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Join Viktor, a proud nerd and seasoned entrepreneur, whose academic journey at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley sparked a career marked by innovation and foresight. From his college days, Viktor embarked on an entrepreneurial path, beginning with YippieMove, a groundbreaking email migration service, and continuing with a series of bootstrapped ventures.
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Join Viktor, a proud nerd and seasoned entrepreneur, whose academic journey at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley sparked a career marked by innovation and foresight. From his college days, Viktor embarked on an entrepreneurial path, beginning with YippieMove, a groundbreaking email migration service, and continuing with a series of bootstrapped ventures.
UK Online Safety Act: Digital ID and the Risks of a Database State with James Baker
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18 NOV • 2025
1 hour 6 mins
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What happens when a government’s push for “safety” starts reshaping the architecture of the internet? In this episode of Nerding Out with Viktor, I’m joined by James Baker, Policy and Campaigns Manager at Open Rights Group, to unpack the deeper implications of the UK Online Safety Act and the country’s evolving approach to Digital ID. With two decades of work in privacy advocacy, James offers a grounded but no less urgent perspective on how these policies affect builders, platforms, and users alike. What begins as a conversation about compliance quickly leads into bigger questions about identity, control, and the future of privacy in digital systems.
James began his work in digital rights in the early 2000s with the NO2ID campaign, helping defeat the UK’s first national ID card proposal. Since then, he’s worked across local government, EU institutions, and privacy advocacy, now leading policy at Open Rights Group — often described as the UK’s EFF. That long view shapes his critique of today’s Digital ID and surveillance proposals, where control over identity is quietly shifting away from individuals.
As James explains, many concerns around Digital ID in the UK aren’t rooted in the technology itself but in how it’s governed. Unlike decentralized or bank-issued identity systems seen in countries like Sweden and Estonia, the UK model leans heavily toward centralization. That raises alarms about a so-called “Database State,” where access to public services could be controlled, revoked, or surveilled at scale. Combine that with AI-driven policy decisions and the involvement of players like Palantir, and you have a potent recipe for institutional overreach without the constitutional safeguards seen in other democracies.
Throughout the episode, we dive into the technical consequences of these policy shifts. From mandated age verification to perceptual hash matching and metadata scanning, the requirements of the Online Safety Act place growing burdens on infrastructure teams. As James puts it, the UK’s enforcement model risks fragmenting the open internet, pushing developers toward compliance-heavy centralization or forcing them to exit the UK market altogether. Even tools like end-to-end encryption and VPNs are under quiet pressure, with the line between user protection and mass surveillance getting harder to draw.
What emerges isn’t just a policy critique. It’s a design problem. James outlines what a privacy-first digital ID could look like: built on W3C standards, backed by legal protections, open source, and decentralizable by design. It’s a vision that trusts the user instead of defaulting to control. And while he’s cautious about political will, he’s optimistic that builders can still shape a better way forward, especially when armed with the right tools and a clear understanding of what’s at stake.
If you care about open source, encryption, or building systems that scale responsibly, this is an episode you’ll want to catch.
Links
- UK Online Safety Act 2023 - The full text of the Online Safety Act
- Open Rights Group - UK digital rights organization, often described as the UK’s EFF
- NO2ID Campaign - The campaign that defeated the UK’s first national ID card proposal
- W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) - W3C standard for decentralized digital identity
- W3C Verifiable Credentials - W3C standard for privacy-preserving digital credentials
- EFF Digital Identity Resources - Electronic Frontier Foundation’s work on digital identity
Transcript
Show/Hide Transcript
But what's really got people upset in the UK is not so much around, you know, the concept of having a digital wallet that could hold credentials.
It's the kind of tracking and centralization that goes behind it.
What, what has been labeled really the database state, you know, some tool to help you.
It's actually a kind of like a state that uses information about you, shares information about you, data about you, to do things to you rather than you kind of ask the state to do something to.
You're kind of almost there to be kind of like the state does these things to you.
Welcome back to Nerding Out with Viktor.
Today I'm joined by James Baker.
Welcome, James.
Hey, welcome.
Thank you for coming on the show today.
We're going to talk about more on the policy than we usually do.
So today is going to be about Online Safety Act and Digital ID in the UK.
So a bit of a UK centric episode today before we dive into the actual show.
James, maybe you can give the viewers a bit of backstory about yourself so we have some more context about the conversation.
Absolutely, yeah.
Well, I'm someone who's been like campaigning on privacy and tech issues in the UK for kind of over 20 years now.
Used to work for a campaign called Notary back in the day and we helped defeat the ID cards the last time around and a lot of kind of surveillance pro issues then.
Since then I've had a bit of a spell.
I worked in local government for a bit.
I was a representative in local government.
Did a bit of time working for some MEPs in Europe when the UK was still in the European Parliament.
And the last few years I've been at the Open Rights Group kind of campaigning again on tech and digital issues and I guess like Open Rights Group is really like the UK's version of EFF.
Right, right.
Yeah.
So EFF I'm a big fan of but so I'm glad to have somebody representing those same issues on this side of the pond today.
We are dive deep into these issues and there are a lot to unpack and I think most people have at least seen this on their radar, both Digital ID and Online Safety Act.
But I, I want to start off with the digital id.
Yeah, at the face value this seems like a very sensible thing, like having an ID in your phone.
Seems like a fairly non controversial concept, fairly straightforward idea but there's a lot brewing under the hood here or on the behind the scenes.
So maybe for those not familiar with the concept and the controversies, I guess, around this.
Let's start there, let's start unpacking, like why this is such a big deal.
Why it's a controversial issue.
Sure.
And I think a lot of this stuff, like the devil is in the detail of how digital id.
Yes.
Is done.
You know, we are used to an age, aren't we, where we will have an app on our phone, perhaps like a digital wallet app, and that can store credentials every.
We can kind of use that.
But like if any app on your phone, Right.
It's kind of who controls the app, what app is, you know, what data is that app collecting?
You know, how's it being run?
Who's in control of how that identity issued or revoked, you know, who has power over that?
I mean, at the essence of it, with anything digital, it's done at the flick of a switch.
Right.
So your credentials exist or they don't exist based on a, you know, a decision.
Mix could be made of a click of your fist, click of your fingers.
So you can kind of, you can like lose access to your identity as well as you can gain it easily.
And you see that, I guess, around issues of like dist exclusion and people kind of losing it, where if you have something physical, there is a sense of it's there, it's in your back pocket.
You know, if the tech goes down, if there's a systems failure, you've got that as a kind of hard copy backup.
