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UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

160 points by ubercow13 8mo ago

captain_coffee 8mo ago
They REALLY want people to become more tech-savvy and to learn how to create their own VPNs using cheap VMs instances from __INSERT_CLOUD_PROVIDER_HERE__, don't they?
- hexbin010 8mo ago
  How many cloud providers accept fully anonymous cash payments?
crest 8mo ago
Has anyone told them teens would create accounts with foreign VPN services?
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  IP blacklisting will follow.
  - iamnothere 8mo ago
    Just use Tor. And if they try to block that, use Snowflake bridges or v2ray like people in other censorious hellholes. Make them shut it all down like Iran and show who they really are.
    - chrisjj 8mo ago
      > Make them shut it all down like Iran They are certainly providing an opportunity for those who would like to inflict that.
londons_explore 8mo ago
So will openvpn now get a new command line argument '--passport-number-for-age-verification 8371652299'? And presumably also a '--webcam-to-use-for-identity'
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  Yeah, if you're unable to read, I understand reaching such conclusion :) But no, this is about platforms/services: > Amendment 92 (“Action to Prohibit the Provision of VPN Services to Children in the United Kingdom”) requires VPNs that are “offered or marketed to persons in the United Kingdom” or “provided to a significant number of persons” to implement age assurance for UK users.
  - londons_explore 8mo ago
    But if openvpn clients want to connect to those servers?
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      If those services are provided by a company that “offered or marketed to persons in the United Kingdom” or “provided to a significant number of persons”, then they need to implement those checks. Still outside of openvpn, and still outside of general servers, you can still spin up your own server and use that, without any age checks, as you're not offering any service. The host who lets you spin up the server might also need to implement those age checks though. But still, not openvpn.
      - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
        So effectively truly Private vpn providers have to have an exit from UK. I mean even if say proton says that its not meant for UK but "substantial" people use protonvpn because its private, then they would be forced for the same laws. Another point is what prevents UK govt or UK bots to sign up for Proton Vpn say themselves and the difference between bots and humans is becoming thin especially for such Private Vpn's and then UK govt comes again knocking asking for age verification. Honestly makes me feel like UK citizens are hostage in their own countries & we might see more UK IP's being blocked from accessing services because the idea of Virtual private network is still vague in my opinion. One can abstract a sort of VPN on top of xmpp or matrix servers too or even telegram as the intermediate. Would that mean that UK govt would come knocking onto these asking for who created the VPN (suppose I built a VPN which uses telegram to send messages/packets or uses telegram infra, so would they come to telegram asking what is the IP/detail info of my telegram user, would they go to signal or xmpp or matrix providers too? What if I use a provider who colo's on a datacenter and they go to the datacenter asking for access or the company behind datacenter I am not saying that they would for something so niche but the fact of the matter is that nothing's stopping them from the laws from what I can gather. They would only have to do it once to instill fear in the masses. I mean technically just this law has instilled fear and I am not even a UK citizen Someone familiar with UK law please comment on my message but VPN is such a vague term imo. Like at this point you are just targeting private networks or people who meet online in private VPNs LITERALLY means Virtual "PRIVATE NETWORKS" What gives the govt right to intercept between two parties communicating in any way (enforcing a condition for one party to have Id of other for age verification etc.)
alexmorley 8mo ago
Not made clear in this article - this bill will be passed back to the House of Commons to debate/amend before going back to the House of Lords. This was not the final say.
- cbeach 8mo ago
  The Commons are even more hungry for pervasive online surveillance than the Lords - at least, while Labour and the Tories are in power. Reform UK (the party currently leading in the polls by a large margin) is the only party that loudly opposed the draconian measures within the Online Safety Act and promise to repeal it
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hexbin010 8mo ago
    Of course Rusform UK promise to repeal it - they want Russian trolls to have as much unfettered access to the British public as possible
    - u8080 8mo ago
      Makes me giggle as Russian citizen since very similar rhetoric was used when establishing internet censorship in RU - let's protect our citizens from evil foreign entities from the internet.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
jimnotgym 8mo ago
Just for clarification. House of Lords amendments do not have to be accepted by the House of Commons and may not make it into law. If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know. You can ask for an appointment with your MP. You can ask for an appointment with ministers. Better still you can form an advocacy group and lobby.
- graemep 8mo ago
  No, but it does mean that MP's have to make a positive decision to reject it, the proponents of the amendments (who are well financed) will claim anyone who opposes the amendment is pro-pedophile (as happened with the online safety act) which makes it hard to reject. To stop it now we need a majority of MPs who are willing to take a political risk to reject it.
  - FrostViper8 8mo ago
    > To stop it now we need a majority of MPs who are willing to take a political risk to reject it. Which isn't going to happen.
- FrostViper8 8mo ago
  > If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know. It is an utter waste of time. MPs already know about the concerns. They don't care. I wrote to my MP about many of these concerns in the past. You either get ignored, told you are enabling pedos, told there will be protections put in place (ignoring the whole point is that I don't trust the government), or you get a boilerplate reply. Moreover The vast majority of people (unfortunately this includes people in my own family) have been propagandised to agree with all iffy censorship, monitoring and other spooky nonsense the UK state engages with.
- aranw 8mo ago
  I've written to my MP several times about this. Each response just repeats the same talking points about safety whilst completely missing the underlying technical issues and consequences.
thefz 8mo ago
What if I rent a cheap VPS overseas and wireguard my traffic to that?
