Digital Privacy
18 Feb 2026 James Baker
Online safety needs structural change, not more layers of control
Concerns about online safety expose a deeper problem about who controls the digital world children grow up in. Parents and young people want safer spaces, yet we as citizens have little power to shape them.
the online safety act isn’t working
Write to your MPCentralised Internet, Centralised Power
Google, Meta, and Amazon are estimated to generate over 60% of global digital advertising revenue. The Internet is increasingly centralised with a few large companies wielding influence over digital infrastructure, user access, and online content. Digital advertising revenue is the oil running the machinery of harmful platforms. Big tech relies on targeted advertising and attention capture. The safety features, or types of content citizens say they want, are often in direct conflict with the emotional hooks that capture attention and are monetized.
The Government’s response to platforms running amok is to focus on how we can add more rules to this broken system. New measures announced for consultation include expanding age checks for AI chat bots, features such as ‘infinite scrolling’ and looking at how software can restrict suspected CSAM images from even being sent or received on a device (sounds like client-side scanning).
Perhaps this isn’t surprising. Throughout its progress through Parliament the Online Safety Act grew and grew. Many safety campaigners rightly highlighted a wide variety of problems with platforms, in the hope that a rule for each could quash them. Like the Hydra of Greek mythology, as one head is slain, two more appear. This occurs as harms are an emergent property of the domination of the internet by big tech. To kill the serpent, we need a different approach.
Whilst Government seeks to expand restrictions on particular features or services, safety campaigners call for safety by design. Safety by design is a useful concept in product engineering, where risks can be anticipated and mitigated through technical and process controls. But speech environments are not closed, predictable systems. They are shaped by economic incentives, social dynamics, and power structures. In these contexts, design interventions alone cannot significantly improve safety if the surrounding market rewards behaviors and outcomes that generate harm.
We have created a regulatory treadmill, where new rules are constantly added while harms evolve around them. Perhaps a solution instead is seeking to build something better.
The rising social costs of rule based safety proposals
Age assurance systems often require sharing sensitive information. This can include biometric face scans or official identity documents. On platforms such as Reddit users are required to provide their exact age. This data is then used to target them with more personally tailored adverts. The same things happens on pornography websites where users are now encouraged to log-in and create an account. Tying a specific user to algorithmic profiles, enables the facilitation of customised porn feeds designed to keep them on the platform for longer.
We know that once collected, data rarely stays in one place. Discord is one example of a platform that suffered a major data-leak as a result of the introduction of age-assurance. As ORG’s work on Ad Tech shows, data tends to flow across the wider advertising and data broker ecosystem.
Providing your biometric information, such as a face scan, to an age assurance provider is like handing your house keys to a stranger who promises to keep them safe. They might mean well, but you cannot see where your keys end up next. The resulting cost to society is the proliferation of more personal data, and a permanent expansion of tracking infrastructure.
Children risk growing up inside identity-linked monitoring systems where proving who you are becomes a routine condition of accessing everyday services. Over time, this normalises large-scale identity and tracking architectures across society. A society that requires identification to access information is a society that has accepted permanent monitoring.
This also reflects a wider trend in which surveillance technologies move between military, intelligence, and commercial markets. For example, figures associated with the growth of modern surveillance technology, such as Peter Thiel, who co-founded Palantir, have also invested in consumer identity and verification companies, including firms operating in the age assurance space.
Restrictions on VPN use create another risk. VPNs are often described as tools for avoiding rules. Yet they are also tools for safety, privacy, and free expression. Young people, especially those in controversial political debates use them to avoid harassment or protect location data. Organisations use them to secure remote log-in to their networks. Restricting them also gives political cover to oppressive regimes that do the same thing for political control. The point is each new safety measure comes with a new social cost.
Complex compliance rules create a third cost. Large companies can absorb legal and engineering overheads. Smaller services often cannot. This reduces competition and locks users into dominant platforms. Regulatory and structural barriers to entry isn’t a new or novel concept in economic.
Read more about the Fix the Online Safety Act campaign
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The Electoral Commission released its official evaluation of the 3 May electoral pilots in England this morning.
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Digital Privacy
29 Jun 2007 By Becky Hogge
Watch launch of ORG’s e-voting report
Last week, at the official launch of ORG’s report into e-voting and e-counting in the May 2007 elections, we invited MPs, civil servants and other stakeholders to come and listen to the findings of our observation mission.
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Digital Privacy
20 Jun 2007 By Jason Kitcat
ORG Election Report highlights problems with voting technology used
Today ORG releases its report into the May 2007 elections in Scotland and England.
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Digital Privacy
08 May 2007 By Jason Kitcat
A big ORG thank you to our Election Observers
A huge thank you to our entire team of Election Observers who went way beyond the call of duty in their work monitoring last week’s elections.
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Digital Privacy
04 Apr 2007 By Becky Hogge
ElectionWatch 2007 – ORG goes north of the border
Breaking news from the Scottish Electoral Commission – ORG can observe the election in Scotland!
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Digital Privacy
23 Mar 2007 By Becky Hogge
Footage from February e-voting events now online
We’ve finally got video footage from two of our February e-voting events online.
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Digital Privacy
23 Mar 2007 By Becky Hogge
ORG Election Watch 2007: Registration Pack now online
Our guide to registering to become part of ORG’s volunteer Election Watch 2007 team is now online.
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Digital Privacy
07 Mar 2007 By Becky Hogge
Election Watch 2007 – Devote your day to democracy!
Doing anything exciting on election day?
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Digital Privacy
07 Feb 2007 By Becky Hogge
South Warwickshire clinicians sharing smart cards
Last week, news emerged that the board of South Warwickshire General Hospitals NHS Trust is allowing clinicians in their Accident and Emergency department to share smart cards.
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Digital Privacy
29 Jan 2007 By Jason Kitcat
May 2007 e-Voting Pilots Announced
Finally, two months behind schedule, the Government has announced which local authorities will be running e-voting pilots.
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Digital Privacy
16 Jan 2007 By Michael Holloway
Taking the lid off e-voting
While the Department for Constitutional Affairs have left us in the dark with no news at all about the e-voting pilots due for May 2007, The Open Rights Group and FIPR have been hard at work.
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Digital Privacy
13 Aug 2006 By Glyn Wintle
Freedom of Expression – China’s Internet
The House of Commons’ Select Committee on Foreign Affairs have published a report on East Asia that strongly critisices internet corporations working for the Chinese government to filter, censor and control web content.
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Digital Privacy
27 Jul 2006 By Glyn Wintle
Consultation on penalties for breaching the DPA
Baroness Ashton has published a consultation paper on proposed custodial penalties for breaches of Section 55 of the Data Protection Act 1998, which deals with unlawful obtaining of personal data.
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Digital Privacy
21 Jul 2006 By Glyn Wintle
Public meeting on RIPA consultations
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act Part III gives law enforcement the power to serve notices requiring that encrypted material be “put into an intelligible form” (or as everyone else would say, decrypted).
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Digital Privacy
13 Jul 2006 By Glyn Wintle
Information Commissioners annual report
Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, has published his annual report.
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Digital Privacy
06 Jul 2006 By Suw Charman Anderson
What do businesses know about you?
Matt Mower has made a pledge on Pledgebank to write to a supplier – say a mobile phone company – to ask them what they know about him, as per the Data Protection Act, but he needs more people to sign up.
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