I mean, I am like a total tech nerd.
I love tech things, but I don't travel without like a physical backup of things as well because like stuff does break and stuff does go down.
So I guess I'm like one essence, there's as a general sense of like, is this going to replace other methods that I've known and trusted for a long time and are kind of like pretty secure and resilient to failure?
So there's that whole aspect of it.
But what's really got people upset in the UK is not so much around the concept of having a digital wallet that could hold credentials.
It's the kind of tracking and centralization that goes behind it.
What has been labeled really the database state.
And you see that really being advocated strongly through organization.
Tony Blair Institute, Obviously, Tony Blair, UK's former prime minister, he's now been running the Tony Blair Institute and he's been essentially, it's a huge organization.
Tony Blanche, like employs over 400 people and they kind of lobby at this international level.
For this concept of, like, how AI can work in order to create a kind of AI smart state that delivers public services for you before you even know you do it.
So when ID cards, digital ID again got announced, I was like, they're doing tours of like the press circuit on kind of radio, on tv, up against Tony Blair Institute.
And they're not talking about some kind of identity credential issued to a wallet, and that's it.
They're talking about a kind of radical transformation of how the British state works.
So the example they gave was, you know, imagine ladies just had a baby, she can now claim child benefits to get access to, like, what the state offers to help people with children without even having to apply for it.
So that whole concept is not, you know, some.
Some tool to help you.
It's actually a kind of like a state that uses information about you, shares information about you, data about you, to do things to you, rather than you kind of ask the state to do something to you.
You're kind of almost there to be.
To be kind of like the state does these things to you.
So that is what is really, I think, alarmed a lot of us who care about these issues around privacy and data.
Not so much actual digital credential, but that kind of revolution of how the state would work.
Yeah.
I think one thing that's important to kind of highlight here for at least for international listeners, is that unlike most, I guess, European and international states, the UK doesn't have any form of ID outside of driver's license.
Which is for me, as somebody who moved to the uk was kind of a weird one.
Right.
So I think this ties together in some ways.
Right?
Yeah.
So I guess, I mean, like quite a lot of common law countries, through that common law tradition, identity is established through your interactions with.
With other people.
So you have ways to prove your identity, but they're not officially done centrally by the state.
You might have like a birth certificate or you might have a license that proves you're that person to drive, or you might have a passport that improves your entitlement to travel.
But none of these things in and of themselves are proof of your identity.
You can also, in the uk, I mean, you can like change your name freely when you want to.
So at the moment I'm called James Baker, but I could myself sign a bit of paper tomorrow and call myself like John Barnes and just change my identity.
So we have that kind of freedom to change.
Identity isn't something that is, you know, determined by a central authority, but the Other thing the UK doesn't have, which a lot of countries do have this digital ID have, is a written constitution and those strong protections for privacy.
So I talk about this with, you know, an example of Germany, for example, where they do have ID cards in Germany, but then they also have very strong like written constitution that protects a lot of their privacy rights, which gives them some future protection about like, you know, an authoritarian misuse of those ID cards in the future.
But in the uk, because we don't have that kind of written constitution, you actually see, you know, the threat of these.
Some of these systems I think are kind of bigger potentially to the UK than they are.
You know, some other countries already have them.
Yeah.
So I, I'm from Scandinavia and in Scandinavia we've been using something called Bank ID for a very long time.
I'm sure you're familiar with that product.
And that was not controversial by any means when that was rolled out.
And it's now essentially your ID to interface with any banking system or any governmental system which for good or bad, I actually myself was in a pickle for that because my bank ID expired and I don't live there and I could only I had to go to the fiscal bank to like renew it when I was in Sweden.
So that highlights what are the problems faced there.
But, but the thing that kind of worked there was that Bank ID was created as a unit between all the banks.
So they basically had, because of KYC, they knew their customers, so therefore they could issue bank id, which is slightly different than the narrative coming from the uk.
Right.
And the model that the bank id.
Sorry, sorry, the model that the digital ID has been modeled around, I, I don't think is coming from that model, but rather from.
I, I think if I'm correct, if I'm wrong, but I think from the.
More like the Estonian side of that side of how the Estonian E-Citizenship works, for instance.
Is that correct or is where the.
Inspiration drawn from this, it's been talked about.
I mean, politicians have referenced Estonia quite a lot for this.
Yeah, I think their idea is something that like, you know, government centrally creates and then is going to be a kind of government wallet which they then issue credentials to.
I mean, the only slight bit of good news I've heard coming out about this is that they're talking about using the W3C standards for digital identity wallets and digital credentials, which if you apply those properly, and again, like the devil is in the detail, but if you did apply those standards correctly, you could create a fairly privacy friendly way of doing digital id.
So it's really, I think it's going to be like, what happens to the data behind the scenes?
Is the, is all the data in government going to be merged into a central authority within government then issues these IDs or is our different government departments and local authorities and maybe even like private sector able to kind of issue their credentials themselves to these schemes?
So to give you example, like here in the uk, if you wanted to become a, perhaps up a pub, that would be like your local authority would issue your alcohol license rather than central government.
So is it going to be a kind of a system that say, like every separate part of government can issue a digital credential to that wallet or is it going to be kind of centralized data sharing and that kind of control that goes with it?
So that's kind of really where we're at with a lot of the concerns around it.
I mean, it's interesting, like, you know, the banking example, like the UK's banking is pretty advanced as a country.
You know, our fintech is kind of up there.
We've got a lot of mobile banking applications and things that can kind of do some form of identity.
You know, it's very integrated now with like credit reference checks and stuff.
If you're opening up new accounts for like, this is where we're kind of, you know, some of the examples of government says, oh, it's such a hassle, you have to get your paper bills out to open up an account.
Like no one does that anymore.
This is, this is true though.
This is, this is true though.
I am so frustrated with KYC checks for everything because I feel like multiple times a year between bank accounts you have to like, oh, now you have to do kyc, scan your council tax bill, set it in and it's just like, guys, this is not a sol.
Should be a solved problem by now in a modern country.
Yeah, there is that repetition.
I had it with one of my accounts, I hadn't done it and then a payment went through and it's like, oh no, we've not been able to like process this subscription payment because you haven't done your like updated check.
And there is that kind of element of control with some of that as well.
And you see it, you know, like it's increasingly difficult to use cryptocurrencies, for example, in the UK because they keep trying to like constantly, you know, tell us your data, tell us what you wanted to use this cryptocurrency for and they're just kind of increasingly making it I guess like increase of financial surveillance.
Yes.
