Web designer/developer, Karate black belt, sax player, and all round good egg.
Manchester, England
Joined December 2010
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Ian Ebden retweeted
I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this.
The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home.
There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered.
What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business.
Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not.
This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy.
That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids.
What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes.
Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming?
No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.
My first instinct was to support the UK’s social media ban for under 16s.
Protecting children from grooming, exploitation and harmful content seems like common sense.
But I’m seeing a lot of opposition to it, so I’m genuinely curious as to why?
One thing making me second guess is that platforms like bluesky are exempt, while at the same time there’s a push to let 16 year olds vote. To me that looks less like child protection and more like controlling where young people get their information.
Interested to hear other perspectives.
Watched Disclosure Day and was surprised at how bad it was. Not one redeeming feature. The ‘climax’/ending was truly amateurish. A stain on Spielberg’s career.
Ian Ebden retweeted
🆔The Labour Government is threatening ID checks for the internet
Our director @silkiecarlo speaks to the BBC what plans for child-locked devices really mean for our internet privacy and freedom⤵️
Ian Ebden retweeted
Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.
signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06…
Ian Ebden retweeted
PAY ATTENTION. Your digital life was just sold to a billionaire. Tony Blair brokered the deal. The King announced it. You had no say.
For 20 years Blair tried to force Digital ID. Failed in 2006 when his £4.6BN Identity Cards Act was scrapped. He learned. You can't force people. You make them walk into the trap optionally.
In 2025, 2.96 MILLION petitioned against it. Government pretended to listen. Made it optional. But the trap was always the same. Once banks integrate it, employers require it, schools demand it. Optional becomes mandatory in practice. You won't function without it.
Why? Larry Ellison paid the Tony Blair Institute £257 MILLION.
Oracle already holds £700M in government contracts across Treasury, Home Office, NHS. They're not building a service. They're owning your life.
In February, Blair and Ellison met in Dubai. Ellison called for unification of all government data for AI. Not to help you. To predict you. Control you. Monitor every transaction, every movement, every choice.
TBI released the report in September. Starmer moved days later. King made it official. Once Digital ID embeds in NHS and tax system, no government can remove it without economic collapse.
It becomes permanent. Survives every election. Every Prime Minister.
Blair learned in 2006 that forced control gets rejected. So this time he's embedding it so deep rejection becomes impossible.
This is institutional entrapment. You're getting a digital leash designed to predict and control your behaviour through AI.
Wake up before optional becomes permanent.
Been using #bulma for years. Paired with #craftCMS, it keeps builds clean, fast, and scalable without fighting the framework. I broke it down here: designkarma.co.uk/blog/why-w…
Very disappointing customer service from @aerial_direct. Been with them years, yet they're unable to deal with a very simple issue. Time to name and shame.
Never launch on a Friday they say. That's loser talk. I just put the new DesignKarma site live. If you need some #craftcms help, hit me up. designkarma.co.uk
Ian Ebden retweeted
If you put 100 black 🐜 & 100 red 🐜 in a jar, nothing happens. But if you shake jar hard, they start fighting until they destroy each other. The red ants think the black ants are the enemy, the black ants think red ants are enemy.
But the real enemy is the one shaking the jar.
Insanity.
Britain has approved funding for experiments to dim sunlight in an attempt to limit global warming manchestereveningnews.co.uk/…
Looking at the implications of the latest bonehead decision by the UK government designkarma.co.uk/blog/uk-go…
Unveiled the new La Manga Club Resort website this morning, powered by #craftcms and #madewithbulma lamangaclubresort.co.uk
Ian Ebden retweeted
remembering all the work stuff waiting for you that you dropped like a bag of shit when finishing up in December.