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  As long as you don't offer it for others in exchange for money, it isn't a service and not what's covered here.
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    Untrue. F.O.C. is.not excempt. See https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3909/stages/20215/amendments/10027478 https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3909/stages/20215/amendmen...
- afiori 8mo ago
  then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK. if you were to sell access to your VPS to others then you would have to do age verifications on them maybe. maybe it is still illegal, IDK, bu likely due to other laws (eg a generic "it is illegal to use workaround for X")
  - afiori 8mo ago
    then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK[0]. if you were to sell access to your VPS to others then you would have to do age verifications on them maybe. [0] maybe it is still illegal, IDK, bu likely due to other laws (eg a generic "it is illegal to use workaround for X")
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    > then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK. Irrelevent. See: must apply the child VPN prohibition to the provider of any relevant VPN service which is, or is likely to be— (i) offered or marketed to *persons in the* United Kingdom; (ii) provided to a significant number of persons
pi3rre 8mo ago
The UK is clearly moving towards pervasive digital monitoring. I’m curious how Mullvad would even comply given their accountless authentication model.
Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
This is very bad news because I have been in contact with low cost providers (lowendtalk) and the community & even they usually end up renting etc. from datacenters and they usually would have name as well So theoretically, suppose I have a vpn company on A) either such lowend niche providers who might support let's say my mission or we are aligned or B) the hyperscalers or large companies. Now I am 99% sure that large companies would actually restrict VPN creation usage (something remarkably rare right now but still it's a gone deal now) And I feel like even with niche lowendbox providers, suppose I am paying 4 euros or something to a provider to get an IP, they are either using hyperscaler themselves (like OVH) or part of a datacenter itself If a server they own in some capacity runs a vps, can it be considered that they are running a vps and they can get sued by the Safety Act too? If not, then what if this happens one layer above at datacenter and now datacenters might have to comply with them I haven't read the article but wtf. Suppose I run a tmate instance (basically allows you to connect one ssh server to another both inside nat), theoretically this is a vpn as well. I was calling out that they might ban vpn's when online safety act came and I realized that theoretically nothing's stopping them technologically to do so. It's a cat and mouse game but they didn't have a legal reason to do it so much. Now... You have it. Is the end of total privacy for UK here? I feel like even privacy oriented VPN's will move out of UK and non privacy oriented (ie. who will accept your id's) will probably have to manage it or use some third party and I am pretty sure that this basically gives govt. even more, they might now look at which IP said something, contact the now compliant VPN and block other truly private, for which user Id used a particular IP at particular time and seek their ID. I don't know how Dystopian UK's gotten but what's stopping a "reasonable cause" or some UK fbi equivalent contacting. I feel like even one or two such extreme case of VPN providers would be enough to scare the whole country into check where if you are UK citizen and you talk against UK online, you will be screwed. Atleast that's the direction I am seeing it heading. Depending on the instance & how many more such dystopian laws UK adds. It's democracy gets really questionable... and I am not sure what it will be replaced by. Both parties are kind of aligned in this from what I can tell. Just raise what "reasonable" suspicion to contact means and abuse any laws or create new dystopian laws but online safety act wasn't okay but VPN's provided a way around it. Now that VPN's themselves are affected. It's kind of gonna wreak havoc imo of any individual privacy. I am worried what this might mean on tor. Since tor can be considered a vpn, so will UK company sue me if I run a tor instance now?
uxhacker 8mo ago
The crazy thing is that you don’t need to show an ID to stay at hotel in the uk, but you will need one to use the internet.
- pfisherman 8mo ago
  Hotels are not platforms. No network effects at play. The idea of ban is to push teen DAUs below the critical mass necessary for self sustaining retention and growth. Sure teens will still figure out a way to access when they really want to, but they won’t be be the same level of peer pressure. I feel like this is the strongest argument in favor of the bans. I am not sure it will be effective or is the most effective way to go about it. I am curious to see the data that comes out of Australia in a few years.
wlkr 8mo ago
I'm very interested to see how some VPN providers react to this. For a zero logs VPN provider, if such a thing can really exist, how big of a problem is this? Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file? Usage remains the same? Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK. Of course, we're sliding quite rapidly down that slippery slope here so I'm sure logging and easier government tracking would be next. The justifications will get weaker and even more lacking in supporting evidence for their implementation.
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  > Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK. Surely they can simply buy that direct ... at least until the Govt. requires ISP to blacklist.
  - fartfeatures 8mo ago
    Sadly if you look at how the law is drafted its setup to catch companies that have a significant UK base not just those that advertise here. It is highly likely for compliance reasons (as we saw with imgur and others) that they will simply block the UK themselves.
- fartfeatures 8mo ago
  There are already solutions that do the double VPN thing for you. For example https://obscura.net https://obscura.net
  - traceroute66 8mo ago
    > For example https://obscura.net https://obscura.net Obscura .... "Terms and the relationship between you and Obscura shall be governed by the laws of the State of New York" Yeah, erm. Now more than ever, trusting a US jurisdiction VPN provider ? No thanks !
    - fartfeatures 8mo ago
unglaublich 8mo ago
What societal "harm" is the UK actually trying to reduce with this age verification? It almost feels like the amount of effort they're putting into this is out of balance with the actual harm.
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  Nothing, the point is that they have a couple of fig leaf reasons while doing what they want to do anyway.