I mean but you mentioned devils in the detail which I completely agree with.
Right.
I mean when companies like Palantir have been surfaced as being part of these projects, that ought to make people nervous.
My list pellet is involved, something is sketchy is happening.
That's that my litmus test generally speaking.
Right.
But yeah, where's your head around with regards to that?
Well, I mean I think you know, you can go online.
I say that this video is on YouTube or what have you of like Tony Blair, speaker of Larry Ellson of Oracle about like this future of digital ID and where AI and this tech can go.
And that really tells you what their vision is or what some people's vision is with digital id.
So I think yeah, the big tech company involved, the company itself could be problematic.
But it's you know, about what the laws and what they're going to do with that and where they see this kind of, where they see government going with AI and technology really is it going to be like a future where we as an individual kind of have some ownership of digital id?
I mean you could do it, right?
You could, you could issue like a system where other people could create the wallet.
You wouldn't even necessarily need to be a government owned wallet.
Like people could issue credentials to it, private sector could use it as well.
Actually quite kind of decentralized in the way it works and not kind of centralize the control.
Or you can see this thing where like you have a really big tech company involved in it, Palantir, Oracle, someone like that and like your data is being held by them and it's pulling data across government from like health.
Because we have like a nationalized health service in uk so all of that public health data is available quite easily to suck up and like crime data, health data, like your tax data, your social data, all of that then goes into like a centralized system which can then be interrogated with an AI because that's what is changing in recent years is that ability to interrogate huge data sets is expanding and that.
And with that I guess like the risks of kind of control come along with it.
So it's this is like entirely different right to something like the open banking system which is run by the banks or not necessarily just the government or like Germany's ID card which is like you know, a card and has these strong protections around merging like the large data sets in Germany.
So that's the kind of risk with digital ID in the uk really, is that kind of database state and then like the AI state that goes along with that?
Yeah, yeah.
How do you see, I mean, the obvious one you mentioned already is that it's an app on your phone, right.
It's your wallet or your phone.
That obviously draws the thinking to Apple and Google being able to issue these on your phone.
Right.
You already seen this.
Like Microsoft Authenticator can do this to some degree already.
How do you see, like, is there some kind of, like in dialogue or some kind of pushback and them trying to control that side against their governments or, and to create some kind of like global ID system or how do you see that playing out?
Yeah, I mean, the global aspect of it, there's an element of it being part of a global agenda.
This isn't like some kind of weird conspiracy thing.
Like you can go on the WS website and they've got like a document around, you know, smart cities of the future digital id.
And it's essentially like encouraging different national governments to kind of go down this route of issuing digital ID for their citizens.
And I think it's born out of this kind of sense of it's the future, it's an easier way of doing it.
We help to like identify people's credentials.
But I do think there's an element of this, it's like there is an element of control.
And it's also, I think, quite highly linked into issues of taxation as well.
So yes, I always joke, like in the uk, like governments have wanted to know more about people since William the Conqueror, like invaded and created this doomsday book of every Saxons farm and how many sheep they had and how many chickens and cows they had and how much land in order to tax them.
And so you see with digital ID in the uk, it being proposed, like, notionally alongside this idea that people are perhaps working illegally and if they're working illegally, kind of not paying tax.
So there's this attempt to tackle, you know, the gray market of people working outside of what the government knows about.
But at the same time alongside that, you see AI tools being developed to help like, catch people who aren't paying the right amount of tax.
So our tax authority, hmrc, has just started scanning people's social media posts to try and detect life skull discrepancies between the kind of lifestyle they appear to have on their social media accounts and what they're reporting to government through taxation.
So this kind of like what the concern is that actually AI here is going to be used to essentially, you know, police people and stop people doing things that they ought not to.
It's a very, I mean it's hard to have this conversation without thinking about the social credit system that's being rolled out in part of China, right.
Where if you have a central identity and you have a score and then well, if your score drops a certain level because you've done something that the government deemed to be bad, you might not be able to leave the country or you might not be able to use the public transport or whatever it may be, you may be penalized.
However they seem fit as per the scheme.
Right.
That I, I mean that side of me is terrifying because it goes against so much our Western values in general.
Yeah, I mean it is terrifying.
I think, you know, and I think people ought to be a bit more terrified.
I think it's so scary that sometimes, you know, we like to just not think about it too much or the risk it might happen here.
But I mean already it started there's kind of AI tools that are used because we do a whole project at Open Rights Group, we call this like pre crime.
So you know, from that, that kind of sense that the technology be used to kind of predict people's likelihood of committing offense as well.
But there's already like programs for like perpetrators so like risk offending tools which is used by, in rehabilitation of criminals in the UK where they'll enter people's data and then they'll predict their likelihood of, that they're going to be someone who's going to go and recommit a crime after they get released.
And that's used in assessments around whether people should be, you know, released on license from prison or not.
So in some ways like those kind of risk profiling tools exist at this point.
There isn't like a centralized credit score that everyone has.
Well there is financially, you know, everyone has a financial credit score in the UK but you know, there isn't a kind of behavior credit score yet.
But there are organizations that use data to create risk profiles of people.
So you're not that far away from that then becoming, you know, more centralized I guess.
Which is terrifying because we all know how much AI today hallucinates and there have already been cases, I don't have the notes here, but I believe there was one, at least one reported incorrect arrest in the US where they had used tools like this where they like predicted somebody but due to poor training they Arrest the wrong person.
Yeah, and we've had it.
So we've had recently, UK trials of live facial recognition scanning.
So essentially the police have been given a load of funding for the Home Office and they go and set up vans outside, like Tube stations and busy places, and they start using live facial recognition technology to try and identify people who are kind of essentially like, wanted by the police.
And that.
That has already resulted in, like, one or two incorrect arrests, where the kind of algorithm gets it wrong.
And as you kind of scale these systems up, you know, the more people you've got involved in it, the kind of bigger the mistakes will be.
And also the other problem is it becomes, like, impossible for the police is, like, capacity to actually keep up with the amount of data they have.
So to give you an example, like, the UK has this really widespread AMPR automatic number plate recognition surveillance system set up all across the country.
So if you drive a car and you're in the uk, it will scan your number plate.
And I think.
I'm not sure, I think it's like one of the biggest databases in Europe at the moment.
It has, like, ridiculous number of entries added to that database every year.
You think of all the.
The traffic.
But then at the same time, I've got a friend who's like, training to be a detective in the police force.
He's like, yeah, well, you know, if we're doing a patrol, we get so many pings off the system, we haven't actually got the time to, you know, stop everyone on.
On the system.
