The UK government is on a deranged mission to install spyware on your phone and control your internet activities. But it's destined to fail. Here's why.
The problem is that what the UK government is asking phone operating system providers to do is illegal in other countries. That gives the phone manufacturers a huge problem. How do they know it's a UK phone with absolute certainty? After all, if they install UK spyware on a US phone and start reporting US phone activity to Ofcom, it's jail for them in the US.
Most articles talking about the Online Safety Act being such an abomination focus on the surveillance and control aspects, but nobody is talking about how it will be implemented. So let's do that.
In order to determine that it's a “UK” phone, there are a few ways to go:
1. Decide based on the country the phone was purchased in.
2. Decide based on the user's IP address.
3. Decide based on the app store country.
Option 1 doesn't work because everyone will just order their phone from Amazon US. Apple may as well close up shop in the UK.
Option 2 doesn't work because what if an American or Chinese tourist comes to the UK – do they have spyware installed on their phone when they step off the plane in Heathrow? How will the spyware be uninstalled later? When word gets out, tourism to the UK will drop to zero.
Option 3 sounds like an easy way to go. To show how effective that's going to be, I saved Apple some time and made a mock-up of the warning messages they would show before they installed spyware on your phone.
This plan by the government is going to drown in implementation details and fail dismally. Every government minister involved in this needs to understand that and bail out now, because it's only going to get more embarrassing for them as time goes on.
@jimmy_wales@prestonjbyrne@SpeechUnion@nym@HarryStebbings@freddienew@KanishkaNarayan