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Myths Persist About Running Public Wi-Fi in the UK (arstechnica.co.uk)
If you're running a Wi-Fi hotspot in the U.K., Ars Technica found most of the available legal advice online was either "ill-informed" or "invented", and "the same wrong advice repeated by multiple sources -- including vendors offering to help clients ensure compliance with the 'rules.'" An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: If you run a public Wi-Fi service, can you be held responsible if someone uses it to infringe copyright, defame someone or commit a crime? Ars Technica examines the situation under English law on intermediary liability, as well as looking at data protection law and obligations (or not) to store traffic data for law enforcement.
According to Ars, much publicised "guidance" for would-be Wi-Fi operators indicates that an operator would be liable, but the legal experts who spoke to Ars are far less convinced.
According to Ars, much publicised "guidance" for would-be Wi-Fi operators indicates that an operator would be liable, but the legal experts who spoke to Ars are far less convinced.
It quotes many other articles and then says 'but these are wrong'. (admittedly with sources) but doesn't contain a list of actual requirements.
Another very relevant factor is not what the law says, but what the police think the law says.
It's not a huge amount of comfort that you're right, when you're getting the door kicked in.
Then it says..
ok so that covers England and Wales.. what about Scotland and N. Ireland who both have seperate and distinct legal systems??? English law != Law that affects other constituent countries of the UK
...it doesn't mean that ars' slightly-better-research brand of journalism is acceptable.
Half the experts quoted aren't actually experts in the "I'm a doctor with 20 years of experience in heart conditions so here's some advice about keeping a healthy heart" sense, but people with different range of special interests from the articles that have been dismissed. For example, Kennard is an admirable accidental campaigner for Internet privacy against the Theresas of this world (at least she's not prime mi... oh), but his brand of rule interpretation is not a legal one, but a particular geek's attempt to interpret rules in a favourable way.
What a legal expert asks: "Can an operator, after legal process, be held liable for a crime committed via a hotspot they run?"
What the operators ask: "Even if I cannot eventually be held liable, is there a risk that the police will come break down my door, arrest me, and steal away all our computers before they realise that I am not not responsible for the crime they are investigating? Or that I will face a civil suit which, even if I win, will still cost me tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees?"
Law can be an expensive matter. Pyrrhic victory is a very real possibility.
The safest approach is to contract with a specialist public hotspot provider like The Cloud to run the spot. They have the legal experts on hand to address anything that might come up, and they can provide the best possible shield for the premises owner - they are the ones who actually run the service, the IP address is registered to them, so they are the ones who get any legal troubles. They generally also authenticate users (typically by requiring a phone number to SMS a login code to), which lets them keep the police off their backs. It's more expensive than just hooking up a basic wifi router though, especially for a small business that just wants to run a single point and doesn't have the negotiating power that a chain or franchise could bring to the table.
Encrypt all the packets (and metadata) traveling on your signal. Sounds like an opportunity for an astute programmer.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I hope England is smart enough to not have such an idiotic law. A good policy is never to examine or moderate any traffic on your net or hot spot. If you do not know it is there you can not intend for it to be there.
If you run a public Wi-Fi service, can you be held responsible if someone uses it to infringe copyright, defame someone or commit a crime?
According to Ars, much publicised "guidance" for would-be Wi-Fi operators indicates that an operator would be liable, but the legal experts who spoke to Ars are far less convinced.
Oh, well, that's cleared that up then.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Funnel everything from your public Wifi AP through a transparent Tor proxy. Except in the most extreme and unusual circumstances, this will be enough to prevent a midnight raid based on what one of your anonymous users looked at online.