So you kind of have this sense of, like, on the one hand, the UK is like a very high surveillance society, but on the other hand, we're kind of like low enforcement because we've not got, like, effective court system or effective, like, police investigation.
Yeah, yeah.
Between ANPR and.
I mean, London has probably the highest density of civilians in the Western world.
Right.
And sprinkle digital ID on top of that with all the data sets.
Like, that's pretty terrifying.
Lost you for a little bit there, Victor.
On the.
Oh, yeah.
Are you back now?
You're back now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was just saying, between the amount of cameras available in London with ANPR systems deployed, combine that with digital id, it's a pretty terrifying idea, even if it's not done today.
But what could be done?
Yeah, what could be done?
And then at the same time, if you speak to a lot of British people, they'll tell you about rising fear and Conservative crime and London, I think, you know, those some of the kind of like stabbing and homicide rates are slightly, you know, the spin on that is slightly worse than the actual data is in terms of like phone theft.
That, that is a real problem in London at the moment.
And so we have kind of like in the UK all of this surveillance, but we don't have the kind of, you know, the low crime that goes with some other cultures which are also kind of like have authoritarian tendencies.
So it's like the surveillance is there but it doesn't also like help ordinary people struggle with crime, if that makes sense.
It hasn't stopped crime.
And I think that's the real lesson.
I'd say like, you know, it hasn't been the solution to crime in the uk.
Yeah, then that's a very good point.
And obviously like you can see these people with just bar clavos, like zooming around town on like scooters and bikes.
Right.
So that's, yeah, just easy way to mitigate that.
Right?
Yeah, that's it.
You know, you kind of, at some point you even need like police patrols on the ground or you need kind of community interventions to stop people going into crime in the first place.
There's like none of that prevention or community funding's all been stripped away.
Instead we've got like loads of cameras everywhere.
I mean London's interesting as well because they kind of put up cameras there for like policing like car emissions as well, like low emission zones.
And you saw like this real kind of grassroots, this movement of people actually just like coming out and trying to cut down these surveillance cameras and just kind of, you know, rebellion against that kind of surveillance because it was being used again it was being used essentially like fine people for a fairly kind of like low level offense rather than actually help people with their day to day struggles with crime.
Right, yeah.
So we've talked about digital ID and why maybe a bad idea and like what.
But let's wrap up that conversation with where would you like to see this going?
Obviously you're involved with the policy side of things, with the lobbying sort of that like how can we get this done?
Right, Because I think it is not a bad idea.
But the devil is in the detail.
Right?
Like how can we get this Right?
Yeah, I think you have to start with like your legal protections and your legal that you have there for privacy.
So what save like the UK is like, well we don't have a written constitution.
We have the Human Rights act which is just a piece of Statute passed by parliament.
But one problem, because we don't have a written constitution, you only require like a parliamentary majority to change anything that's there already.
It's not like some countries where you have to have some kind of like super majority to change the constitution.
So we have a kind of broken democracy problem in the uk.
So part of like if you want digital ID done in a way which like isn't going to be authoritarian or isn't going to strip people of their rights, so you need to have that kind of system of rights in place in the first place.
And I think part of the countries that have done that well are countries that have got a very strong constitutional protection for some of these things and privacy and courts that will kind of defend it.
And within that environment it's probably safer to think about developing something like a digital ID system.
And then I think you also need like polarity and decentralization rather than kind of centralization.
So try to create a system which is not all just on like one set of servers that could go down, you know, not under one authority's control.
Something that like is more decentralized, where the code is open source.
We can see how it works.
Like different people can choose to operate wallets, be that you know, Apple, the state, even like an NGO or a charity or a bank could maybe kind of operate the wallet software themselves.
It doesn't have to just be centralized.
And then I think, you know, working to develop those international standards like the W3C standards around decentralized digital identity and kind of work to make those as privacy friendly as possible and kind of working on those, I guess like more the tech solutions around kind of you know, zero knowledge proofs and just kind of developing like privacy friendly tech around encryption and how you do that.
So I think that's like how I would go about it.
I'm always a bit wary of saying like it could be done in a privacy friendly way because like politicians will take that and then not do it.
So I tend to like be more critical.
But yeah, I mean I think with my little insight on this like zero knowledge proof seem to be the by far best solution to do this so that you can actually prove who you are without disclosing information.
Right.
And I think we've seen terrible things that happen when you hand over data to any sort of entity.
Right, yeah.
And, and there are, I mean I know there's people like within.
Org as an organization who would like be like critical of zero knowledge proofs because there are kind of academic papers out there that kind of show in real world applications they're not always possible.
And maybe like one example of that is like the recent like Discord breach around.
I was going to mention that.
Yeah, yeah.
Around like online age assurance stuff.
Like even if the age assurance systems secure itself and even if that was like using zero knowledge proof or whatever, then actually what your systems around that system, you know, when you start to think of processes which involve like the wider process, it then gets even harder to kind of keep all of that privacy friendly.
So I think like the Discord breach wasn't, you know, the actual age assurance provider, but it was through people who then had problems with that and then went onto a different customer service system, then that customer service system had a breach.
So it's a lot harder, you know, even if you get like the privacy right on like one part of our entire system, kind of getting it across your whole process is much more of a challenge.
On the best way to protect it is not to have it at all.
Well, there is that like don't.
If you don't need it, don't.
Don't collect it or use it, don't store it.
Yeah.
Well that gives us a nice segue over to the second topic for today's conversation with which is the Online Safety act, which is highly controversial regulation that went into ratification earlier this year.
For those not familiar with it, or maybe those who are maybe don't have maybe those familiar with the terminology, but with the name, but not really what it implies.
Let's.
Can you give the viewers kind of like a recap of what that is and how it impacts our lives?
Okay, so the very basics of the Online Safety act is I guess it was an attempt to or is an attempt to apply to providers of online services.
So that's quite broad.
You know, anyone doing a website, but any kind of online service where users can interact, place upon them certain legal duties to prevent and mitigate harms.
So it comes instead of, you know, the old way of conceptualizing the Internet was you're providing a service.
What people do on that service is down to them.
You know, they're doing something illegal, it's them who's done something illegal.
You're just the facilitator of the space.
But the individual liability is kind of, you know, if you publish something.
So it's moving from that to kind of trying to put general duties of care and legal responsibility upon service providers.
And perhaps the closest analogy I can think of is Something like we have health and safety law in the UK where if you're like providing an activity in the real world, you kind of have a duty of care to people in the real world that it's safe.
