In the 2005 film “V for Vendetta” a fictional UK government has turned into a tightly censored, tracked, and controlled hellscape, with technology used to control citizens in every way possible. The UK has now taken a massive step toward making that horror a reality, with the passage of likely the most misguided legislation in the country since the Norman invasion of 1066.
I won’t detail their Online Safety Bill here — you can find endless references by searching yourself — but the vast, blurry, nebulous, misguided rules for “protecting children from ‘harmful’ content” — a slippery slope bad enough on its own, quickly expanded into a Chinese Internet style virtual steel collar for every UK resident, chained to the government in every aspect of their online lives.
The mandated social media platform ID age verification requirements, which will ultimately require the showing of government IDs for access to sites, alone will create the opportunity for virtually every action of every user of the Internet in the UK to be tracked by the government and its minions in ever expanding ways over time.
Be careful what sites you visit or what you ask or say on them. In China, you can simply vanish under such circumstances. And in the UK? Similar disappearances coming soon, perhaps, as every site you visit, no matter the topic related to business, medical concerns, or other aspects of your family’s private and personal life, will ultimately be linked to you in government databases.
VERY similar *bipartisan* legislative efforts are taking place here in the U.S., though the U.S. court system is creating additional hurdles for their perpetrators here, at least for the moment. For now.
While some activists and legislators spend their time ranting about Internet advertising, governments around the world are working to turn the Internet into a pervasive tool for tracking your every online move and thought, permanently linked to your government IDs.
We’ve seen it in Communist China. Now we see it in so-called democracies.
Open your eyes — while you still can.
–Lauren–