The introduction of mandatory age verification under the UK’s Online Safety Act has inadvertently led to a noticeable surge in VPN usage. This development has reportedly displeased certain factions within the UK government, prompting calls for measures to restrict VPN access. However, the Open Rights Group (ORG), a prominent advocate for online privacy, has vehemently criticized these potential restrictions, warning they would only complicate matters further.
Virtual Private Networks offer a simple workaround: users in the UK can connect through servers located in countries that do not require age verification. Despite this obvious bypass, no effective preventative actions have been implemented thus far.
With children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza recently describing VPN use as “absolutely a loophole that needs closing,” the ORG quickly countered, asserting that VPNs are not the core problem. They have launched a campaign advocating for significant reforms to the Online Safety Act. Given the Act’s wide-ranging impact, affecting everything from dating apps to Spotify, as well as health and political information, this campaign is expected to gather considerable momentum.
Following queries in the House of Lords regarding the increasing reliance on VPNs, James Baker of the ORG highlighted that attempts to “age-gate VPNs” could inadvertently compromise online safety in other, more dangerous ways.
Baker elaborated, pointing out that while very young children are unlikely to use VPNs, teenagers are quite capable of finding ingenious methods to circumvent restrictions. These could include resorting to untrustworthy proxy sites, Tor, P2P sharing, using borrowed account credentials, or simply accessing content on alternative platforms. He also noted that adults often use VPNs due to a profound distrust in existing age assurance technologies, suggesting that their reliance on VPNs would likely diminish if the government were to introduce higher standards for data protection and privacy in age verification systems.
Concluding his statement, Baker firmly declared that “detecting or banning VPNs is not technically feasible without extreme levels of digital authoritarianism,” thereby emphasizing the serious ramifications of such an approach.
Teenagers utilize VPNs for various reasons, whether to enhance their online gaming experience or to secure their privacy when connecting to public Wi-Fi. Regardless of their motivations, restricting VPN access would likely compel these individuals to use less secure alternatives, such as unreliable proxy sites. This, in turn, could open up a host of new and potentially more severe online safety concerns.
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