- pjc50 8mo ago
  The stated harms are "adult content", and social media in general (same bill includes a ban on under-16s)
- RansomStark 8mo ago
  political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative. A Labour MP foolish attended a GB News show and when pushed admitted that the Online Safety Act was also about identifying speech by adults [0]. Sorry about the quality of the link, but the video is there (higher quality is available on X) and its not like the paragon of truth that is the BBC reported on this. https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/uk-government-admits-using-online-safety-act-to-monitor-anti-immigration-opinions/ https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/uk-government...
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    > political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative. No, this age verification is not against that.
    - RansomStark 8mo ago
      No, the age verification doesn't, the linking of adult profiles to real human people, which is required to enable the age verification is. Did you watch the linked video? There's an MP admitting they are doing this
Quarrelsome 8mo ago
What I find particularly tragic about all of this legislation (the OSA and now this) is that there are obviously technical people in the room that would advise against this clusterfuck of a direction and they are being ignored by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control. This will continue to push people towards providers who operate outside UK jurisdiction or providers that care less about UK law and are less trustworthy. I remain upset that they do this without building the necessary infra. They already assert identity when applying for a passport (and they do this very well). If they had extended this process by creating a OAuth compliant digital id provider first, then they could have avoided all the problems on the day the OSA dropped. Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting. Instead we have this status quo of encouraging UK citizens to hand over their identity documents to dubious third-parties or shifting their traffic from the UK externally to avoid these checks.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  > by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control You seem to believe they're wrong. Since they're the ones who come up with the laws of the land, I think it's important to realize that they can and do aggressively control access to the internet in their country. It sucks, but it's the reality.
  - Quarrelsome 8mo ago
    > they can and do aggressively control access to the internet yes but this is like watching someone deal with an ant infestation by stamping on them. They're not solving the issue and unlike the ant analogy, they're making the problem worse.
- FrostViper8 8mo ago
  > Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting. The privacy issue would still exist. They can tie your online activity directly to these tokens.
pjc50 8mo ago
Same article also says the bill includes a ban on social media for users under 16, like Australia. Pretty dramatic change. Meanwhile the government and official accounts continue to use X even as they're trying to ban it. Mixed messaging. Lead proponent of the VPN ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nash,_Baron_Nash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nash,_Baron_Nash; he's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Policy_Studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Policy_Studies again, the dead hand of Thatcherism.
- valleyer 8mo ago
  It drives me nuts that local governments in the US continue to use Twitter/X to disseminate communications, despite having perfectly good web sites of their own.
  - nindalf 8mo ago
    Those websites aren't easy to update. I have a website of my own too, and even though I've set it up to be as painless as possible, it's always going to be easier for me to open a social media app and post. Now imagine that the local government has a website that can only be changed by contacting a web developer, who takes 1-2 business days to reply. It might not be as bad as that, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the ballpark.
    - FrostViper8 8mo ago
      Most content websites that are managed by a organisation such as a council/government or are usually driven by some CMS software. Updates are usually done by a content/social media team. These people are also posting the updates to twitter. It isn't the late 90s/2000s anymore where people are uploading HTML files over FTP.
    - wraptile 8mo ago
      If our governments can't update an HTML page same way they update a twitter status then we are all doomed and should just nuke ourselves to get it over with.
sureglymop 8mo ago
How do they define "VPN" in this? If I make a little wireguard mesh and use an aws vm in another country as the exit node for my traffic, would that go under VPN?
iamcalledrob 8mo ago
Where does this end? Turtles all the way down. If VPNs require age verification, then people will shift to running a VPN on a cheap VPS. Probably via a popular single-click setup script. Or people will just get drawn to more seedy providers that do no KYC or have ulterior motives. If I was Russia, I'd consider operating a free VPN or VPS service that MITMs the traffic.
- uh_uh 8mo ago
  There will always be a way out if you are dedicated enough. They "just" want to make it unviable for most of the population.
  - John23832 8mo ago
    That, and then the dedicated stick out like sore thumb.
  - iamcalledrob 8mo ago
    I guess my point here is that the user experience of doing this "DIY" will improve as more people want to do it!
  - u8080 8mo ago
    Then they will simply advocate for state-wide DPI.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
laserbeam 8mo ago
Can we somehow get age verification without IDs? Age verification itself is OK as an idea. I’m happy to show ID to buy alcohol at the store… but the store clerk doesn’t take a photo of that ID and store it in logs somewhere forever. Can we please get a law where kids won’t just take their parents’ IDs and upload them to random places?
- squidbeak 8mo ago
  You might like the Digital ID scheme. It uses Zero Knowledge Proofs, so that one of your 'IDs' could be a simple 'Is over 18' ZKP, without involving your name or anything other detail. These are not tracked by government or possible to associate with your wider identity. This is one of the examples listed in the framework docs. > "Unlike with a physical document, when using a digital identity, you can limit the amount of information you share to only what is necessary. For example, if you are asked to prove you are over 18, you could provide a simple yes or no response and avoid sharing any other personal details." (from https://www.gov.uk/guidance/digital-identity https://www.gov.uk/guidance/digital-identity ) There's a huge amount of disinformation circulating about the digital ID scheme, and the government's messaging over it has been catastrophically clumsy. Which is a pity, because the system has clearly been designed with civil liberties in mind (ie defensively) and for citizens it's a serious improvement over the current system.
