UK House of Lords to propose mandatory CSAM detection software on smartphones

86 points by iamnothere a day ago on hackernews | 92 comments

bita_nidir | 21 hours ago

I don't get the fuss. This is absolutely only going to be used to detect CSAM content, this year.

A_D_E_P_T | 20 hours ago

I'd give it a few months before they scan every photo/video you ever take for other purposes. If you were at the wrong public gathering, I don't know if they'll even bother with parallel construction.

vorticalbox | 20 hours ago

Pretty sure the current proposal will already require scanning everything.

To stop the “production” you would need real time scanning of the camera when taking pictures and video and disable the ability to save if csam is detected.

bita_nidir | 20 hours ago

Saving and sharing would still function, albeit in a slight different way.

  - Saving, as before.
  - Sharing, works, but due to a glitch the recipient got a blank blank image/video. He'll sure reply to let you know, but unfortunately incriminate himself in the process.
  - Deleting, as before, no sorry, bugger, I/O error, can't delete this file. But support team has your address and is on their way.

lynndotpy | 20 hours ago

For what it's worth, I can not tell if you earnestly mean what you are saying, or if it is rhetoric with the implication "This is worth fussing over, and this will be used in the near future to scan for content other than CSAM".

unethical_ban | 20 hours ago

Sarcasmgram detects that the comment was 99% dry humor.

bita_nidir | 20 hours ago

I can confirm your detector is functioning as advertised.

david-gpu | 20 hours ago

Very appropriate use of British understated sarcasm. Philomena Cunk would approve.

Varelion | 21 hours ago

Maybe they should focus on fixing their country first

jeltz | 20 hours ago

But they will not. This is why the British people I know are so apathic. All their major political parties suck and have zero interest in fixing the country.

whynotmaybe | 20 hours ago

> Older devices could also be covered using a mandatory software update.

Highly curious about how they'll be able to do that.

Will they force apple to release ios27 for an iPhone 4?

londons_explore | 20 hours ago

More likely they'll collect from phone manufacturers the IMEI of all devices which are updated, and then send police in to confiscate any device which is powered up and connects to a mobile network when not updated.

ghusto | 20 hours ago

Probably a patch to the last major version available to that phone.

bondarchuk | 20 hours ago

Kind of an aside but they finally removed the hereditary members this year (yes this year)! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords_(Hereditary_Pee...

Though there's still these lads I think? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_Spiritual

loloquwowndueo | 20 hours ago

Hereditary?

bondarchuk | 20 hours ago

Hereditary members of the House of Lords

cwnyth | 20 hours ago

He was asking about your original spelling.

bondarchuk | 18 hours ago

oh lmao thanks

geye1234 | 20 hours ago

The hereditaries were far more civil libertarian than the political appointees that now make up the whole HoL, and would have almost certainly been against this.

ghusto | 20 hours ago

They were the orderlies in the mental institution that is UK politics. Now they're gone we have this kind of shit.

NDlurker | 20 hours ago

How do they plan on stopping creation, especially on older devices?

londons_explore | 20 hours ago

An 'old phone amnesty', where you take all your old phones to the police station on a given day. Anyone still in possession of one after that date gets prosecuted, like they would for having an unlicensed gun.

[OP] iamnothere | 18 hours ago

Maybe they can set up detector vans to search for old devices based on broadcast MAC addresses.

numpad0 | 20 hours ago

Or on non-UK devices. This just inflates values in the UK of such devices and contents that UK will be unable to create, let alone compete with.

calgoo | 20 hours ago

"Older devices could also be covered using a mandatory software update." So your already slow device will get a forced update to now make it compliant.

orangecat | 20 hours ago

Bold move from a country that wrongfully arrested and convicted thousands of postmasters due to buggy software that determined they were stealing.

octo888 | 20 hours ago

Don't forget the 13 who committed suicide. :(

johnnyanmac | 20 hours ago

doubful this will pass in its current form, but if it somehow does: countdown until yet another parent is arrested for pictures of their own baby in their phone.

cortesoft | 20 hours ago

I can't help but think of the dad who was investigated by the FBI for having pictures he took to show his kid's doctor.

