UK Government Publishes Draft Codes of Practice for Online Safety Act

The UK government has released draft codes of practice under the Online Safety Act, setting out how platforms must protect children from harmful content including child sexual abuse material, grooming and suicide-related material. The codes require platforms to use proactive technology to detect and remove illegal content, implement age verification or assurance measures, and report CSAM to the National Crime Agency. Ofcom will enforce the codes once finalised, with penalties including fines of up to ten percent of global revenue for non-compliance.

The Act mandates detection but leaves platforms to determine how: many will face the choice between keyword-based content filters that generate high volumes of false positives or end-to-end encryption that blocks all monitoring. Guardii's architecture resolves this tension by analysing the behavioural signature of a conversation in real time, flagging sustained targeting, escalation and coercion through anti-grooming and anti-sextortion modules that identify risk patterns rather than scanning message content. By operating at the point of contact across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, the system surfaces a child at acute risk to the responsible adult or authority without requiring the platform to break encryption or hand over transcripts, meeting the regulatory obligation to prevent harm while preserving user privacy at scale.