Privacy — writing by Peter Bassill
Privacy
Personal, family and boardroom privacy, and keeping children safe online. 47 articles
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The unmarkable exam: the child-safety law no one is allowed to grade
The Children's Commissioner told a Lords committee that children say the Online Safety Act has made "absolutely no difference" — and that she can't judge it, because Ofcom won't release the platforms' risk assessments. A law built to be unmarkable has already told you something.
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The consent nobody sought: Britain says no to the keys
Someone finally asked the public — and across every party, Britain said it would not trust the state with the keys to its private life. A sidebar to the series that goes to the foundation the whole age-verification project rests on: a consent never sought, and never given.
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The honeypot changes address
Part 11: Meta settles the US child-safety case for up to $18bn and the UN comes out against outright bans — the week the ban model lost the argument. But the age check just moved from the platform to the app store, and the identity honeypot moved with it.
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AI-generated harm against children in 2026
Revisiting the September 2024 post on deepfakes and children. UK law has criminalised creation of intimate deepfakes of minors. Schools have policies. The IWF reports massive growth in AI-generated CSAM. Voice clone fraud is mature. What has actually changed and what to do.
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Struck down before the start: France's court reads the argument back
Part 10: eighteen days before launch, France's Constitutional Council struck the under-15 ban down — on the grounds this series pressed: disproportion, and age verification with no guarantees for private life. A reprieve, but the redraft is already commissioned.
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Gaming and online communities in 2026: what changed
Revisiting the 2023 post on gaming, voice chat, and the communities that look least like social media. Three years of platform safety overhauls, AI moderation, AI voice in games, and the new financial and AI-companion risks that did not exist last time.
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The first hour
Part 3: a child has just told you they are being extorted over an image. What to do, in what order, in the hour that follows. Why not to pay, why not to block before you capture, what Report Remove actually does, and why the image is not the emergency.
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The first message is always kind
Part 2: how contact with a child actually starts. Not a stranger saying something obviously wrong, but attention, aimed at a child having a bad week. The pattern, the four things that stop them telling you, and the sentence to say before anything happens.
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They were never on the dark web
Part 1 of a new series. Europol has just referred 4,340 URLs tied to The Com, a network that grooms and coerces children on the platforms they already use. Why the dark-web mental model fails parents, what the numbers say, and what follows.
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The experiment comes home: Britain bans under-16s
Part 10: the experiment comes home. Britain will ban under-16s from social media by spring 2027 — the ban the Commons rejected in March, revived by regulation in June. Held to the same standard as France and Australia, including the objection the government made itself.
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Four days, 490 records: the insider breach nobody budgets for
A new council worker opened ~490 sensitive safeguarding records and downloaded 94 over four days — then got a suspended sentence. The sentence is the least interesting part. Why insider snooping is the breach nobody budgets for, and why you can't rely on prosecution to stop it.
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The experiment goes live: France bans under-15s
Part 9: France becomes the first country in Europe to ban under-15s from social media — and the first to make everyone verify their age. Braver than Australia's version, and it builds the identity honeypot at national scale. Scoring the law against the argument.
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So what do I actually do?
Seven parts on why the government's plan to protect children online will leak. So here is the other side of the ledger: the evidence-based, do-it-this-weekend guide to protecting your own child — ordered by what genuinely works, not what merely feels reassuring.
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A curfew you can switch off
The government's midnight social media curfew for 16 and 17-year-olds is a default, not a control — and after 29 years of telling boards the difference, I can't un-see it. Part 1 of a series on what happens when good intentions meet the technical reality of the teenage internet.
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Lessons from the age gate we already built
We don't have to predict how a national age-verification scheme performs. We switched one on last July for pornography, and a year of data is in. Part 6: what the porn age gate actually did — who it stopped, where the traffic went, and the identity honeypot it built along the way