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    > if you are asked to prove you are over 18, you could provide a simple yes or no response and avoid sharing any other personal details I can't imagine how that would operate, esp. given we're told this ID will not be a digital ID card you can "show".
    - squidbeak 8mo ago
      It's an app, and data is submitted with a tap to approve. The data is just attribute / proof pairs (eg nationality:British / true), and the bundles assembled from these pairs will differ between use cases. Nightclub proof of age would just need the 'over 18' proof, while opening a bank account would need a photo, name, address, date of birth, nationality etc. In other words, there isn't a single Digital ID. The 'ID' is just a container for a specific use. They can be reused, but they will often be single purpose or generated from the attributes saved in your wallet the moment a service requests your data. The best way to think of this is that it gives you a way to pass on your citizen data with authority, and without having to overshare.
throw__away7391 8mo ago
Every government in the world right now wants to get their hands on the controls and put their thumb on the scales here. Modern social media has proven to be effectively remote control for their citizens, nothing like this kind of power has never existed before and is absolutely irresistible to politicians. Expect them all to be laser focused on this until they're able to seize complete control, no matter how long it takes or how roundabout the path to this is.
- pnut 8mo ago
  Counterpoint - Governments are attempting to wrest political control away from coordinated global corporate fascists.
  - pjc50 8mo ago
    Yes and no - you need to check whether each individual politician, not just party, is taking money from said global corporates, because they have a lot of money and UK politicians are cheap. Not to mention the opaque mess that's Reform UK financing.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - FrostViper8 8mo ago
    The "coordinated corporate fascists" (your words not mine) are providing a platform where I can challenge the the state and be seen by potentially millions of people.
  - iamnothere 8mo ago
    Many of these governments are directly funded and directed by said corporate fascists. The opposition is hardly much better. There’s no good guys at the state level here.
ed_blackburn 8mo ago
I think we need to accept that age verification makes the internet safer. What we cannot accept is age verification's use as a mechanism to pry too far into peoples lives. When we can separate age verification from who am I, most people will be happier. What's tricky is who validates age? Your ISP? Your government? Your OS? A thirty party? Who accredits third-parties, and can you trust them? I'm convinced there's a way to solve this do we can keep the internet safe and not intrude massively on peoples privacy.
- bjackman 8mo ago
  I don't think it's possible? You could imagine some sort of certificate scheme where the govt issues a thing that says to a 3rd party "we certify this person is 18 but in a way that doesn't reveal who they are". You could also implement that in a way where, even if the 3rd party reports the details of an authorisation to the govt, the govt can't say who was involved in that auth. But in the latter case, the system is wildly open to abuse coz nobody can detect if every teenager in the country is using Auth Georg's cert. The only way for that to be possible is if the tokens let you psuedonymise Georg at which point it's no longer private. The answer is to leave this shit to parents. It's not the government's job. It's not the government's business.
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    > The answer is to leave this shit to parents. See Australia. Many parents helped their children evade the ban. https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/04/social-media-ban-parents-help-teens/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/04/social-media-ban-parent...
    - iamnothere 8mo ago
      That should be the parent’s choice, no?
      - chrisjj 8mo ago
        That's what got us in to the current public health emergency. It is a luxury we cannot afford if we are to stand a chance to get out. https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s125 https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s125
bilekas 8mo ago
Privacy has an age rating now ? Seems a little ironic forcing anyone under 18 away from being able to have extra layers of privacy and in some cases security online.
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  > Privacy has an age rating now ? It always did. https://www.keygreer.net/family-law-faqs/what-rights-do-children-have/ https://www.keygreer.net/family-law-faqs/what-rights-do-chil...
giacomoforte 8mo ago
Are there any remaining western countries with strong free speech protections? UK and Germany weren't ever good in this department but now worst than ever. US supposedly good but I wouldn't risk it in practice. Australia I hear is also quite bad. Canada and NZ I don't know. I expect Denmark and Sweden to have somewhat weak free speech laws too. Norway and Finland I expect to be good. France I expect to be just slightly better than Germany. Netherlands and Switzerland, I have no idea. Czech Republic I think has strong protections. Italy and Spain and Ireland, I heard mixed reports about. Poland, Greece, Slovenia, Portugal and other unnamed countries I don't know at all.
- notTooFarGone 8mo ago
  How is age verification and free speech in any case related? You can solve the problem of age verification without limiting your free speech right. Those two get entangled all the time and it does not make sense.
  - FrostViper8 8mo ago
    If your ID is tied to your anonymous identity this creates a chilling effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
  - anonymous908213 8mo ago
    Non-anonymous free speech is a bit of a red herring. If you say something publicly, especially in this era of mass data, you are perpetually liable to be punished for it at some point in the future. If not by the current government, potentially another. Virtually every country in the world has experienced authoritarianism at one point or another, and there is never a guarantee that it won't again. Saying something publicly tied to your identity is signing up to be imprisoned when an authoritarian who doesn't like what you said seizes power. We have many historical examples of dictators rounding up and executing wide classes of people, so we know this threat model is more than just a hypothetical but rather something that can and does realistically happen at various times and places. Therefore, in practice, anonymity is the only way to safely express oneself in public. Privacy is the true bastion of the freedom of ideas. This is naturally lost when the means to communicate privately are stripped from us, when every word we've ever said is recorded and tied to our identity. Age verification could possibly theoretically be implemented in a way that does not immediately infringe upon privacy, but you surely know that there is no world in which it will ever be implemented in such a way.
