Europe UK (Commonwealth Union) – Privacy concerns have long been at the center stage of the public. The use of public data by major corporation track and individuals’ activity and also compromising an individual’s information.
A new technology that may be introduced via an Online Safety Bill in the UK can be utilized to convert millions of phones into facial recognition tools has been found in a recent study. Across the world facial recognition tools have raised many concerns as they have been used by authorities to deny individuals services or place travel restrictions for those who had made online posts critical of the authorities or major global corporations.
A new study conducted by Imperial College London that evaluated the possible privacy implications of a tool known as client-side scanning (CSS). The Online Safety Bill is presently placed before parliament, where the CSS could be brought in to flag when an individual is attempting to share images that could have illegal content, prior to being encrypted and sent.
The new study indicates that it would be able for governments to apply CSS to look into an individual’s private messages, such as the utilization of facial recognition, in the absence of their knowledge.
The Online Safety Bill is presently under review in the UK parliament. The CSS is a component of an EU proposal as well that, if passed, has the ability to mandate its installation on millions of phones. The technology has already been produced in America by companies such as Apple.
The researchers of the study have indicated that their results indicate that we do not understand the risks sufficiently to move ahead with the deployment of CSS technology for hundreds of millions of devices.
Co-author Shubham Jain, of the study from the Department of Computing, of the Imperial College of London says “It’s vitally important to tackle illegal content online and we must do so in effective ways. However, CSS threatens to add a backdoor into personal devices, sacrificing the privacy of millions.”
