#david rose

Paul Holden: You can have one of two things. You can either have an age-gated internet or you can have privacy. You can't have both of these things.

Keir Starmer: The government has decided to ban social media access for children under 16.

Holden: The basic underlying mechanism for something like that is it has to treat everyone like a child until they prove not to be a child. To prove you're not a child, you're going to have to give some form of information to social media companies that we're told we can't trust anyway, right?

Well, on the one hand, the government is saying these social media companies, you can't trust them, they're terrible, they're trying to seduce our children into the worst corner of the internet. At the same time, we're very comfortable with them taking all your private information and actually linking your online activity to your bank account, to your passport, and to your biometric data.

Basically, there is no way to implement the system that doesn't involve some degree of giving up your privacy online.

David Rose: So how inimical to independent investigative journalism could some of these ideas be?

Holden: I mean, it's deeply worrying. You cannot have investigative journalism without privacy. It's just not feasible It's not possible to manage a confidential source if there's no reasonable expectation that you can actually provide them privacy.

There is a train in motion here, there is a civil service that's pushing this stuff, there are people in the old-style regime who have been pushing the stuff in a particular direction. This is the direction of travel. It's almost immaterial, in a sense, whether Burnham supports it or not, unless he takes a real interest in it, which I don't think he is. It's just going to happen. It's just going to happen by default.

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Full interview:

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