Havoc 8mo ago
Email your MP if you’re in the uk https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP
moritonal 8mo ago
I don't get why the device changes the blame logic. If child-services knew a parent was constantly watching/leaving around adult-content near children, that'd be considered the parents fault. If a parent lets a kid watch anything they want on TV and the kid watches adult content, it's the parents fault. But if the parent gives the child a phone, and doesn't manage what apps they use or content they watch, now it's the companies fault?
- simion314 8mo ago
  Does big tech help the parents? Can I set the age of the child in the phone user account and then the browser will report the age to the websites and the nice websites will aknowledge it and deny minors to watch adult content? No big tech and browser makers did not put their hurds of developers to handle this and forced the governments to try more retarded solutions. This big OSes should have a super easy activation procedure where a parent will enter the birthday of the account user and then the tech should do the magic,/ What are the current solutions for Android and iOS? To buy some apps and give them root permissions and they will filter out webpages or block entire domains ?
  - lemoncookiechip 8mo ago
    You can block the entire internet and whitelist specific domains. There's multiple ways of doing this, from router parental controls, specific OS tools in iOS/Android, Windows, as well as apps specific to it, and all it takes is for a parent to care enough to make a simple Google or Youtube search and learn if they don't know, and don't even know to know that they should care in the first place. The failure here is two-sided. One and the most glaring are the parents who let devices raise their children, this hasn't changed since before home computers were a thing. Secondly it's a failure of the state for not educating both adults and teenagers on best practices when using online platforms to be safe. If they're interested enough in policing people's web habits, they can spend time and resources on educating the masses. The best time to start doing it was 20 years ago, the second best is now and it could take a decade plus for it to have a meaningful impact. Also this is important. The UK, like it or not, is a nanny state. They like to use child safety as an excuse to police adult habits, and more important their speech. There's quite a few times they've admitted to this plainly without any ambiguity. "The Online Safety Act 2023 (the Act) is a new set of laws that protects children and adults online" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act... There's also examples of them being asked directly in interviews and they admit to wanting to police adults speech and content they consume online. Australia is in a similar predicament and honestly most of the world is rolling towards this, just not as fast as the UK. The UK unfortunately has incarcerated people for simply lifting cardboard signs saying Free Palestine. They've jailed people for innocuous social media posts on Facebook and other platforms. I'm not proud of the USA for a lot of reasons, especially lately, but one thing that any and all Americans should be proud of is their Freedom of Speech protected by the First Amendment, it's the most American thing and one of the best aspects of America that other countries should aspire to, and I hope that the jabs Freedom of Speech has taken over the past decade doesn't make it crumble away.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
pieshop 8mo ago
Amendment 92 of the bill, added by Lord Nash during it's passage through the Lords says: > “consumer” means a person acting otherwise than in the course of a business; > “relevant VPN service” means a service of providing, in the course of a business, to a consumer, a virtual private network for accessing the internet; It's quite specific wording for a piece of legislation, just VPNs. It excludes businesses but, as written, it wouldn't include network proxies, or remote desktop protocols, or TOR, or web/mobile applications that fetch pages for you, any of which could be used to circumvent the bill. The slippery slope argument could be made that those things would have to be added for this bill to have any meaningful impact, and that would require the amendment to be written in a very non-specific way. I'm not hopeful that the Government would recognise that as overreach (ignoring that the amendment already is).
fmajid 8mo ago
The UK usually ties with Australia for the industrialized country vying to be the greatest enemy of the Internet.
hiprob 8mo ago
Does the house of lords really do anything, though? At best, they can delay decisions, but what power do they really have? Aren't they just a bunch of rich people funded with taxes doing basically nothing?
Certified 8mo ago
This would force everyone using a VPN to submit ID verification in one fell swoop
Bender 8mo ago
OpenSSH, Tinc, Wireguard and a myriad of other open source tools can also be used as a VPN. One only need a place to connect to and egress from. To me that means VPS/Server providers will also need to do age verification. Most VPS/Server providers also allow configuring reverse DNS. That leaves only CIDR blocks as a way to tell it is not residential. One could also egress from residential elsewhere assuming the friend has spare bandwidth that could be balanced and capped using sch_cake.
cedws 8mo ago
The government isn't doing any favours for its image by simulatenously trying to ban X, and introducing all of these internet controls. It just fuels the narrative that the government is trying to shut people up and control the spread of certain ideas. Then when you add in that weird "education" game they paid for, Pathways[0], it feels like a very coordinated effort. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/25/ai-generated-british-schoolgirl-becomes-far-right-social-media-meme https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/25/ai-generate...
Palmik 8mo ago
Is there yet a low friction way to verify age of UK users that doesn't rely on third party services with questionable privacy implications and exorbitant pricing? I wonder if any of the law makers are investors in those companies.
- dmantis 8mo ago
  Questionable privacy implications are the feature, not the bug. Surely three-letter agencies, "unknown creators" of chatcontrol proposals in the EU and other state psychopaths care very much about the children! No, they don't. Mass surveillance and the leverage coming from that is the goal itself.

