Today DCMS announced they will legislate to get rid of European cookie pop-ups, ahead of their legislating to require you to implement British identity verification pop-ups.
So here it is, then, the topic that is apparently too dangerous to discuss: the future of the web profession itself.
The draft Code is a recipe for creating a generation of children who will grow up sheltered, shattered, and shamed, as their outlooks and formative experiences are defined by safety warnings, age gates, and privatised surveillance.
I had a natter with David Meyer about the past fortnight in UK tech policy drama. We did this deliberately as a casual chat, as opposed to a techlaw deep dive, so don’t expect anything too heavy. (I had in fact planned to switch off my brain this summer like normal policy wonks do. So much for that…)
Journos: if you are advising your readers on counter-surveillance measures but not dropping the adtech, you are not helping your readers. You are building a honeypot to trap them.
Day one, first principles, for the reproductive health care and privacy emergency which America just voted to unleash.
An amendment to the Online Safety Bill uses its age verification requirements to censor subjective legal content determined by government policy. Just like we warned you years ago.
These unanswered questions need to be cleared out of the way before the Bill can progress, regardless of who takes over that work next month.
No, I didn't destroy the Online Safety Bill with this blog. I did something even better.
An anecdote from the road about the somewhat muddled thinking that has gone into defining the Bill's sweeping compliance requirements.
Last month's post about the UK's upcoming age-gating system covered only one aspect of your compliance obligations under the upcoming Online Safety Bill. In this post, I'm going to tell you about the rest.
My friend Morten Rand-Hendriksen and I chatted about legislative threats to freedom of expression, and their potential impacts on open source software communities and projects.