UK Online Safety Bill And Encryption

 Will the UK block the WP.  

Wikipedia will not perform Online Safety Bill age checks

Published in the BBC

By Chris Vallance & Tom GerkenTechnology reporters

Wikipedia will not comply with any age checks required under the Online Safety Bill, its foundation says.   Rebecca MacKinnon, of the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the website, says it would "violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors".

A senior figure in Wikimedia UK fears the site could be blocked as a result.

But the government says only services posing the highest risk to children will need age verification.

Wikipedia has millions of articles in hundreds of languages, written and edited entirely by thousands of volunteers around the world.

It is the eighth most-visited site in the UK, according to data from analytics company SimilarWeb.

The Online Safety Bill, currently before Parliament, places duties on tech firms to protect users from harmful or illegal content and is expected to come fully into force some time in 2024.

Neil Brown, a solicitor specialising in internet and telecoms law, says that under the bill, services likely to be accessed by children must have "proportionate systems and processes" designed to prevent them from encountering harmful content. That could include age verification.

Lucy Crompton-Reid, chief executive of Wikimedia UK, an independent charity affiliated with the foundation, warns some material on the site could trigger age verification.

"For example, educational text and images about sexuality could be misinterpreted as pornography," she said.

But Ms MacKinnon wrote: "The Wikimedia Foundation will not be verifying the age of UK readers or contributors."

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As well as requiring Wikipedia to gather data about its users, checking ages would also require a "drastic overhaul" to technical systems.

If a service does not comply with the bill, there can be serious consequences potentially including large fines, criminal sanctions for senior staff, or restricting access to a service in the UK.

Wikimedia UK fears that site could be blocked because of the Bill, and the risk that it will mandate age checks. ... '