Are parents going to be arrested for pictures of their kids in the bathtub? Or at least are they going to be blurred?

octo888 | 20 hours ago

Probably. The government just made couples who record face sitting, without distributing, for their own use, sex offenders.

edit: But we live in a country where everything is illegal but rarely anyone is arrested for it so that's somehow ok /s

donkey_brains | 20 hours ago

(Muffled) Oh no

cowlevel | 8 hours ago

I think someone needs to inform "bothers" that he's super-shadowbanned.

A regular shadowban only requires one vouch for a user's comments to be revived. The comment seemed reasonable so I vouched for it, but it is still dead. That means they have somehow hit the second-level shadowban where your comments are permanently dead no matter what.

chrisjj | 20 hours ago

> Are parents going to be arrested for pictures of their kids in the bathtub?

No. Because this magical new software will prevent such pictures.

gambiting | 20 hours ago

We both know that if it's not built in straight away, it will be upgraded to report you without even notifying you of the fact. Exactly how the Apple csam detection system was supposed to work before apple backed off - if a picture was deemed csam your phone would automatically report you without telling you about it.

chrisjj | 5 hours ago

Well, it can't report you for taking a picture it prevented you taking, can it?

gambiting | 2 hours ago

It can still report that it has detected CSAM on your phone, with whatever it saw on the screen attached as proof. Whether you clicked capture or not is irrelevant. Reading the proposal it sounds like not would literally look at your screen as you browse the internet and blur it "instantly". So it obviously looks at the screen in real time(how does anyone think this can actually be built and run without destroying the battery is beyond me, but I don't think these people have given it that much thought)

chrisjj | an hour ago

> Whether you clicked capture or not is irrelevant.

I thought we were talking about taking photos.

So only the first is illegal.

gambiting | an hour ago

The proposal suggests scanning your entire screen and blurring any content before you have a chance to see it.

spwa4 | 5 hours ago

> No. Because this magical new software will prevent such pictures.

WITHOUT informing the police of exactly what you were doing down to the centimeter in the past 2 years?

Not a chance.

Oh and in case anyone thinks this is the government wanting to protect children: Let's see how child services funding is doing (you know, the people actually caring for children)

Child services funding: 20% down.

The part of child services that actually cares for children: 70% funding lost over the last 10 years.

It has gotten so bad there isn't A SINGLE LOCAL COUNCIL that isn't giving extra funding to their child services to prevent the worst. Not one. Not a single one.

So that tells you more than enough about how much the House of Lords (or House of Commons or any other part of the UK government) cares for children, doesn't it? And obviously this exacerbates the worst things about child services ("stealing" children that got in minimal trouble but aren't in danger, because they're easy to care for and behave with promises they'll get out if they only ..., preference for younger children who don't fight youth services (but also suffer maximum psychological damage from youth services intervention) and throwing out children in real danger with whatever excuse)

cperciva | 20 hours ago

Honestly, doctors need training about what they should or should not ask parents for. When my daughter was a month old her GP asked me to take photos of her diaper rash and email them in. "Uh no, not going to do that."

jeltz | 20 hours ago

No, we should instead stop sexualing children. And we should ban this kind of mass surveillance.

unethical_ban | 20 hours ago

They should be able to ask for that in a secure manner with security and retention controls and guardrails for how that data is accessed. In other words, email is not ideal.

Or, if your time and money allows it, deny that option and take your kid into the doctor in person.

Bjartr | 20 hours ago

Is the concern the doctor, or someone in their office misusing the pictures? Or is it the fear of having such an image on your phone or sent over the internet at all? Or is the concern that the very concept of such an image being recorded is morally wrong? Or is it something else?

sikozu | 20 hours ago

I think the most reasonable concern would be having the image sent over the internet. I wouldn't be afraid of anybody in their office misusing the picture because they're trained and it's just another day in the office for them. Body parts are body parts, it shouldn't be morally wrong because of where the photo is, I think that's problematic thinking in my opinion.

