The start of September often has a new-year feel. So, what does our Tech and Innovation Sector team see on the horizon?
1. Online Safety – a scramble to comply
New duties under the Online Safety Act 2023 will start to bite towards the end of 2024, and a lot of businesses will have to move quickly if they haven’t already. Most press coverage of the Act has focussed on its impact on social media giants, but the Act creates new duties for most providers of ‘user-to-user services’ with links to the UK. Any internet-based service that enables service users to encounter content generated by other service users is a ‘user-to-user’ service, so the scope of the Act is huge. The new duties are aimed at protecting users against illegal content and protecting children against a wider range of harms. Service providers will have to carry out risk assessments and implement systems to prevent users from encountering priority illegal content and mitigate related harm to users. To comply with those duties, service providers will need to consider their processes for:
- risk governance;
- content moderation;
- reporting illegal content and taking it down;
- user terms of service;
- default settings and support for children using the service;
- content recommendations; and
- user access and blocking.
For many service providers, this will require rapid upskilling and innovation in processes and systems. The new duties will start to apply when Ofcom publishes the relevant codes of practice, which it plans to do later this year. Providers of regulated user-to-user services will have just three months to publish their first risk assessments once the codes of practice are published.
2. AI regulation comes to the UK
In the King’s Speech, the government announced it would ‘seek to establish the appropriate legislation to place requirements on those working to develop the most powerful artificial intelligence models’. That does not go as far as announcing a new artificial intelligence bill, but it does mark a significant shift from the previous government’s approach, and new legislation is likely to follow.
The previous government’s approach was not to create a regulatory regime for Artificial Intelligence, but to ask regulators to use their existing powers to police the use of AI in the sectors they regulate. This approach was in marked contrast to the approach in the European Union. The EU AI Act, which came into force on 1 August this year, prohibits certain AI practices entirely and imposes strict requirements on organisations that design and develop, deploy, distribute, or import AI systems for the EU market. The EU AI Act is also one of an increasing number of EU laws that seek to impose obligations on organisations outside the EU, so plenty of UK-based businesses will find they have to comply if they are supplying AI or AI-powered services into the EU.
The key question will be whether the UK’s new government tries to align the UK with the EU approach. The King’s Speech talked about the ‘most powerful’ models. If the UK’s regulations focus on the capabilities of an AI model, then that would be a very different approach to the EU, where the EU AI Act is mostly concerned with the purposes which an AI system is designed to achieve.
3. Increasing use of the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a description of the network of devices (Things) embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices over the internet or cloud. From mobile phones, smart watches, domestic appliances, manufacturing machinery, and industrial plants, to planes, trains, smart cars, and robots, the appetite from consumers is for an ever-increasing reliance on the benefits that connected devices could bring. Experts predict that the use of IoT will continue to grow in 2025 by between 20 to 40 billion devices, some predicting an even higher growth. It is also expected that the data generated and shared by such devices would exceed 70 ZB.
These are daunting figures and cannot be underestimated by all those involved in the tech and innovation sector. The increasing reliance on IoT devices is understandable; aside from cost reduction, improved efficiency, convenience, and security, the technology also allows for enhanced accuracy and an improved customer experience. But this trend is not without risks, chief among being data privacy and cybersecurity threats.
The close monitoring of data movement and processing would need to be accelerated, in the face of the challenges posed by the enforcement of data protection laws across a diverse and growing range of IoT devices. And in the kind of hyperconnected global infrastructure that we are moving towards, more robust efforts would need to be prioritised to deal with cybersecurity. These are likely to come in the form of tighter regulation and adoption by consumers and industry generally of tighter vigilance and safer digital habits.
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