Alive and Well in Brussels – image by IISG via Flickr
The BBC reports a set of draft proposals from the European Commission to “protect children from the dangers of the internet”.
That’s how it’s billed anyway.
The proposals consist of a lot of half-baked ideas, for example
It proposes a plan – via legislation, self-regulation and research grants – to create an online “ecosystem” that keeps children safe but does not make going online too dull.
But the plan includes one proposal that is very far from half-baked, and is instead deeply sinister, as so often with the ideas from Brussels:
It also wants industry to create a system that can electronically authenticate and identify children to ensure they do not stray onto inappropriate sites or see material unsuitable for them.
To back this up, the commission will later this year unveil a framework for the electronic authentication system that is based around age. This will help with both data protection and child safety, it says.
Think about that for a moment. Does it only apply to children? If somebody goes to an “adult” website, they need to authenticate as NOT a child after all. What this means is that the EU’s proposals can only mean a logon id for everyone who accesses the internet.
It is Labour’s national identity database all over again – except that this time it is an EU identity database.
Well after all, totalitarian states, even nascent ones like the EU, do need to keep tabs on their citizens. Can’t have them deciding things for themselves. If they did that, the government might lose control of them.
The EU is becoming daily ever closer to the old USSR. This time, we will be living in it and not looking at it from the outside.
