"Tech Mandated by Online Safety Bill 'Could Turn Phones Into Surveillance Tools'"
According to new research from Imperial College London, the technology mandated by the UK's Online Safety Bill could be used to transform millions of phones into facial recognition tools. Client-Side Scanning (CSS) was examined in regard to its potential privacy implications. Under the Online Safety Bill, CSS would be implemented to identify when people are attempting to share images known to be illegal content before they are encrypted and sent. The new research, which will be presented at IEEE Security and Privacy, suggests it would be possible to use CSS to search people's private messages without their knowledge, for example, by conducting facial recognition. The UK parliament is currently reviewing the Online Safety Bill. CSS is also included in a European Union proposal that, if approved, could mandate its installation on hundreds of millions of phones. According to Dr. Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye of Imperial College London's Department of Computing and coauthor of the new paper, the research shows that the software could be built or modified to include other hidden features, such as scanning private content from people's phones using facial recognition, the same technology used at airport gates. This article continues to discuss the potential privacy implications of the CSS tool.