.

It's all about control and absolutely nothing about child protection. That's the smokescreen.

I think it's more so that the internet has developed quickly and become something a lot of people who haven't grown up with it don't understand and those same people that don't understand it are the ones also creating the laws to try and regulate it. It's quite funny that as soon as the law came in that VPNs became the most downloaded apps across the board

The "think of the children?!" people are probably the same ones that plaster their kids photos all over their non-private social media. And even the ones who try to blur their kid by putting a sticker or something over their face which is very easy for someone to remove...

The government should've approached it from more of an educational stand point for new parents and roll out some sort of new digital safety resource for them to be more informed of how to use parental controls for things like ipads etc as well as more information regarding privacy settings on social media to keep their children protected from exposure to things they shouldn't see and also to protect their images or photos being copied or stolen etc.

Pretty crazy if it’s now effecting music

It’s all a bit dystopian

On 28/07/2025 at 13:48, Rooney said:

Well ultimately it is a bit annoying, but you can just verify yourself. Dont know why people are so paranoid that there’s gonna be a leaked database of everyone whose accessed porn.

And you can just get a VPN to dodge issues too.

This the funniest part is they are complaining on some of the biggest social media platforms available, if it was about wanting and selling your data they can just take it from your social media anyway

1 hour ago, 777666jason said:

This the funniest part is they are complaining on some of the biggest social media platforms available, if it was about wanting and selling your data they can just take it from your social media anyway

This is what I can't get, people share their cookies, our own medical data is shared with third parties etc. all the social media companies sell our data, we regularly sell our data for Clubcard/Nectar points etc. If there's some great big porn database out there with everyone's identities.. so what?

2 hours ago, Liam Sota said:

Pretty crazy if it’s now effecting music

It’s all a bit dystopian

I've seen a lot about the Spotify news today but not seen any sign of it actually on the platform yet. It seems somewhat ridiculous, apparently it's about music videos? This might be where the act falls down or has to be changed because once it starts hitting services normal people use for really obviously unobjectionable stuff you then start to get the average person who only uses big sites for basic services to start thinking 'hey, isn't this a bit much'.

1 hour ago, 777666jason said:

This the funniest part is they are complaining on some of the biggest social media platforms available, if it was about wanting and selling your data they can just take it from your social media anyway

Not all of us are so cavalier about giving up our data and privacy, and many people are anonymous (to varying degrees) when using sites for a reason, largely so that doesn't happen. That's another thing this act is aiming to do, make it more and more inconvenient and eventually just straight up impossible, to be anonymous online, tying everything you say and type to you, forever. An authoritarian government's dream, and people who go along with this are clearly very happy to be controlled.

4 minutes ago, Rooney said:

This is what I can't get, people share their cookies, our own medical data is shared with third parties etc. all the social media companies sell our data, we regularly sell our data for Clubcard/Nectar points etc. If there's some great big porn database out there with everyone's identities.. so what?

? Can you not see a pretty clear difference between restrictive marketing data (that even the most privacy-concerned have the ability to opt out of by engaging in very limited ways) and submitting scans of highly sensitive identification data to companies who then could keep it in one of their databases as long as they please, directly attaching you and only you to their services?

Saying it's about porn downplays this huge privacy breach as more and more decidedly non-porn websites start mandating it just to be sure they aren't serving minors anything that a censor might deem unsuitable.

8 minutes ago, Iz 🌟 said:

Not all of us are so cavalier about giving up our data and privacy, and many people are anonymous (to varying degrees) when using sites for a reason, largely so that doesn't happen. That's another thing this act is aiming to do, make it more and more inconvenient and eventually just straight up impossible, to be anonymous online, tying everything you say and type to you, forever. An authoritarian government's dream, and people who go along with this are clearly very happy to be controlled.

I dunno if people are so desperate to remain anonymous about what they are posting online , comes across a bit suspect like they have something to hide

 

15 minutes ago, Rooney said:

This is what I can't get, people share their cookies, our own medical data is shared with third parties etc. all the social media companies sell our data, we regularly sell our data for Clubcard/Nectar points etc. If there's some great big porn database out there with everyone's identities.. so what?

It's not like someone gonna be sat in an office monitoring what you do 24/7 , as you already said we already give our data out in so many other ways anyway

1 minute ago, Iz 🌟 said:

? Can you not see a pretty clear difference between restrictive marketing data (that even the most privacy-concerned have the ability to opt out of by engaging in very limited ways) and submitting scans of highly sensitive identification data to companies who then could keep it in one of their databases as long as they please, directly attaching you and only you to their services?

Saying it's about porn downplays this huge privacy breach as more and more decidedly non-porn websites start mandating it just to be sure they aren't serving minors anything that a censor might deem unsuitable.

They can keep the data, but that would also be illegal and would be breaching GDPR laws, even more so if they got hacked. I agree it's likely going too far and that the government could just force companies to use adult filters etc. but my point is more the Government and companies can already keep track of us (the Governmanr and most probably do and all other companies definitely do) to predict all our habits.

4 minutes ago, 777666jason said:

I dunno if people are so desperate to remain anonymous about what they are posting online , comes across a bit suspect like they have something to hide

Doing 'if you got nothing to hide you got nothing to fear' in the big 2025 is certainly a choice. The internet requires anonymity to function for good because of the persistence of data, and allowing anonymity is an essential tool against government surveillance. Governments should be obligated to protect our rights to privacy if we so choose and that right is essential for the proper human rights of freedom of thought and expression, otherwise known as free speech.

4 minutes ago, Rooney said:

They can keep the data, but that would also be illegal and would be breaching GDPR laws, even more so if they got hacked. I agree it's likely going too far and that the government could just force companies to use adult filters etc. but my point is more the Government and companies can already keep track of us (the Governmanr and most probably do and all other companies definitely do) to predict all our habits.

The company I've looked into most is Persona, as that's the one that's verifying on Reddit, and I have come away basically convinced that I should not put my ID in there. Their privacy policy states that they either destroy it after completion of verification OR keep it for up to three years for AI training purposes, depending on their interactions with the customer, and that latter use, because they're an American company, is outside of GDPR. They've also been breached with their services for LinkedIn multiple times. I may be misinterpreting that but I do not trust that. Similarly looking into some of the other companies that are being used isn't much better.

I completely expect that anyone with the desire could reconstruct a complete picture of my online activities, even if I don't use my real name on most sites I use regularly, so actually by contrast to the suggestion of 'live and let live' I'm very very careful with what further data I share with any websites, and this is far more than I am ever willing to share.