One of England's top police officers, Shaun Sawyer, wants citizens to go after internet giants that have wronged them.
Sawyer, who is chief constable in Devon and Cornwall and is national lead for human trafficking and modern slavery, made the suggestion in an interview with The Sunday Times, published over the weekend.
In a paywalled article, he told the Murdoch organ that if someone is a victim of an “Internet-enabled crime”, they should sue the platform involved.
Describing the internet as a “safe space for organised crime”, he said Silicon Valley company abuses were “becoming a human injustice”.
The comments coincidentally (?) came after American authorities last week shuttered Backpage.com, a site accused of supporting human trafficking by allowing publication of advertisements for "escorts".
Sawyer believes platforms like Facebook need more policing, and he also criticised “liberal” laws.
So it's down to users, apparently: if people with the resources of the person in the street start suing the platforms, he argued, they would start using their resources to spot abuse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @06:29PM
You laugh, but I had to deal with a company that implemented that.
All .doc and .pdf email attachments are stripped out.
But the company requires you to send them forms in those formats. Hmmm... what to do? Company policy is to send DOC or PDF files named with a different extension. Now THAT is ironclad security!