So it's a bit like trying to apply health and safety law to the entire issue of the Internet, but with the major problem that like people who run services are based all over the world, whereas the UK is just like one jurisdiction.
So it's got that kind of massive problem, it's extraterritoriality.
And then the other problem with it is just like the complexity of the duties that are placed upon you are kind of mind boggling really.
And that's where we've kind of run into problems is that unless you're a really big tech organization with specialists employed working on this, it is pretty incomprehensible for most people to really understand the law and all the codes that have been created.
So legislators, they passed the law back in 2023 and then Ofcom had this period of trying to get their heads around it and implement it.
And I almost feel a bit sorry for Ofcom because they've been given a kind of almost impossible task event.
OFCOM has just been spitting out like these hundred page, you know, hundreds and hundreds of pages of codes of practice and guidance for.
Honestly, you would like lose the will to live if you had to read through all of this stuff.
I kind of think it's like UK has created like a kind of magnus opus international bureaucracy with this piece of legislation.
I mean like they did an update of it, right?
It was a consultation, 310 pages of consultation, asked like 60 question.
I had 17 annexes now that like, how can anyone seriously.
It took me like weeks to go through it and I'm kind of doing this.
But you've read it, you've read painfully.
Yeah, I mean I got, thankfully Org employed me to read it.
It would not have been something.
But yeah, all those donations to Org, they're used.
Well, it enables someone who cares about digital rights to get their head around this stuff.
But it's.
Yeah, so that's the kind of problem with the active and the.
Some of the main things that have come out of it are obviously like age insurance, this idea that not just for pornographic websites but actually for a whole host of other websites people are having to do now like age checks on their users.
That's kind of one of the things that's come out of it.
But also with the next round of it, we see increasingly proposals to start deploying perceptual hash matching technologies across whole range of services, including file storage and file sharing.
So your Google Drive as well here in your kind of private documents could be covered by this to start kind of scanning either content that you produce or content that you're sharing for a whole host of types of content which is kind of covered by the app.
There's.
Yeah, there's so much to unpack here.
But let's start with the age verification thing because I think that's ties into what we started with digital id.
So there are these conversations very tangential, I guess, and very much interdepend.
I think it's important to kind of prefix this conversation with the fact that I think there's a lot of like the intents are somewhat good, I guess, but as always, the road to is paid with good intentions.
Right.
I mean, I think it's important to acknowledge that we are living in a problem time where kids are exposed to pornography and like the are a lot of things that are bad, objectively bad.
Right.
The question is not, I don't think anybody, including you and your organization you work for, say that's not bad.
Everybody agrees that's bad.
The question is how that how we go about to mitigate that and solve that.
Right.
So based on where like what's like if you were to recap your biggest beef with this entire piece of legend legislation, what would you say that is your biggest issue with it?
Oh, I think my biggest beef, honestly, and I say this as a father, there's nothing in there about educating, there's nothing about educating young people around risks of lc and there's nothing in it about giving users better technical tools to prevent them seeing the stuff themselves.
It's like you're trying to place all the responsibility onto the platform to try and manage content for people rather than empowering people to one be able to like manage the content they see themselves and to when they inevitably see content, learn how to deal with that psychologically.
Like where you can get help, where you can get support, what you might see the impact of that.
And I say that some.
You know, I grew up in the early days of the Internet, the days of like rotten.com the days when like the large porn sites had total, you know, like when I was younger and you went on to a porn site, there was just all types of content on that site, which you just wouldn't see today.
It was like far more extreme and that was kind of like normal stuff.
And like Rosten.com you know, it's a group of teenage boys, we all went online and we all just like looked up gore stuff as a group of teenage boys.
Haha, isn't this funny?
Whereas actually like, you know, your mates left and then like the stuff you've seen then replays in your mind later that evening.
And actually I've been exposed some pretty like horrific content which has had an emotional impact, but then there's no one to speak to about it.
There's no kind of support mechanism within society.
So I think that's what we're getting wrong is that we're trying to rely on platforms to kind of police the Internet when actually it's all of our responsibility as a society.
And in trying to police the Internet they're also kind of wrongfully censoring stuff that shouldn't be censored.
And they're also kind of causing some of the best bits of the Internet to shut down because they can't just like deal with the kind of compliance side of it.
So they're actually kind of like forcing people onto big tech platforms.
Yeah, so that's super interesting, right?
I mean, I think the biggest element, the biggest beef I have is kind of like you're pushing onto the platforms rather than parental responsibilities, for instance.
I mean to make analogy, right, if you as a parent show your kids porn, that's a sex offense.
But if you are a negligent parent and you let your kids freely browse the Internet and the end result is the same, you have not done any, for anything wrong in the eyes of the law.
So it's, I think that's an interesting way of thinking about it where the responsibility of the parent, ultimately who is the person who issues the device to the person who is impacted by this, I mean, where their responsibility lives.
I know it's a difficult problem as a nerd myself to, to enforce this, but I do feel like there should be more onus on parents more so than trying to just turn this around and brush it off and say, hey, big tech companies, you solve this for us.
Yeah, certainly.
I think there should be like more of an effort to give parents better tools.
And there are tools out there.
I mean it is hard.
You know, I'm a dad of a kind of 7 year old and a 13 year old and I can stop like the 7 year old seeing stuff they probably ought not to.
But I struggle to be able to put stuff in place that my 13 year old couldn't get around if they're really determined to do so.
So at that point it becomes around like talking to them, education going, look, you're going to see some of this stuff.
This is what, you know, how it might impact you.
It's okay to talk about it if it does.
Like not making it a taboo thing.
But a lot more could be done in terms of like education and support for parents who's through like kind of schools as well.
I mean I always had this idea of like, well why couldn't like the government put some funding into like open source software solutions for like parental control or like filtering technology and then it could like you know, run a system through libraries, through like education, through the BBC, through radio.
You could like tell parents about these tools and help people kind of use them and it could become like an embedded thing.
And in some ways always thought like that was probably a better solution.
A lot of this stuff kind of did happen already though.
So already in the uk, you know, if you get out an ISP by default parental control blocking will exist at the ISP level.
So they will block certain websites at the ISP level.
And the ISPs run these kind of blocks, block filters, but you have to kind of actively get that taken off.
But again like there's ways you could do it.
You know, if you're a tech nerd you can go, okay, right, well I'm gonna set up my network and then I'm gonna have like one wireless network which doesn't have the blocks.
I'm going to run this other one through by a load of filters.
And therefore the children have got this kind of like blocked safer network.
And me as an adult can access the kind of unrestricted one that's like pretty, you know, it requires a certain level of kind of networking skill in order to kind of set up that network.
