SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submission Preview
Scan Your Eyeballs, Think of the Children: How Britain Sells Surveillance as Safety
Keir Starmer's under-16 social media ban can only work if everyone proves who they are. It is the natural conclusion of the Online Safety Act – and of a Brexit that was always about control, says digital rights advocate Heather Burns [thenerve.news]:
Sam Altman wants to scan your eyeballs. His company Worldcoin [newsweek.com] – recently rebranded, blandly, to "World" – is installing chrome orbs in major US cities that read your iris, hand you some cryptocurrency and issue a digital "passport" certifying that you are a real human and not a bot. The bot problem it is trying to solve is one Altman's own OpenAI did much to create. Researchers Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves and Laura Forlano have a name [rdcu.be] for how a company sells something this strange as common sense – a "sociotechnical fiction".
To get people adopting the product, they explain, it was necessary to first create a crisis narrative, then use that narrative to cast biometric scanning of the product's users as an act of pre-emptive safety. In this way, World's AI-driven panopticon surveillance is portrayed as both natural and inevitable. All the while, the surveillance provider cashes in.
Post-Brexit UK has run exactly this playbook with its homegrown experiment in internet regulation – most clearly in the form of the Online Safety Act (OSA), which has been promoted since 2019 as an innovative solution that would keep children safe, fix social media and bring Big Tech to heel.
The problem is that none of those things are true. They never were.
It was always the vision of Theresa May, and her government, to expand the use of British technology for law and order [sky.com] [this link results in an "access denied" page]. Brexit gave her the mandate to do so. From the start, the intention of the OSA was never actually child safety, nor fixing social media, nor taking on Big Tech. The act's main policy goal was to create a captive, lucrative market [exchangepoint.tech] for the British safety tech sector [www.gov.uk]. That includes the age verification providers whose offerings were mandated this week as technical intermediaries between all of us. It wasn't about child safety. It was about lobbying.