160 points by ubercow13 8mo ago

They REALLY want people to become more tech-savvy and to learn how to create their own VPNs using cheap VMs instances from __INSERT_CLOUD_PROVIDER_HERE__, don't they?

hexbin010 8mo ago
How many cloud providers accept fully anonymous cash payments?

crest 8mo ago

Has anyone told them teens would create accounts with foreign VPN services?

chrisjj 8mo ago
IP blacklisting will follow.
- iamnothere 8mo ago
  Just use Tor. And if they try to block that, use Snowflake bridges or v2ray like people in other censorious hellholes. Make them shut it all down like Iran and show who they really are.
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    > Make them shut it all down like Iran They are certainly providing an opportunity for those who would like to inflict that.

londons_explore 8mo ago

So will openvpn now get a new command line argument '--passport-number-for-age-verification 8371652299'? And presumably also a '--webcam-to-use-for-identity'

embedding-shape 8mo ago
Yeah, if you're unable to read, I understand reaching such conclusion :) But no, this is about platforms/services: > Amendment 92 (“Action to Prohibit the Provision of VPN Services to Children in the United Kingdom”) requires VPNs that are “offered or marketed to persons in the United Kingdom” or “provided to a significant number of persons” to implement age assurance for UK users.
- londons_explore 8mo ago
  But if openvpn clients want to connect to those servers?
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    If those services are provided by a company that “offered or marketed to persons in the United Kingdom” or “provided to a significant number of persons”, then they need to implement those checks. Still outside of openvpn, and still outside of general servers, you can still spin up your own server and use that, without any age checks, as you're not offering any service. The host who lets you spin up the server might also need to implement those age checks though. But still, not openvpn.
    - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
      So effectively truly Private vpn providers have to have an exit from UK. I mean even if say proton says that its not meant for UK but "substantial" people use protonvpn because its private, then they would be forced for the same laws. Another point is what prevents UK govt or UK bots to sign up for Proton Vpn say themselves and the difference between bots and humans is becoming thin especially for such Private Vpn's and then UK govt comes again knocking asking for age verification. Honestly makes me feel like UK citizens are hostage in their own countries & we might see more UK IP's being blocked from accessing services because the idea of Virtual private network is still vague in my opinion. One can abstract a sort of VPN on top of xmpp or matrix servers too or even telegram as the intermediate. Would that mean that UK govt would come knocking onto these asking for who created the VPN (suppose I built a VPN which uses telegram to send messages/packets or uses telegram infra, so would they come to telegram asking what is the IP/detail info of my telegram user, would they go to signal or xmpp or matrix providers too? What if I use a provider who colo's on a datacenter and they go to the datacenter asking for access or the company behind datacenter I am not saying that they would for something so niche but the fact of the matter is that nothing's stopping them from the laws from what I can gather. They would only have to do it once to instill fear in the masses. I mean technically just this law has instilled fear and I am not even a UK citizen Someone familiar with UK law please comment on my message but VPN is such a vague term imo. Like at this point you are just targeting private networks or people who meet online in private VPNs LITERALLY means Virtual "PRIVATE NETWORKS" What gives the govt right to intercept between two parties communicating in any way (enforcing a condition for one party to have Id of other for age verification etc.)

alexmorley 8mo ago

Not made clear in this article - this bill will be passed back to the House of Commons to debate/amend before going back to the House of Lords. This was not the final say.

cbeach 8mo ago
The Commons are even more hungry for pervasive online surveillance than the Lords - at least, while Labour and the Tories are in power. Reform UK (the party currently leading in the polls by a large margin) is the only party that loudly opposed the draconian measures within the Online Safety Act and promise to repeal it
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- hexbin010 8mo ago
  Of course Rusform UK promise to repeal it - they want Russian trolls to have as much unfettered access to the British public as possible
  - u8080 8mo ago
    Makes me giggle as Russian citizen since very similar rhetoric was used when establishing internet censorship in RU - let's protect our citizens from evil foreign entities from the internet.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]

jimnotgym 8mo ago

Just for clarification. House of Lords amendments do not have to be accepted by the House of Commons and may not make it into law. If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know. You can ask for an appointment with your MP. You can ask for an appointment with ministers. Better still you can form an advocacy group and lobby.

graemep 8mo ago
No, but it does mean that MP's have to make a positive decision to reject it, the proponents of the amendments (who are well financed) will claim anyone who opposes the amendment is pro-pedophile (as happened with the online safety act) which makes it hard to reject. To stop it now we need a majority of MPs who are willing to take a political risk to reject it.
- FrostViper8 8mo ago
  > To stop it now we need a majority of MPs who are willing to take a political risk to reject it. Which isn't going to happen.
FrostViper8 8mo ago
> If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know. It is an utter waste of time. MPs already know about the concerns. They don't care. I wrote to my MP about many of these concerns in the past. You either get ignored, told you are enabling pedos, told there will be protections put in place (ignoring the whole point is that I don't trust the government), or you get a boilerplate reply. Moreover The vast majority of people (unfortunately this includes people in my own family) have been propagandised to agree with all iffy censorship, monitoring and other spooky nonsense the UK state engages with.
aranw 8mo ago
I've written to my MP several times about this. Each response just repeats the same talking points about safety whilst completely missing the underlying technical issues and consequences.

