British Parliament passes major digital security law

2023-09-20 12:00:56
The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology of the British Government, Michelle Donelan, on September 7, 2023 in the House of Commons. UK PARLIAMENT / MARIA UNGER / VIA REUTERS

After long debates and four years of back and forth, the two houses of the British Parliament definitively adopted, on Tuesday September 19, theOnline Safety Bill, a law which provides for a series of security measures for the protection of Internet users. The text should be promulgated in the coming days. The British Secretary of State for Technology, Michelle Donelan, considered that this new text was a major step forward, which would ‘UK’s safest place in the world to be online’.

Similar in certain aspects to the French bill “securing and regulating the digital space”, currently examined in committee at the National Assembly, the English text provides for several measures to protect minors, particularly targeting social networks.

The platforms must, among other things, “promptly delete or prevent publication” of content inciting suicide or self-harm, implement additional age control measures for users, publish regular reports on actions taken, facilitate reporting of problematic content or situations. Those failing to comply with these obligations face fines of up to 10% of their global turnover.

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Limitations techniques

THE criticism of the text argue that some of these provisions are difficult to apply in practice. Age verification technologies, in particular, have so far struggled to find a balance between privacy protection and effectiveness, which led the previous British government to abandon a bill in 2019 aimed at to impose them on all pornographic sites.

The version of the text adopted by Parliament also retains a particularly controversial provision, which requires messaging services and large platforms to proactively “scan” content exchanged by their users to detect child pornography content. Strongly contested by all major digital companies, this provision would in practice result in prohibiting the encryption of communications on messaging services such as WhatsApp or iMessage. However, encryption is considered by these companies and by computer security experts as essential to protect users from hacking and surveillance.

Several messaging operators, including WhatsApp, had declared that they would be forced to leave the United Kingdom and stop offering their services there if this provision was put in place. At the beginning of September, the government tried to be reassuring by saying that this measure would not be applied until the technology to do it securely was ready. It could therefore never be implemented, because no technical solution seems possible today.

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Le Monde with Reuters