How is this not bigger news? The UK is demanding mandatory client side scanning malware that watches everything you see/do, on every smartphone in the country. This includes spying on encrypted messages before they are encrypted.

Indeed, I've only seen minimal discussion of it on X. Had me thinking it's fake news, or misinformation.

The EU Commission is currently rushing ahead with their anti-privacy age verification plans that require Google/Apple account to function. They aren't going to save anyone from this.

I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Commission is trying to get Google to be more proactive at banning accounts and preventing individuals from being able to create new ones. That's what the States were demanding in the recent court case against Meta.

Politicians have been pushing companies to be more aggressive about banning individuals who open new accounts after their previous one gets banned. That was even one of the requirements of the deal in the recent social media court case in the US.

What's your evidence politicians are relevant to this?

Canada is about the learn this lesson the hard way with bill C-22. At the rate things are going, Canadians will wake up to find themselves being blocked by WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal and other popular messaging apps.

The legislation currently have weak surface level protections against encryption backdoors, but law enforcement are seeking to remove those. The legislation also requires mandatory data retention and surveillance, which also means that messaging apps will ban Canada.

They already have said they will do that, and Apple has already blocked services from the UK rather than comply with their anti-encryption insanity.

Why would someone paying for an expensive camera to damage the pixels of their images with "invisible" watermarks?

The signature doesn't touch the image data in any way. It's just a piece of metadata attached to the image, like any other metadata tag.

The only people living in a fantasy world are the ones that want mandatory online age verification for social media, adult content, private messaging, video games, and things of that nature.

Mandatory online age/ID verification is an unacceptable violation of privacy. It doesn't matter how its implemented. There's no such thing as privacy protecting or anonymous age verification.

Parental controls and self-declaration of age are the only acceptable solutions.

Mandatory verification is an unacceptable attack on privacy. A device level whitelist of kid safe areas that is disabled by default and enabled by parents is a better idea.

I'm waiting for them to turn every wifi router in 3D tracking nodes that monitor the exact location and body position of everyone nearby in buildings. Its too juicy of target once they get the tech fully figured out.