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Articles

The Online Safety Bill: Five Key Features

Zoe Barber

5 min read
Promotional graphic for an article by Zoe Barber about the Online Safety Bill, featuring an image of a government building.

What is the Online Safety Bill?

The Online Safety Bill aims to regulate the online space from media that is considered unsafe or age-sensitive, such as social media content, fraudulent advertising, and the sale of sensitive or age-restricted products. Any platform failing to uphold its duty of care could receive fines of up to £18 million or 10% of its annual turnover. The bill is currently in its second stage in the House of Commons and is likely to see revision before becoming legislation.Every sixty minutes £28,000 is lost to fraud – this is more than the average UK salary. In an effort to tackle fraud, illegal content, and online safety, the UK government is introducing the Online Safety Bill, redefining online platforms’ duty of care towards their users.

5 Most Significant Inbound Changes

  1. Impacted platforms that have a duty of care must ensure the removal of illegal material online, such as terrorism and child sexual exploitation and abuse. Platforms likely to be accessed by children will need to remove content that depicts sensitive topics, including self-harm or eating disorders.
  2. Providers who publish or host pornographic content on their services will be required to prevent children from accessing that content. This means that age verification checks will become mandatory to prevent children from freely accessing sites. The ‘are you 18+? Yes or no’ boxes will no longer suffice.
  3. Businesses must provide adult users with greater levels of autonomy over their safety, by controlling who they interact with, what content they can see, as well as verifying their identity. This can be used in several ways, for example: an identity verification feature that gives users the ability to only interact with other verified members. The onus will be on the platforms to decide which methods to use to fulfil this identity verification duty, but they must give users the option to opt-in or out.
  4. Platforms must stop fraudulent adverts being published or hosted on their service. This bid to reduce fraud might find some success, however, fraudsters find victims in many more ways than adverts alone.
  5. Platforms must provide a method of appeal for users who feel their content has been unfairly restricted or taken down. News content will be completely exempt from any regulation under the Bill.

          The government states ‘Freedom of expression will be protected because these laws are not about imposing excessive regulation or state removal of content but ensuring that companies have the systems and processes in place to ensure users’ safety.’

          How to Protect your Business

          You might be thinking ‘so what does this mean for my business?’ It should be noted that only sites which host user-generated content such as images, videos, and comments, or which allow UK users to talk with other people online through messaging, comments, and forums are impacted. If this applies to you, these next steps may be vital.

          Steps to Take to Update your Business for the Online Safety Bill:

          • Conduct a risk assessment on any key issues relevant to your business
          • Remove any content from your site which may be considered illegal
          • Put in place a system to swiftly identify and remove future illegal content
          • Outline in the Terms of Service how you are thoroughly and fairly protecting users from illegal content
          • Put in place a system for reporting and reinstating potentially unjustified content removal
          • If applicable, put in place a robust identity verification system with an ability for users to moderate interactions
          • If applicable, put in place a robust age verification system
          • Document all information relevant to these new systems

          The Mobile Solution

          There are intelligent solutions to identify and validate details about your users which do not produce substantial amounts of customer friction – one of the most effective being MNO (Mobile Network Operator) data. During onboarding, users are quick to hand over phone numbers, yet the information surrounding the mobile is rarely utilised properly.

          MNO data can be matched with information provided by a user to verify age, address, name, device, SIM-card, and so on. It can even be used to check for indicators of fraud such as whether call forwarding or porting is active, or whether a SIM-swap attack has occurred.

          When deciding how to validate users, companies such as Phronesis can harness the MNO data using an easily integrated API (Application Programme Interface) to provide your business with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant and frictionless identity validation. They can also validate whether your user is 18+ or not using just a phone number – making your customers happy, and your website legally compliant.

          If you have any questions about using mobile data when verifying identity, or more specifically, age, please arrange a call, or reach out to a member of the team.

          Sources

          The Telegraph

          Parliamentary Bills

          Gov.uk

          Burges Salmon


          Last updated on September 18, 2024

          Contents

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          What Our Customers Are Saying

          "Phone number verification plays a critical role in helping to detect and prevent online fraud. TMT ID’s TeleShield product provides easy access to global mobile data, enabling us to enhance the actionable results of our MaxMind minFraud® services."

          MaxMind

          "BTS (Business Telecommunications Services) is successfully using TMT’s Velocity and Live services to check the status of mobile numbers. This way we make sure we optimize the performance of the service offered to our customers and ensure the quality of terminating traffic to all countries.”

          Business Telecommunications Services

          "Working with TMT’s TeleShield service has expanded our ability to detect fraud and minimise the risk to our business. TeleShield brings peace of mind and the opportunity to stop fraud before it affects our customers’ bottom line or the service."

          Six Degrees Labs

          "LATRO relies on TMT’s TeleShield to provide the most up to date and reliable numbering qualification information within our fraud reporting tools, enabling us to protect our customer’s revenues and empowering them to defend themselves against fraudulent numbers."

          LATRO

          "TMT is a valued partner that enables us to manage our routing costs effectively. They proactively and continuously expand their operator and country coverage while delivering exceptional customer service. We can always count on them to achieve high-quality results and look forward to our continued collaboration."

          Global Message Service

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          Global Voice

          "TeleShield from TMT gives 42com the power to detect and target telephony fraud scams internationally, thereby protecting our company from the financial and customer experience impacts of telecommunications fraud."

          Alberto Grunstein - CEO

          "It has been a pleasure to work with the team at TMT. They have become an essential provider of accurate numbering data information and Number Portability services globally."

          Luisa Sanchez - VP of SMS and Messaging Solutions, Identidad Technologies

          "Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier uses TMT ID as one of their key suppliers for Mobile Number Portability Data services. Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier uses TMT ID’s Velocity MNP solution. This is an ultra-fast query service that optimises the routing of international voice calls and A2P messaging."

          Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier

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