thefz 8mo ago

What if I rent a cheap VPS overseas and wireguard my traffic to that?

embedding-shape 8mo ago
As long as you don't offer it for others in exchange for money, it isn't a service and not what's covered here.
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  Untrue. F.O.C. is.not excempt. See https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3909/stages/20215/amendments/10027478 https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3909/stages/20215/amendmen...
afiori 8mo ago
then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK. if you were to sell access to your VPS to others then you would have to do age verifications on them maybe. maybe it is still illegal, IDK, bu likely due to other laws (eg a generic "it is illegal to use workaround for X")
- afiori 8mo ago
  then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK[0]. if you were to sell access to your VPS to others then you would have to do age verifications on them maybe. [0] maybe it is still illegal, IDK, bu likely due to other laws (eg a generic "it is illegal to use workaround for X")
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  > then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK. Irrelevent. See: must apply the child VPN prohibition to the provider of any relevant VPN service which is, or is likely to be— (i) offered or marketed to *persons in the* United Kingdom; (ii) provided to a significant number of persons

pi3rre 8mo ago

The UK is clearly moving towards pervasive digital monitoring. I’m curious how Mullvad would even comply given their accountless authentication model.

Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago

This is very bad news because I have been in contact with low cost providers (lowendtalk) and the community & even they usually end up renting etc. from datacenters and they usually would have name as well So theoretically, suppose I have a vpn company on A) either such lowend niche providers who might support let's say my mission or we are aligned or B) the hyperscalers or large companies. Now I am 99% sure that large companies would actually restrict VPN creation usage (something remarkably rare right now but still it's a gone deal now) And I feel like even with niche lowendbox providers, suppose I am paying 4 euros or something to a provider to get an IP, they are either using hyperscaler themselves (like OVH) or part of a datacenter itself If a server they own in some capacity runs a vps, can it be considered that they are running a vps and they can get sued by the Safety Act too? If not, then what if this happens one layer above at datacenter and now datacenters might have to comply with them I haven't read the article but wtf. Suppose I run a tmate instance (basically allows you to connect one ssh server to another both inside nat), theoretically this is a vpn as well. I was calling out that they might ban vpn's when online safety act came and I realized that theoretically nothing's stopping them technologically to do so. It's a cat and mouse game but they didn't have a legal reason to do it so much. Now... You have it. Is the end of total privacy for UK here? I feel like even privacy oriented VPN's will move out of UK and non privacy oriented (ie. who will accept your id's) will probably have to manage it or use some third party and I am pretty sure that this basically gives govt. even more, they might now look at which IP said something, contact the now compliant VPN and block other truly private, for which user Id used a particular IP at particular time and seek their ID. I don't know how Dystopian UK's gotten but what's stopping a "reasonable cause" or some UK fbi equivalent contacting. I feel like even one or two such extreme case of VPN providers would be enough to scare the whole country into check where if you are UK citizen and you talk against UK online, you will be screwed. Atleast that's the direction I am seeing it heading. Depending on the instance & how many more such dystopian laws UK adds. It's democracy gets really questionable... and I am not sure what it will be replaced by. Both parties are kind of aligned in this from what I can tell. Just raise what "reasonable" suspicion to contact means and abuse any laws or create new dystopian laws but online safety act wasn't okay but VPN's provided a way around it. Now that VPN's themselves are affected. It's kind of gonna wreak havoc imo of any individual privacy. I am worried what this might mean on tor. Since tor can be considered a vpn, so will UK company sue me if I run a tor instance now?

uxhacker 8mo ago

The crazy thing is that you don’t need to show an ID to stay at hotel in the uk, but you will need one to use the internet.

pfisherman 8mo ago
Hotels are not platforms. No network effects at play. The idea of ban is to push teen DAUs below the critical mass necessary for self sustaining retention and growth. Sure teens will still figure out a way to access when they really want to, but they won’t be be the same level of peer pressure. I feel like this is the strongest argument in favor of the bans. I am not sure it will be effective or is the most effective way to go about it. I am curious to see the data that comes out of Australia in a few years.

wlkr 8mo ago

I'm very interested to see how some VPN providers react to this. For a zero logs VPN provider, if such a thing can really exist, how big of a problem is this? Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file? Usage remains the same? Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK. Of course, we're sliding quite rapidly down that slippery slope here so I'm sure logging and easier government tracking would be next. The justifications will get weaker and even more lacking in supporting evidence for their implementation.

