Grump Master

Australia's eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, made statements about digital surveillance legislation that are incorrect and disingenuous to technical experts. I’ve broken down her statements to explain why each one is wrong and designed to misdirect the media and public. 🇦🇺 "The government is listening to all kinds of feedback from stakeholders” 💡 This is untrue. The government listens to organizations that supports its narrative; child safety charities, NGOs, think tanks, parents, and behavioral psychologists. They’re not technical experts in online child safety. 🇦🇺 “So I think, you know, perhaps things will evolve” 💡 No. The legislation either achieves its stated objective or it doesn’t. Saying the system will evolve provides an excuse for ongoing technical failures. 🇦🇺 “I think there’s been a real misreading and a misinterpretation about what the Digital Duty of Care legislation is meant to do” 💡 This is also untrue. I understand the legislation and other technical experts understand it. Some of us understand the legislation and technical consequences better than the people designing and implementing it. Disagreement is presented as misunderstanding. 🇦🇺 “It’s meant to put proactive obligations on these technology companies, like we do with car manufacturers or medicines or medical devices” That analogy fails. When people can’t argue their point, they fall back on physical world analogies. When that fails, they fall back on ideology because nobody argues against protecting children. 🇦🇺 “I’m sure there will be lots of negotiation, but I think the Digital Duty of Care is the only way we can get ahead of these harms rather than just responding to them after” 💡 There was and still is no negotiation. The Commissioner either intends to ban children from social networks, or she wants companies like Meta to make sites like Facebook safe for them. Asking Meta to make Facebook safe for kids is like asking Marlboro to make cigarettes safe for children. Either way, both approaches demand the same technical requirement: verify everyone’s identity so tech companies know who’s a child and who’s an adult. 💡 The Commissioner already acknowledged age estimation isn't robust enough. Once age estimation is rejected, the only fault-proof approach is identity verification or collecting enough personally identifiable information to amount to the same thing. That means every adult in Australia must be verified before receiving permission to read, write, or share content and opinions online. 💡I demonstrated to the Commissioner that smartphones already contain parental controls letting parents block apps, block websites, restrict content, limit communications, and impose curfews for their children. 💡 If parents already have the ability to protect their children, the government has no legitimate reason to strip their right to choose what’s right for them. 14 years ago, I was interviewed by BBC Newsnight while advising the British government during the first Parliamentary inquiry into online child safety. At the time, I demonstrated how poor parental controls were. Today they are excellent. There is no technical justification for forcing the entire population through identity verification. 💡 The Australian government’s end game is to outlaw online anonymity so people censor themselves. There’s no other plausible reason when looking at all the evidence. 💡 Once every person must connect what they read, write, share, and who they communicate with to their real identity, online anonymity is gone and people will censor themselves. 🇬🇧 In the UK, 30 people are arrested every day for what they say online. The UK government says it’s forcing a national digital identity mandate to protect citizens from identity theft. 🌎 At least 25 countries are coordinating identity verification mandates under the pretext of child safety right now.