Liuser | 20 hours ago

Real question, why not? It seems like a reasonable request barring needing to go into the office. My comms and images with our pediatricians are through their app (not email), which they constantly remind us is under strict HIPAA compliance.

theodric | 17 hours ago

Because it's not worth losing your Gmail account or having to explain to everyone you meet that no, you're not a pedophile, and you weren't "caught with CSAM," it was just an over-zealous prosecutor responding to an automated report and a misunderstanding about some photos the doctor requested, and anyway that case was thrown out...

ulrikrasmussen | 17 hours ago

What's the problem with that? If you mean the channel, unencrypted email, then maybe I agree to some extent. If you mean taking pictures of children for the purpose of diagnosis I really don't follow.

cowlevel | 8 hours ago

Your phone and your email provider are both going to ban you if you do this.

dlcarrier | 14 hours ago

Even without that kind of false positive, with every phone running the check on every image false positives on perfectly normal images will be extremely common.

I occasionally use the Civitai.com to generate realistic images, and due to US regulators jawboning payment processors, they've put in strict filters. I've been using it for G-rated images, but they often get false positive for much worse ratings. I generated an image of a portrait of a couple at the beech, with a man in board shorts and a fully clothed woman, and it rated it XXX. One image of fully clothed people didn't even get a rating and was automatically removed as a "terms of service violation".

octo888 | 20 hours ago

UK's got a Mumsnet Government

nik282000 | 20 hours ago

Cool, so 800 tech illiterate senior citizens are mandating updates for _all_ legacy smartphones.

dennysora-main | 20 hours ago

I think it's very interesting. The detection function needs to send data back to the cloud, right?

Does it need to be written into the Kernel? Or how does it work?

I think we're probably not far from the world of Watch Dogs. As for whether it will become 2077, we'll have to wait and see.

chrisjj | 20 hours ago

Good question. If so, we will be prevented from taking photos when offline. And will pay extra data charges when not.

numpad0 | 20 hours ago

> there was a “ghastly worldwide industry” of child sexual abuse material being created, and that Britain was one of the biggest consumers of it,

They're talking about anime and how UK is not making any, nor is it significant market of to be infliential to, yet nevertheless consuming it in ever larger quantity over the years, unilaterally receiving cultural influence with no leverages, not even cash flow that can be choked off. Lots of these "CSAM" stuff is inflated with imaginary kids and trafficking angles to hide that intent, but it boils down to that.

Otherwise the action taken would be to assigning more police officers or otherwise assigning more resources to support kids IRL. They're not doing that. They only want speeches suppressed.

I don't know why they don't just tax social media for it, though. CDN bandwidth for foreign user-generated contents can be measured. Maybe because they just don't like fictions at all, but that ship had sailed like, thousands of years ago.

gambiting | 20 hours ago

>>Otherwise the action taken would be to assigning more police officers or otherwise assigning more resources to support kids IRL. They're not doing that. They only want speeches suppressed.

My county went from 56 youth support officers to just 2 in the last few years. But yes, government(s) that cares about children /s

sneak | 20 hours ago

This is not about CSAM, it is about an infrastructure for large scale censorship and tracking of publishing and publishers.

Anyone talking about CSAM has missed the point entirely.

jonplackett | 20 hours ago

Yep.

The ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ argument that already got IDing everyone online through as a social media age gate.

gambiting | 20 hours ago

The house of lords should absolutely fuck off back to the dark ages where it belongs. Useless institution that keeps interfering with democracy(case in point - recent assisted dying bill)

ghusto | 20 hours ago

Actually it's exactly because you got what you want that this is happening. The house of lords as it was would never have pushed this kind of thing. You got rid of the hereditary peers and here we are. Congratulations.

gambiting | 20 hours ago

>> You got rid of the hereditary peers and here we are.

Who is this "you" in your post?