So I think there's more that could have been done there.
You could create products which are like, you know, here's a router and off the shelf there's like one password you've got which is not got the block list and you can log on to as an adult and here's like another login that you can give to your children and you can get their devices logged onto like a WI FI network that has like filters and like parental controls and blocks built into it.
Which are age appropriate for the age of that child.
But you're never going to stop information.
I mean, that's the other thing like that child will still, at some point, you know, they could go out there, they could buy a device off a high street secondhand, they will come across a mate who's got that content on their phone.
So which is why I always think it has to come back to a certain extent to education.
I think about like information control.
I think like even North Korea, people smuggle memory sticks into to North Korea.
Like, I just think the idea that you can entirely control information and solve a problem is, is not feasible.
That's why I kind of go back to education a lot of the time.
I think that's very sensible.
And I think this ties into the school, obviously plays an active role in this.
In particular on, I mean we've seen kind of a big push towards banning smartphones in schools and I think that I'm a big proponent of that.
Right.
Because I think that plays into like these things happen all around the clock.
Right.
Not only that, but again, going back to education I think is important, but also not letting kids have like a smartphone that they can have unlimited access to in their bedroom after hours.
Right.
When they're supposed to be sleeping.
Right.
So I think that's where again, this comes back to like responsible parenting.
But I think it's going to be difficult to sell that narrative to the public because most people don't want to acknowledge that's the problem.
No.
And how do you know, how do you say to a parent who's like, had something horrible happen to their kid because, you know, they've been influenced perhaps by website, something like.
Well, actually, you know, it's your, its parental responsibility.
It's a hard sell, isn't it, to parents and it's easier to kind of like say it's the government's responsibility or it's easier.
I think it's like wave a stick at big tech and go, oh, it's all, you know, these nasty tech billionaires fault that this stuff is happening.
And you know, big techs are kind of easy, an easy blame target.
And you saw, I think a lot of the debates in UK Parliament, UK know, the way MPS were talking about big tech.
That's like kind of like vilification is basically, I think there's a loss that actually like it has, there has, there are problems of it, but there are also kind of huge benefits to young people and society generally by Having access to this technology, it's not all bad.
Like there's this kind of sense, I mean, to give you an example, there's a story that was recently UK press around a teenager who really tragically had like seen some online craze thing around sniffing aerosols and then they.
They'd overdosed from inhaling aerosol fumes and tragically passed away.
I mean that's just like awful.
I can't imagine that as like a father myself that happened to like one of my kids would just be devastating.
But I also remember growing up in the 90s before the Internet and that kind of thing happened then they were like teenagers did crazy, these dangerous stunts and crazes isn't like wasn't created by the Internet.
That was something that rent around just schools as kind of memes and ideas.
So I think sometimes we've lost a sense of like proportion around risk and it's now easy I think to like blame.
Blame the medium that oh, it's happened because they saw something on the Internet.
It must be like the Internet, a big text fault rather than going, actually this is a like a bigger problem around adolescents doing risky.
Engaging in risky, stupid behaviors that sometimes end tragically.
Yeah, it's the easiest scapegoat, no doubt.
And let's go further.
Like we talked about a little bit about potential.
We can talk a bit about potential solutions later on.
But you talked about something else which I think is important, which is like the case of jurisdiction.
And I think OFCOM has been, I guess, been ridiculed, I guess, to say the least from not the least 4chan about the fact that they think they are a global authority, Whereas in reality, 4chan, whatever you may think of them, is not a part of the UK entity.
Yeah, so I think that was.
That's an interesting narrative around like global enforcement because yes, some people and some entities will play ball, but I think it's naive to assume that the inter will bend over backwards for saying and.
And adhere to what Ofcom suggests they should be adhering to.
Right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean you really see like a class of speech culture between UK and US and you go back to the history of this and I mean for starters, like America fought a war to get its independence not to be covered by UK jurisdiction.
And out of that with, you know, the Enlightenment, this idea of free speech was like integral to that whole the founding of America and having that kind of First Amendment right based on those kind of principles of individual liberty and free speech from all of those kind of Intellectual speakers, people like Thomas Paine.
And now you're kind of seeing a situation where the UK is just trying to impose its model of speech back onto.
Back onto the world and kind of issuing fines as if they've got the power to enforce those.
And they've done that without seeking a, you know, a treaty, which is how you'd normally kind of enforce laws between countries.
You've had a, you know, reciprocal agreement for certain crimes and offenses that you could be extradited and charged between countries.
But there's.
Because there's that breakdown around speech.
You have this kind of bizarre thing where you see, like, you know, Donald Trump and Keir Starmer getting questioned about it.
And Starmer's going, oh, no, we're not.
We're not trying to censor Americans free speech.
And then a couple of weeks later, Ofcom issue a letter to an American company saying, we're.
We're fining you for your failure to regulate speech on your platform.
Yeah.
And what I don't understand is, like, why Ofcom didn't go straight to the kind of blocking stage.
Surely it'd make more sense.
But if they did that, they'd have to kind of admit they don't have the power around the world to enforce this.
So it's a bit like the Emperor's New Clothes they're trying to, like, make out they've got this power because it's been written into UK law.
But I don't think it, you know, it's not actually a power that exists.
It's not enforceable in the American courts.
Yeah, it.
The.
The.
When I read that 4Com.
OfCom 4chan narrative, the.
The thing that sprang to mind for me directly was, I'm not sure you remember, but the Pirate Bay used to publish these letters that they have received from US lawyers and saying, oh, in case you didn't know, Sweden is not a state in the US and now you have kind of like the opposite.
Right.
Yeah.
In.
In ofcom try to enforce outside of their own territory.
So, I mean, do you see any international.
International kind of consensus?
Because, I mean, I very much doubt the U.S. would bend over backwards and start enforcing something from Ofcon.
Right.
In the.
That completely goes against the First Amendment right.
How do you see that playing out?
Well, there's attempts by people who want this type of regulation by the Internet to create an international consensus.
So there's organizations, I guess, trying to create similar laws in other countries and kind of lobby for that.
And, you know, like, Australia, I think, is like another country which is kind of following the UK down this kind of path of like, kind of, you know, censorship and stuff online.
Stop it all under 16 year olds.
So I think there will be some consensus between some countries around the stuff and some companies will comply because they just want to like do business in the UK and you know, for them it's like, you know, we're not going to pull out of the UK market and lose all that business, so we're just gonna do it.
And for some of them it benefits them because it's like, well, actually we're big enough that we can comply with this and some of our smaller competitors are going to pull out.
