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If you’re a politician and you don’t understand the Internet, then there’s only one reasonable course of action: you stay away from the Internet. That, or you hire someone who is well-versed on the Internet to take control of all matters pertaining to it. It is quite clear that Prime Minister David Cameron hasn’t done this, as he is asking for porn sites to keep a log of the personal information and viewing habits of their users, a move which will undoubtedly lead to this data being leaked at some point in the not-so-distant future.
These draconian policies are ostensibly being put in place in order to ensure that underage citizens of the UK do not stumble onto pornographic material online, but for the rest of us it means that there’s now a risk that our details, including our credit card information and home address, could be published online for everyone to see, not to mention the embarrassing prospect that our viewing habits could be leaked, too.
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Children potentially having access to online porn is certainly a problematic issue, but I’m pretty sure it’s one that’s already been solved thanks to Parental Control features already established in browsers. Parents of this generation are more tech-savvy than older generations, too, meaning that these Parental Controls are more likely to be enforced in order to ensure that children do not see any content that isn’t appropriate for their age group.
What Cameron is essentially doing, then, is creating a new problem, and one that will not only prove to be risky for viewers of porn, but will also cause a headache for porn sites, too. Them now being forced to retain the private data of their users essentially means that they’ll also have to ready themselves for accusations of breaching those users’ trust when that data is inevitably leaked, and could eventually prove to be detrimental to their respective businesses in the region.
All-in-all it’s a disastrous idea that is sure to have negative consequences once hackers eventually work their way around these websites’ algorithms, with it essentially making a wide range of people vulnerable to cyber crimes. It’s a ploy on Cameron’s behalf to appeal to the generations of UK citizens that are wary of the Internet and would probably see this as a good thing, while the rest of us who know how the Internet works recognize this new policy as a disaster waiting to happen.