>>The house of lords as it was would never have pushed this kind of thing.

That is an astonishing statement given their previous stances on various issues. What gives you that confidence? But heridetary peers or not, house of lords doesn't belong in Britain of 2026.

ghusto | 20 hours ago

The person who wanted them gone, which in this case is you. _You_, you.

> That is an astonishing statement given their previous stances on various issues. What gives you that confidence?

Watching the government trying to pass mental laws and having them rejected by people with no skin in the game.

Democracy doesn't work when everyone's in it for themselves, and the public are easily manipulated.

gambiting | 16 hours ago

>>The person who wanted them gone, which in this case is you. _You_, you

Well I wanted house of lords gone and that clearly hasn't happened, so....I don't feel like I got what I wanted? Or did you just assume I wanted just heridetary peers gone? If so, how did you make that assumption?

>>Watching the government trying to pass mental laws and having them rejected by people with no skin in the game.

Oh you mean for instance like the house of lords has opposed reforms around homosexuality that had both parliamentary and public support, but few conservative lords kept blocking the bills? That was as recently as 1998-1999. What paragons of sensible law making.

hunterpayne | 12 hours ago

The House of Lords used to be composed of well...Lords. People with titles, usually because of their parents. Quite some time ago, they changed it so they needed to be elected but had to come from a specific aristocratic group. Now that is gone too and its just elected people. The body is still called the "House of Lords" but that's just the title. Its an elected body that anyone can run for. Which is...wait for it...exactly what it seems you are arguing for. When it was just aristocratic people, they would have opposed this. Now that they aren't, they don't. Not sure why this was so hard for you to understand.

gambiting | 9 hours ago

>>Which is...wait for it...exactly what it seems you are arguing for.

And again, how did you come with that assumption, when I explicitly said that the house of lords just needs to be removed as an institution.

>>Not sure why this was so hard for you to understand

Likewise. I think people make up an argument in their heads and argue with that instead of with what I actually wrote.

DrHungers | 20 hours ago

This will create more attack vectors, make phones more ineffeciant, make massive piles of people innocent of wrongdoing put prosecuted and jailed for sending pics of their kids to their family and doctors, and generally increase the power of the state to surveil its citizens to an extreme degree, on par with the worst totalitarian dictatorships.

Its funny, every time I talk to a brit they seem very intelligent and reasonable but then they've been happily electing people who make their country into an extreme surveillance state, labor & conservative both. I think their accent just makes them sound smarter than they are.

calgoo | 20 hours ago

Every time i talk to a brit around these things it just ends up with a: "well they can decrypt it in ~10 years anyway so why try... These are people in IT, people that works with security and networking just giving up directly.

gambiting | 20 hours ago

I've lived here for over 16 years now, and if I had to sum up Brits in one word it would be "apathy" - there's no point in fighting for anything because nothing ever gets better. Friends will admit in private conversations that they are concerned about surveillance but they aren't going to voice this anywhere because there's no point and it probably won't even affect them so why bother. There is a small group of people who still believe in protesting, but after several people were sentenced to 5 years(!!!) in prison for planning(!!!!) a protest, that had a chilling effect on various organisations around the country. Not to mention the entire farce that is aggressive criminalisation of anyone who even dares to mention Palestine Action around any kind of protest.

unethical_ban | 20 hours ago

Apathy and nihilism are self-fulfilling. At least in the US, courts sometimes ask what "a reasonable person" expects of a certain statement or legal requirement like privacy. If the culture publicly shrugs its shoulders, that is taken into consideration. The absolute bare minimum people can do is care, and say it with their voices to other people, and vote.

ghusto | 20 hours ago

With the bonus irony of doing sweet FA about child porn.

[OP] iamnothere | 18 hours ago

They won’t prosecute them until they oppose the state. Then bam, straight to jail.

calgoo | 20 hours ago

The worst part is in the end: “We will also give the police the powers they need to keep pace with criminal use of emerging technologies in order to keep our children safe.”

