Mission: Creep

Amid RAM shortages, price hikes, and a shift towards consumer cloud computing seemingly always looming, NVIDIA’s announcement of RTX Spark caught me off-guard. Their new hybrid chip is said to boast up to 128GB of integrated memory, capable of supporting massive 120B parameter AI models and agents, entirely locally. This represents the biggest pivot back toward personal compute and control over one’s hardware in over a decade.

This made the British government’s ultimatum to Apple and Google just eight days later all the more jarring.

Introduce device-level controls across all new and existing mobile devices, or else.

The stated purpose of these controls is to prevent children from creating, sharing, and viewing nude images.

This comes roughly a year after the government successfully pressured Apple to deny Advanced Data Protection for iCloud to new users, becoming the first country to weaken the encryption capabilities available to its population. As of the time of writing, the UK is the only country in which ADP is unavailable. Instead of further weakening this encryption, the new strategy appears to sidestep it entirely, inspecting content on-device, before it is encrypted, and after it is decrypted.

In a statement released by The Signal Foundation – the non-profit behind the end-to-end encrypted messaging service, Signal – these measures are described as “dystopian”. Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker threatened to withdraw from the UK entirely, rather than compromise on user privacy, contending that tools used to detect sexual content today, could be used to detect undesirable political speech tomorrow.

The implications of this are clear. While there are no signs in the current proposal that devices will be “phoning home”, nor will they be scanning for anything other than nude images, mission creep seems inevitable in this case. Once the capability of client-side scanning is implemented, all barriers to complete mass surveillance become a matter of legislation. In an increasingly polarised political climate, this simply cannot be ignored. In 2023 alone, 12,183 arrests linked to digital communications took place in the UK. This is an unusual number for any country, but especially concerning for a liberal democracy.

It is hard to escape the fact that the government’s framing is likely employing a moral chilling effect, preventing criticism of legislation which is objectively intrusive, given that it will be mandatory for all mobile devices, and will require “age assurance” – the form of which is yet to be determined – effectively ending any illusion of true anonymity.

The silver lining is that this, and the social media ban that is coming with it, will likely be good for children. Ofcom reports both children and parents naming “infinite scroll” as a feature that keeps children on social media platforms for longer than intended, and keeps them coming back for more. This coincides with both maths and literacy scores falling significantly in England since 2018. The Children’s Commissioner found that 70% of respondents had seen online pornography before adulthood. The average first exposure was 13, and some reported exposure at six or younger. It is important to note that much of that exposure is reported to be accidental.

The problem is real, the solution heavy-handed, and the whole situation unfortunately demonstrates a failure on the part of parents to utilise the extensive tools available to them to keep their children safe.

I must admit that upon reading the ultimatum, I felt embarrassed that it took me this long to truly realise how far mobile and desktop devices had diverged. In practice, mobile devices have become increasingly locked down and more akin to licensed portals through which we interact with each other, corporations, and now increasingly, the state.

However, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with thinking of a smartphone as a handheld computer, so why must the distinction continue to exist in law?

If we put our tin foil hats on for a moment, we can envision a future in which our desktop computers and laptops, beholden to the same mandatory OS-level hooks, fully equipped with powerful “reasoning” AI agents with full access to the rest of our systems, can be remotely deputised by the state.

This would be truly Orwellian, and I hope it never comes to pass.