Discord users are first victims of UK's Online Safety Act

Much like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s 2022 mini budget, something absolutely disastrous, predictable, and entirely avoidable has occurred.

In the wake of the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), a number of Discord users have had their data stolen by an “unauthorised third party”. Whilst full credit card numbers and passwords were not impacted by the hack, data potentially accessed includes names, usernames, emails, the last four digits of credit card numbers and ,of course, 2,185,151 of images of government IDs from users who had to upload them for age verification. If the Online Safety Act is supposed to keep our children safe (it doesn’t), it’s certainly not keeping our adults safe.

As of writing, the petition to repeal the OSA has reached over half-a-million signatures and is due for a parliamentary debate in several months.

To add yet another tier to this growing layer-cake of ineptitude, current prime minister ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer wants EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the UK to have a photo ID which links us all in to government services, proves who we are, aNd WiLl DeFiNaTlY nOt GeT hAcKeD aT aLl.

So let’s get this straight: The UK Labour (lesser of two evils) government wants us to consolidate all our ID information, into a single app, and what? Hand it out like Halloween candy to any site that lets people post about politics?

Some platforms like Steam have taken a different approach, and now only allows the purchase of adult content to people who have a credit card. Sure, there’s no risk of my driving licence getting hacked, but also as someone who doesn’t have a credit card, I don’t feel like taking out a loan just so I can see a pair of tits.

So yeah, we might become victims of fraud, have to take out credit cards we don’t want, be unable to talk about things the government doesn’t want us talking about, BUT AT LEAST THE KIDS ARE SAFE!

Of course, Labour are using immigrants as a scapegoat for their encroaching authoritarianism. I really can’t see how any of this will even affect legal immigration, perhaps there will be other groups in the future that will need ‘rounding up’. This centralised store of personal data will sure make that easy.

During my time in the press, I covered a number of stories about modern slavery, whilst it is definitely a problem in the UK, I can say with certainty, this is not a problem ID cards will solve. This is probably why Labour will start making it more difficult for us to use cash in the future. The forced digitalisation of society hopes to make it easy for the government to completely remove what little is left of our privacy and dignity, and to marginalise those who won’t get on board.

But if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear, right? It’s not like I’m an immigrant, or hold horrendous views like Palestinians are humans beings who shouldn’t be slaughtered en masse, or starved out of their country.