Which means that not only will it blur it, it will also report it and you will be processed for a picture of your kid for the doctor or when the "fail safe" software fails.

What could possibly go wrong with a government having the ability to stop people from seeing things that they consider bad.

metalman | 20 hours ago

How many of them still have Ghislane on there speed dial? and palsy walsy pics of themselves, the prince formerly known as royal, Jeffery, and a few junior massage trainies.

lazzurs | 20 hours ago

Yea nah.

efdee | 20 hours ago

I'm so happy they left the EU.

dangistan202611 | 19 hours ago

Is the EU meaningfully better? The EU has had its own push for such things.

octo888 | 17 hours ago

We're coming back baby! Someone's got to stop the French and Germans arguing with each other.

upboundspiral | 15 hours ago

Yes Minister remains ever relevant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU

cs02rm0 | 20 hours ago

The UK is running so fast towards ever increasing authoritarianism. I can't see it stopping.

They were pushing out today that they're going to add, well, what they call a ban for under 16s, which really means strong ID for everyone else, to access eBay and Vinted in case kids use the messaging functions on them.

It'll be TCP next. Then you'll need government permission to blink.

userbinator | 20 hours ago

As usual, the UK seems to be driving towards 1984-style dystopia.

darkhorn | 20 hours ago

Interesting. The first laws in Turkey started to around 15 years ago with the only purpose of protecting children. That is how the first internet blocking started in Turkey. Now they block any negative thing about the government. But CSAM is not active in Turkey because why would it be? It is not about children but opressing political opponents.

At this point why they don’t record everything from our microphones? It will prevent many tax evasions and crimes.

cucumber3732842 | 17 hours ago

> It will prevent many tax evasions and crimes.

Careful now, useful idiots will come out of the woodwork to cheer for it when you phrase it like that.

gmerc | 20 hours ago

Have they tried investigating the Epstein Class?

sailfast | 20 hours ago

What a bunch of morons.

Remove “illicit” from this headline and you get a better idea of what’s happening.

Perhaps they should focus their energy on reducing pedophilia in their leadership and monarchy instead of spying on their people? (Oh right that’s the whole point of this legislation in the first place… Nevermind…)

hn_throw2025 | 20 hours ago

The HoL have no manifesto, no democratic mandate, and should be proposing jack shit.

sikozu | 20 hours ago

This is an insane proposal, what they really mean is protecting the children is a front for surveillance since you'll look bad if you don't care about children.

56dev_ | 19 hours ago

90% of voters back the software? I'm curious what the "short description" they gave was. I'm surprised not more people are concerned about the surveillance aspect.

cedws | 19 hours ago

Because if you say you’re against it you might be concerned about the optics and whether you’re now on a list. This is the kind of chilling effect these motions can have. We’re racing towards a police state.

morkalork | 17 hours ago

Racing towards? Brother, you are in one now.

txrx0000 | 19 hours ago

This is what happens when multiple sinister interests align: Apple and Google will get to further cement their smartphone OS and hardware duopoly. Five Eyes will get extra surveillance and dissent suppression capabilities. Corrupt men of the Epstein class will get their crimes covered up because the public can no longer record or view the evidence.

We must never forget the Five Eyes global surveillance apparatus exposed by Edward Snowden [0]. And never forget that elite child predators are protected by governments [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein

octo888 | 17 hours ago

Just for some context: 2022, USA,

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

> "Google has refused to reinstate a man’s account after it wrongly flagged medical images he took of his son’s groin as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the New York Times first reported. Experts say it’s an inevitable pitfall of trying to apply a technological solution to a societal problem.

> "Experts have long warned about the limitations of automated child sexual abuse image detection systems, particularly as companies face regulatory and public pressure to help address the existence of sexual abuse material."

Thanks for providing the tech and buddying up with governments, Silicon Valley! /s

zombot | 2 hours ago

And smartphones of House of Lords members will sell for record prices, because they will be exempt from this. We should have them SWATted continuously for CSAM as a thank you.