Yes.
You know, but it's never, I don't think it's.
The problem is with like the uk, like the First Amendment is just such a strong protection for speech in America.
And also there's such a cultural tradition of it, like, and America is such a huge market, but I just don't think they're ever going to get, you know, all of that compliance from a lot of the US sites.
I mean, what Ofcom can do is then issue a court order to get ISPs to kind of block that, block the IPS and the domains.
So, like what will eventually happen with this, I suspect, is that Ofcom will just issue one of those orders and four chan boards that should be blocked off from the UK and any, and some sites have already voluntarily blocked themselves on the UK to avoid risks of stuff happening.
So what will happen is the UK won't have full access to the Internet.
It will have a UK version of the Internet which is more censored than other countries.
Not, not to the extent of China's great firewall, but to a lesser extent we will have a kind of UK Hadrian's firewall as it's been.
Yeah, that's terrifying.
That's terrifying to me for many reasons, but not the least because even if the objective today is to save children, it's a slippery slope.
Right.
The second that is enforced as it is now is the scope will always keep expanding.
It would never shrink.
And that as with all these surveillance laws and kind of moderation laws, their scope never creeps back, they only expand.
Yeah, and it's like, well, there's a couple reasons why that happens.
One is there's just a lot of people employed in jobs doing this stuff now.
And it's like having succeeded in getting the Online Safety act, they weren't all like, well, I'm now going to go work on something else.
They're like, how can I get funding to do the next proposal from people who care about this stuff?
So you know, they kind of carry on in their jobs and roles, kind of trying to push for the next solution.
You see that with like VPNs is like the next battleground in the UK.
So after the Online Safety act got implemented because a lot of people A, like didn't trust all these age assurance companies with their personal data and B, just wanted to carry on using Internet as I had before they went and got VPNs to access content as people in Russia do, as people in Iran and China do.
You know, I think tells you what you want.
People in the UK are now in the same boat as people in like China or Russia, but they need to have a VPN in order to fully access like an uncensored version of the Internet.
It's.
Yeah, it's that funny meme I've seen where like of a Russian guy is using a VPN in the UK tax the Internet, then a UK guys are using a VPN into Russia tax the Internet.
Just that they want different sides of it.
Yeah, pretty much that is the case.
Yeah, it's quite funny.
I've not heard that one before.
But you know, I mean I had to just for like Reddit I didn't want to give my personal details I hope, I hope Reddit don't hear this and like shut down my account.
Maybe they don't know what my account is.
But like, you know, I didn't want to give my personal details to Persona like a US company.
Like I didn't want them to have my things.
So I was like, okay, I use a vpn.
But literally it was like one day I could look at like a subreddit about like alcohol or sexual health advice or like violence and it would literally just, it was just like if you're in the UK that disappear.
If you hadn't got age verified, you could search for it in your Reddit, like search you just.
The subreddit wouldn't even pop up.
It didn't even like tell you it was missing because you haven't been age checked and then you could go log on.
Oh, I'm back in like France, Netherlands.
I can now access this like these subreddits again.
So like that censorship to me was just like awful.
Someone who's like growing up loving the Internet and the ability to access all these ideas, information around the world to then feel like I've been cut off from.
That was.
I mean that's the other thing.
You know, I've had a lot of friends as well kind of go well it's made me pretty depressed this online safety act.
It hasn't improved my mental health or well being, you know and that designed to protect people has actually caused a number of people kind of mental anguish really through having technology cut off, through like anxiety of handing over data as well.
And I was chatting about this especially like you know people like certain neurodiversity, perhaps you're autistic and you've been told throughout your life, you know, don't hand over your personal data.
And then someone's saying now you have to hand over your personal data.
It's like what should I do?
I've been told conflicting things and it's causing me like stress and anxiety over like what is the best thing to do?
Am I going to be subject to a data breach now?
You know, if you're.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean I want to switch over before we wrap up for today to another thing which I, I don't think has been discussed too much at least in the UK domain and we have seen a lot about this in Europe around Chat Control which I, I put out of scope for this conversation because I think it's enough topic just cover an entire episode on by itself.
But, but you mentioned already about this creep of scanning messages around image hashes and so forth which is driven to a great degree by lobbyists that representing very strong financial incentives.
One of them being Thorne, which is co founded by Ashley Kutcher and D. Moore for instance.
Like they've been very vocal by lobbying for these things.
So not from a altruistic perspective per se but because there is big financial incentive despite what the narrative around that might be.
But let's unpack a little bit.
What have you seen around that and how.
What's your head around this?
Hash matching technologies.
That's part of this.
Yeah.
So it came in as part of the Online Safety Act I think clause one two one it was like snuck in and thought well that's not very exciting.
So I kind of coined the term the spy clause for it and we managed to get some attention at the time around it.
We had some great help from Meredith at Signal.
Really helped to kind of boost the profile of the issue in the UK press.
We had like you know, WhatsApp getting involved a bit as.
As well to had sort of a bit of help from Meta to kind of raise the profile of it.
And we caused like a bit of a political fuss.
But I mean the law still ultimately passed.
We won like the smallest concession.
But before they could do it, they had to get like an independent person's report on its technical feasibility.
But it's kind of there in UK law that Ofcom now have this power.
They can issue any provider of a service the requirement to start like developing and deploying kind of like, yeah, Perceptual has matching of messages to try and detect certain types of content.
And they kind of believe, I mean proponents of believe that you can do that and not break kind of end to end encryption, which is kind of nonsense.
So that's kind of where we're at in the UK really.
I mean, I think like the UK is almost like too small alone to try and break end to end encrypted messages.
I don't think OFCOM are kind of like, I think they realize they can't kind of take that on.
So I think proponents of it were like hoping that they'd get the EU and chat controls done at the EU and then if that were to happen it'd be a lot harder really to kind of resist it.
But what we've got in the meantime is like Ofcom have announced proposals not for like end to end encrypted private messaging, but they're talking now about doing Perceptual has matching for certain file storage systems as well as social media.
So that would mean, you know, if you're sharing a Google Drive document and they talk about like certain categories of scanning such as like CSAM or terrorist content and then like scanning, you know, even like your Google Drives getting scanned flat if you were to kind of share it.
But the problem is of this stuff is it's like a lot of the time it's not easy to like it's very contextual whether something is or isn't promoting terrorism or whether you're reporting on it.
You know, it's a fine line between a human rights journalist documenting, you know, abuses, human rights abuses in Gaza for example, and depictions of Hamas terrorism.
