TECHNOLOGY

The use of technology is now a given of modern life, but government regularly struggles to keep up with new developments. Modern policies are essential for societal progress as they foster innovation, competitiveness, and improve the quality of life. Allowing policy to stagnate results in exploitative, unfair, and wasteful business practices. The following policies will give new rights to UK citizens and a new framework within which businesses can operate fairly and competitively. We would:

• Introduce a new Bill of Digital Rights alongside a new British Bill of Rights. This will include the right to repair devices, the right to own your purchases, and the right to cancel subscriptions with the same ease as signing up.

• Ban HP’s dynamic security and other equivalents. Restricting the use of third-party ink cartridges is a clear attempt at monopolisation. All printers should be required to accept any ink cartridge of the end user’s choice.

• Require phone components to be modular as much as possible (especially batteries).

• Explicitly ban manufacturers from intentionally designing products to fail prematurely a.k.a. planned obsolescence, and require them to guarantee products for a reasonable period (5-10 years at a minimum).

  • Introduce a certification scheme to highlight durable and repairable products.

• Companies will be banned from changing their terms of service after a sale has been made (e.g. Roku TV firmware updates) OR must provide a Disagree button to T&Cs that does not prevent use of the product or service but does allow for critical security upgrades, and updates changing TOS and/or disabling previous functionality cannot be pushed to previously-purchased devices.

• Previously paid-for content must remain permanently available to purchasers or refunds issued at the point of retirement/shut-down under a new Right of Digital Ownership. We refer to the case of Bungie ‘retiring’ paid content from Destiny 2 so it can’t be played anymore, and the ‘Stop Killing Games’ movement.

• Media subscription services should be ad-free by default. No paid-for content should have adverts in it.

• Ban roaming charges for mobile devices.

• Ban payment processors from cancelling payments for purchases they are morally or politically opposed to, or refusing to process payments from a legitimate platforms e.g. Steam (for allowing adult games to be sold), well-known adult/pornography sites etc. They are not the morality police and have no right to dictate what their customers spend their money on. Their job is to act as the middleman. Criminal activity is for the police to investigate.

• Consumers must be able to downgrade firmware if desired with all previous firmware versions remaining publicly accessible and usable.

• All smart devices must provide the ability to use a local API.

• Dismantle the political and technological surveillance state that has developed since September 11th 2001:

  • Restore civil liberties lost since the commencement of the failed War on Terror.

  • Repeal the Online Safety Act. It is being used to suppress legitimate and legal political content that is inconvenient for the government, and requires companies to scan your personal messages. This is a gross violation of free speech and privacy and will only be part of ‘function-creep’ until we have no online freedom left. Children should be kept safe online by parents parenting, not by the State determining what is ‘harmful'.

  • Collected data to be deleted after 30 days.

  • Make D-Notices subject to direct judicial oversight. Although they are not mandatory, the media are generally complicit, but the issuance should be scrutinised to ensure that it is not being abused.

  • Stronger whistleblower protections.

  • Ban mandatory encryption backdoors.

  • Restrict facial recognition use by police.

• New data collection rules for cookie prompts and user tracking:

  • Ban ‘pay to read with no ads’ cookies prompts. Users must be able to choose to set no cookies/trackers and read for free, and these cookie walls do not give them a choice to refuse cookies without losing access. Pay-to-read is already banned by GDPR rules but not enforced strictly enough. We will give the Information Commissioner’s Office stronger powers to take action against violators.

  • Cookie prompts must also have a prominent Reject All button which actually turns all selections to off. Users should not have to scroll through endless menus and turn each one off individually. That is clearly being done in an attempt to overwhelm the user and make them give up, which is deceitful.

• Require owners of a web address to either utilise it with an active, functioning website within 6 months of purchase or be forced to relinquish it back into the pool for purchase. Nobody should be able to buy up masses of addresses and then hold them to ransom.

• Amend the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to establish a fair-use model which allows content creators to use copyrighted works for educational purposes (e.g. music education channels); create a certified educational content creator scheme within the Intellectual Property Office that gives a presumption of fair use to registered creators, shifting the burden of proof to the claimant; require content platforms to implement a specific flagging option citing fair use under this law; establish a low-cost tribunal system to adjudicate copyright disputes of this nature; and punish persons/bodies that maliciously abuse the copyright claim mechanism to get videos and/or channels deleted.

• Establish an ethical AI development framework and regulatory model, and amend the Data (Use & Access) Act 2025 to mandate AI companies declare when they have used copyrighted material as training data for their algorithms and compensate the owners accordingly, including retroactively. They should not be allowed to get away with previous mass-scale copyright theft.

• Set up British alternatives to Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Twitter/X etc. so we don’t rely on Americans for them and they can’t access our data. Social media is the public square in digital form and it should not be left to the control of tech oligarchs with personal political agendas. Social media should be run by genuinely independent bodies in the interest of the public good. Any eventual service will come with privacy and free speech guarantees so people can use it knowing they are not being tracked, and will not be censored providing they don't post anything that violates existing laws. We want to firmly establish the principle that the State has no right to intrude on your private life unless there is credible evidence of criminal activity or intent to cause harm.