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    Ofcom wants to double down on file monitoring in 2026
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    Ofcom wants to double down on file monitoring in 2026

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    21 Comments

    1. Redditisfakeleft on

      Bizarre how prescient the idea of the Telescreen was.

      >…an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror

      Even down to the form factor.

    2. NaiveBadgers on

      To keep children safe we have to limit you’re activities… 

      Freedom and safety come with a lot of limitations… 

    3. Draqutsc on

      This got to be a joke. If they are serious than there will be a great firewall around the UK.

    4. SecTeff on

      Mass surveillance of all files shared this is totally Orwellian stuff. Alongside the facial recognition and digital ID I am honestly disgusted at what this country is turning into

    6. FlaviousTiberius on

      Even if you trusted this government (I don’t know why you would) to not abuse this, this lays a nice easy fundation for much worse governments to expand beyond this.

      For example you could have a totalitarian religious government using it to arrest anyone for “deviant sexuality” which could be basically anything other than heterosexual sex for procreation. Or totalitarian governments scanning everything you say or send to see if you’re saying anything they don’t like.

      I guess those kinds of governments would just set up their own systems any way, but that doesn’t mean we need to make it easier for them. It’s time to accept that freedom comes with some level of risk and stop trying to wrap everything in bubble wrap.

    8. Croy_Dav on

      It wasn’t that long ago that people used to talk about China and how they were controlled by their government. While that was going on our government was quietly saying “we want some of that”. Same with the social credit score. I’m sure it is already a plan. We can no longer laugh at China and how their people are controlled. We are walking ourselves into our own version.

    9. Dissidant on

      Getting out of hand
      And bollocks to the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” rhetoric you can be law abiding and still express privacy concerns because it is blatently clear companies aren’t held to account when peoples data is lost/leaked and its the very same ones that end up being tasked with running whatever the government cooks up

      Whats this doing exactly to stop young people accessing inappropriate content?
      Last I checked there was a story doing the rounds about them creating it using AI

      To think we used to mock the likes of China’s firewall, or the intranet thing NK does for their network (people have smuggled iphones out of there, its mad)

    11. ParrotofDoom on

      I’m wondering why your average sharer of child sexual abuse imagery wouldn’t just zip those files with a password and send those zips.

    12. vriska1 on

      > When we asked for clarification on its plans, an Ofcom spokesperson said the agency is considering measures that automatically detect illegal content and content harmful to children called ‘hash matching.’ However, “the proposals do not recommend services break end-to-end encryption,” Ofcom said.

      Seems this will be a mess…

    13. jamiea10 on

      I’m usually against the online safety stuff but this is literally just hash matching.

      No one will read your content. Each file is run through a formula to produce a hash, for example; 185f8db32271fe25f561a6fc938b2e264306ec304eda518007d1764826381969

      The only way they will know what is in the file if they have a perfect copy of the file already hashed. This way they can catch certain files being stored or shared.

      The example hash above is simply “Hello” hashed using SHA256. You cannot reproduce the content from simply the hash.

    14. Georgist-Minarchist on

      it is not the governments role to police the internet while they should investigate people for having illegal content, that doesn’t mean everyone is suddenly a massive nonce (like what labour called people who disagreed), those involved in illegal images need to be brought to justice

    15. Environmental-Sir-19 on

      Well , all I know is if UK are not even going to hire contractors to do this, this will be the most shittest system know to man, UK are rubbish and corrupt when it comes to this sort of stuff , some friend will get the contract to deploy this with zero knowledge and it will turn into a shit show like the NHS after changing ir35. Whoever is controlling the top parts of the UK really has no clue how to do it well and worst , ppl in the UK don’t fight when corruption happens so they always get away with it . We have turned into a shit country and I’m not even white but I am British

    16. Aggressive_Pin941 on

      It’s time name and shame which individuals are actually advocating. These people who are turning our country into a surveillance state need to be named

    17. Astriania on

      People are getting a bit over the top in this thread. What they are actually proposing is that cloud providers would be requested or required to hash user content and compare those hashes to a list of known child porn content, and report matches to the authorities. It doesn’t mean that Ofcom gets to read your files.

      Cloud providers mostly already hash your content because it allows them to verify its integrity.

      No, this won’t catch people who use end-to-end encryption or encrypt the files before storing them. But a lot of criminals are idiots and it will catch the guy who’s distributing child porn by sticking it on his Dropbox or S3 bucket and sharing a link.

      You can argue that this isn’t a proportionate measure against child porn, but please don’t exaggerate what the measure actually is.

    18. Hithrae on

      In the real world this would be the same as the police being allowed to come in and check your cupboards just to check for anything they don’t like. We wouldn’t stand for that, why this?

    19. Kijamon on

      To keep my toddler safe you’re going to poke about photos I’ve taken of him privately and never shared publically. Bravo.