You know, it's not always a clear line, it's not always easy to distinguish.
So you get lots of examples where people kind of get content wrongly flagged.
So as this kind of rolls out, unfortunately we're going to see more and more of that.
And at the same time the law in the UK can be expanded by a minister can just add something else as a priority offense.
We've already seen like three or four New priority offenses added to my safety act since July.
I think cyber flashing has been added, I think choking porns now being added and self harm's been added.
So like when that gets added it will follow on.
But you know, Perceptual has Matching will try to kick in on social media platforms and others to try and censor that content.
So you really see what they've put in place is a kind of censorship regime that could be very easily expanded and they believe that like at the moment they've just got duties to kind of take this content down.
But now Ofcom is saying, oh, you know, we think that like Perceptual has matching technology can be used to kind of automate this and take that stuff down.
And so you'll kind of see it being rolled out to social media and then at some point they've got this like bridge to tackle when it's end to end encrypted environments because it's just not at this point technically feasible to do that deployed appetra smashing within an entered encrypted enclosure environment.
So you that will be the kind of the future, I guess, battleground and showdown between that.
Yeah, I mean I'm pretty confident that a company like Meta would bend over backwards for that if they were to be pushed.
Whereas there are more vocal opponents to it.
Like Signal being a good example of that.
Right.
Where well they've explicitly stated if chat control were to be deployed to Europe they will pull out.
Right.
Which is a pretty vocal position.
I doubt Meta would do such like that because of financial interests.
Probably not.
I mean real car fight was pretty good for WhatsApp in terms of saying strongly about its impact on WhatsApp.
And then WhatsApp ran this like whole ad campaign in the UK around like enter the importance of end to end encrypted messages.
Then they turned on Enter and decryption for like Facebook messenger, even though like the UK government hated that.
So they've done some stuff which is like not too bad in fairness to Meta.
But I think that like that threat of wherever you pull out, I mean Meredith has been very clear that like Signal just like won't do that and break over.
Whereas I think Meta's almost said you don't need to worry about end to end encryption because we'll give you all the metadata and actually that's what you want.
So.
Yeah, you know, but then I mean what frustrates me at this point, other end of the scale, there's so many reports from platforms of content like csam that just the police don't have the capacity to follow up.
So again, like you could actually make a real difference in stuff if you just had more resources going into the teams that work on it and you followed up like the leads that platforms were already giving you and you had a proper criminal justice system of like, you know, like Sweden saying like Swedish prison system, I think world leader in terms of reforming criminals and reoffending rates and stuff.
Like if you tackled that stuff, you could actually address a lot of the harms in a perhaps a more constructive manner.
Yeah.
And I mean, I had Nick Selby on my last episode.
He used to run cyber security and cyber investigations at NYPD and he is a vocal opponent of chat control and kind of resonating what you're saying, like these tools are not necessary.
There are ways to do this without the massive breach of privacy.
Right.
Because I think again, this is, to me, this is a line sand.
Right, like there must be some privacy.
We can't just hand over and assume everything can be backdoored and, and just there not must be some sense of privacy in a functioning democracy otherwise redeemed.
Right, yeah.
And I think, you know, it's a real risk to.
I say this like mps, I say, but you're the sort of people who are going to get blackmailed or you're going to suffer, you know, if you don't use engine encryption on a secure platform.
You're the ones that are going to be like leaking data to China.
I mean, there's been a massive scandal in the UK about like Chinese spying and the amount of like infosec or the lack of it amongst our establishment in UK has been shocking.
But it's like you guys should be defending end to end encryption because it's in your interest that we're not just opening up data to like Russia or China or you know, criminals who are out there to do like ransomware stuff.
You want to be protecting your data and like, as soon as you start backdooring this stuff, you're going to just undermine that security for everyone.
I mean, I think it is quite mixed.
I mean, within like, you know, cyber security professionals and even like former people who've worked for intelligence services.
I mean, we've had like former, you know, professionals involved in GCHQ in the UK come out against this and kind of say, you know, there's risks here.
A lot of their own, you know, intelligence services, a lot of our own operatives will rely on different like end to End encrypted protocols to you know, like the CIA will entirely rely on that for all their operatives.
So you're going to like undermine systems that help Western like democracies defend their values, you know, but that's it.
You, you can't have it both ways.
You either have interned decrypton or you don't.
And I, I, I, I love, I think it was in chat control in one of the draft.
It was so kind of aster say like yeah, we, we warned back and encryption.
We want backdoor everything.
We want to backdoor everything but we want to be excluded the political class.
And it's just like hold on.
Yeah, that's not how it works.
You want a special version of the app which hasn't got the backdoor on it, right?
Yeah, that's pretty terrible.
I mean that's, this goes to show that it's us, we're excluded, but the rest of them don't need privacy.
That's fine.
Yeah, like, yeah, the asymmetry of privacy is a real issue, isn't it, whether you can, if you have to buy privacy or have the power to obtain it.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, so as we're wrapping up here, James, I'm curious.
How do you see the future of Online Safety Act?
Are we doomed?
Is there a light down a tunnel?
What can we do to kind of like take back control and take back like a, a more sensible narrative when it comes to this whole spiel domain?
Sorry.
I sometimes joke that like the UK government is going to like raise the most like tech savvy generation of any country now because like every British teenager will be like familiar in how to use Tor, how to use VPNs, how to like find alternative ways.
They'll be like kind of thinking up new protocols like share whatever data mesh nets or what have you.
So I think there's like, there's always that kind of like opposition creates innovation.
You look at like the long view of communication technology.
There's been like a pattern of new type of communication comes out, have a burst of freedom.
Suddenly governments panic, they want to try and control it.
It happened with the printing press, it's happening again now with the Internet.
So like my long view is optimistic that people will always find ways to communicate and share information freely.
And my hope with privacy, I mean is that we're able to, you know, for thousands of years, people just able to walk into a field and have privacy because they're able to have a kind of private chat and that was normal.
And I think it's like a normal part of human society that we have that ability to have private chat.
So again, I, I remain optimistic that like eventually we will kind of realize this.
There's always, there's always hope.
I don't think you can get like too pessimistic about the dystopian visions of future.
I think you need to kind of have some hope and faith in the human spirit.
In the meantime, use VPN and use signal.
Use signal, Use the VPN and protect your bits.
Yes, James, this has been a great pleasure.
Maybe we'll have you back and no doubt about chat control and various other things and perhaps a follow up to this one in terms of the development going forward.
So thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Much appreciated.
Great, thanks.
It's been a pleasure.
Cheers.
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