Age-Restricted Taxi Tracking? The Absurd Consequences of the Online Safety Act
I was recently travelling in the UK and, after a lot of sightseeing on foot, decided to order a taxi to go back to my hotel.
I searched the internet for a local taxi firm and found one with relative ease. I called the number and went through an automated process which worked well. I managed to book a taxi quickly. The computer-generated voice told me that my taxi was on its way. I was sent a link so that I could monitor the progress of my taxi. The message also said that I would know the taxi driver’s name and the type of vehicle and registration number that was on its way.
When I clicked on the link I was forwarded to this:
I can’t understand why anyone would consider a link to show you the progress of a taxi that you have ordered to be age-inappropriate content.
I can only assume that it is to do with the recent Online Safety Act, although coincidentally I had recently changed mobile providers, so it might purely have been that the mobile provider that I’d switched to had a different standard as to what was considered adult content. I doubt this on the basis that the company I moved to, Talkmobile, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the company I had used previously, Vodafone, and, as you can see, the block was from Vodafone.
Whoever has decided that this link contains age-restricted content hasn’t necessarily thought this through. Consider the scenario where a 17 year-old girl can’t get hold of her parents and it’s too far away or she does not want to walk home, so she orders a taxi through a reputable taxi service. A link is sent to her so she can see the progress of the taxi that she has ordered. Of course, she can’t open it because it’s considered age-inappropriate and, being only 17, she’s not in a position to prove that she’s over 18 and thus get the link to the taxi.
Thankfully it’s rare, but we do know that there are predators out there who will look for people who are vulnerable, and it’s not difficult to spot someone who’s waiting for somebody to pick them up or waiting for a taxi, because every time a car approaches the person will look up from whatever they’re doing to see if it’s the car that’s picking them up. All it would take would be for a predator to be around at that time, pull the window down and say, “Did you call for a taxi?” and, of course, because she’s just ordered one, she believes this is her taxi, so she gets in, perhaps never to be seen again — all because some moron has decided that a link to follow the progress of a taxi is something you’re not allowed to see if you’re under the age of 18.
How many other innocuous things have been blocked because of this Online Safety Act, and by doing so, are children really any safer?
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The explanation of this is fairly simple: Vodafone has outsourced “content classification” of resources on the WWW to some third-party provider (I’ve created such software in the past) and the database used by that third-party provider contains errors (like this one).
The implication of this are more severe, though: In order to implement this on the current web, Vodafone must be using an interception proxy of some kind to ensure that it can see all “web requests” users of Vodafone-powered phones make, including encrypted web requests, as are meanwhile the norm on the WWW. This means someone with access to the Vodafone infrastructure for this can gather “web movement profiles” of all Vodafone users, including cleartext of all supposedly encrypted user data. That’s automated 24×7 surveillance of everything any Vodafone user does on the internet — no privacy whatsoever. To “protect the children” … we must unfortunately record your online banking access credentials.
This is all the nudge to digital ID… suddenly all these petty obstacles will melt away when you can auto load your Tony Blair sponsored ID…
Just a reminder that your children are ultimately not yours but the state’s. You pay for them and have day to day responsibility for them. But on anything that the state wants, the state has the last word and can override parents.
That’s the world we live in. Like it or not.
They can eff off, they don’t own mine. They tried already, and lost.
It’s like our so called freedoms. They are an illusion. We have the freedom to operate within the boundaries and parameters set for us. If we never feel the need to stray beyond those parameters then we will feel we are “free”. If we try to push beyond those limits we will discover very quickly how unfree we are. Just ask that lady who got locked up for a social media post.
Same with the kids. Consistently do things the state considers inappropriate in their upbringing and the risk of having hem taken away is very real. At the very least getting fined. Happens all the time,
It’s all absurd. The people who make the rules and the people who sell and implement systems to help other people stay legal are f***ing clueless, frankly. I remember, in 2008, I was working in field sales for a large privately owned electrical wholesaler. A large part of my job was to source unusual electrical components for MRO clients who didn’t have the time or expertise to source what they needed to get their air conditioning, lighting, etc working again. I used the internet a lot in this endeavour. One day, my boss arrived and rather sheepishly asked to see me in my office. We both sat down at my desk after I had closed the door. “Marcus, you’ve been causing trouble,” he said. “You been flagged on a list at HQ.” “Oh dear,” I said. “What is this about you being engaged in violent political activism and the… er…” Here he looks down at a sheet of A4. “…production of online material featuring sex abuse and drug dealing?” My mind raced. I had once been dragged along to a Stop The War protest in London in the run up to the second Gulf War. But surely this was not… Read more »
There was an oilfield services group called “BJ Services”. They had a lot of problems initially when these algorithms first started.
😂
Best Job Services
Brilliant Job Services
Can’t imagine why they would have problems
It transpired that any website hosted on a web server which had at some point in the past also hosted content judged to be illegal or bad in some way, then the first website would also be classed in the same way. That’s called IP reputation tracking, it’s decidedly still alive and kicking, and actually even worse than what you believe about it. The internet protocol destination address of some TCP connection is easily available connection meta-information and hence, people badly want to use that for “bad stuff filtering”. But there’s no fixed 1:1 association between such protocol addresses and individual computers actually hosting web content and there’s no 1:1 association between such computers and web sites, meaning, any number of web sites can be hosted on any number of computers, including more than one site on the same computer or the same site on more than one computer and any number of computers (not really any number, but something close to 65,000 at least) may share the same public internet protocol address and – of course – computers can also use more than one internet protocol address. Lastly, associations between internet protocol addresses and computers change over time as… Read more »
Couldn’t agree more. Everything you write is exactly my point. I just couldn’t be arsed to go into that detail here 🤣
The potential fines for service providers are enormous, the rules are opache and Ministers are doubling down. They want a victim and likely Rachel in Accounts needs the cash.
This is what happens when you have a succession of socialist governments, all intent on micro controlling our lives.
And I see there was a story yesterday about the government threatening to fine social media companies if they obey the new rules TOO MUCH, so they’re really caught between a rock and a hard place. It all feels rather Chinese.
This one is the most stupid one yet!
Get a good quality VPN, which can geo locate you in a Country, eg USA outside the UK police-state.
Technical workarounds for this are obvious. But this doesn’t mean the original issue should exist. People are supposed to have a right to the privacy of their communications with other people and that the government claims it must be abolished to protect some people’s children from careless or bad parenting is no valid reason for actually doing so.