chrisjj 8mo ago
> Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK. Surely they can simply buy that direct ... at least until the Govt. requires ISP to blacklist.
- fartfeatures 8mo ago
  Sadly if you look at how the law is drafted its setup to catch companies that have a significant UK base not just those that advertise here. It is highly likely for compliance reasons (as we saw with imgur and others) that they will simply block the UK themselves.
fartfeatures 8mo ago
There are already solutions that do the double VPN thing for you. For example https://obscura.net https://obscura.net
- traceroute66 8mo ago
  > For example https://obscura.net https://obscura.net Obscura .... "Terms and the relationship between you and Obscura shall be governed by the laws of the State of New York" Yeah, erm. Now more than ever, trusting a US jurisdiction VPN provider ? No thanks !
  - fartfeatures 8mo ago

unglaublich 8mo ago

What societal "harm" is the UK actually trying to reduce with this age verification? It almost feels like the amount of effort they're putting into this is out of balance with the actual harm.

jacquesm 8mo ago
Nothing, the point is that they have a couple of fig leaf reasons while doing what they want to do anyway.
pjc50 8mo ago
The stated harms are "adult content", and social media in general (same bill includes a ban on under-16s)
RansomStark 8mo ago
political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative. A Labour MP foolish attended a GB News show and when pushed admitted that the Online Safety Act was also about identifying speech by adults [0]. Sorry about the quality of the link, but the video is there (higher quality is available on X) and its not like the paragon of truth that is the BBC reported on this. https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/uk-government-admits-using-online-safety-act-to-monitor-anti-immigration-opinions/ https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/uk-government...
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  > political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative. No, this age verification is not against that.
  - RansomStark 8mo ago
    No, the age verification doesn't, the linking of adult profiles to real human people, which is required to enable the age verification is. Did you watch the linked video? There's an MP admitting they are doing this

Quarrelsome 8mo ago

What I find particularly tragic about all of this legislation (the OSA and now this) is that there are obviously technical people in the room that would advise against this clusterfuck of a direction and they are being ignored by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control. This will continue to push people towards providers who operate outside UK jurisdiction or providers that care less about UK law and are less trustworthy. I remain upset that they do this without building the necessary infra. They already assert identity when applying for a passport (and they do this very well). If they had extended this process by creating a OAuth compliant digital id provider first, then they could have avoided all the problems on the day the OSA dropped. Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting. Instead we have this status quo of encouraging UK citizens to hand over their identity documents to dubious third-parties or shifting their traffic from the UK externally to avoid these checks.

embedding-shape 8mo ago
> by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control You seem to believe they're wrong. Since they're the ones who come up with the laws of the land, I think it's important to realize that they can and do aggressively control access to the internet in their country. It sucks, but it's the reality.
- Quarrelsome 8mo ago
  > they can and do aggressively control access to the internet yes but this is like watching someone deal with an ant infestation by stamping on them. They're not solving the issue and unlike the ant analogy, they're making the problem worse.
FrostViper8 8mo ago
> Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting. The privacy issue would still exist. They can tie your online activity directly to these tokens.

pjc50 8mo ago

Same article also says the bill includes a ban on social media for users under 16, like Australia. Pretty dramatic change. Meanwhile the government and official accounts continue to use X even as they're trying to ban it. Mixed messaging. Lead proponent of the VPN ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nash,_Baron_Nash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nash,_Baron_Nash; he's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Policy_Studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Policy_Studies again, the dead hand of Thatcherism.

valleyer 8mo ago
It drives me nuts that local governments in the US continue to use Twitter/X to disseminate communications, despite having perfectly good web sites of their own.
- nindalf 8mo ago
  Those websites aren't easy to update. I have a website of my own too, and even though I've set it up to be as painless as possible, it's always going to be easier for me to open a social media app and post. Now imagine that the local government has a website that can only be changed by contacting a web developer, who takes 1-2 business days to reply. It might not be as bad as that, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the ballpark.
  - FrostViper8 8mo ago
    Most content websites that are managed by a organisation such as a council/government or are usually driven by some CMS software. Updates are usually done by a content/social media team. These people are also posting the updates to twitter. It isn't the late 90s/2000s anymore where people are uploading HTML files over FTP.
  - wraptile 8mo ago
    If our governments can't update an HTML page same way they update a twitter status then we are all doomed and should just nuke ourselves to get it over with.

sureglymop 8mo ago

How do they define "VPN" in this? If I make a little wireguard mesh and use an aws vm in another country as the exit node for my traffic, would that go under VPN?

iamcalledrob 8mo ago

Where does this end? Turtles all the way down. If VPNs require age verification, then people will shift to running a VPN on a cheap VPS. Probably via a popular single-click setup script. Or people will just get drawn to more seedy providers that do no KYC or have ulterior motives. If I was Russia, I'd consider operating a free VPN or VPS service that MITMs the traffic.

uh_uh 8mo ago
There will always be a way out if you are dedicated enough. They "just" want to make it unviable for most of the population.
- John23832 8mo ago
  That, and then the dedicated stick out like sore thumb.
- iamcalledrob 8mo ago
  I guess my point here is that the user experience of doing this "DIY" will improve as more people want to do it!
- u8080 8mo ago
  Then they will simply advocate for state-wide DPI.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

laserbeam 8mo ago

Can we somehow get age verification without IDs? Age verification itself is OK as an idea. I’m happy to show ID to buy alcohol at the store… but the store clerk doesn’t take a photo of that ID and store it in logs somewhere forever. Can we please get a law where kids won’t just take their parents’ IDs and upload them to random places?

squidbeak 8mo ago
You might like the Digital ID scheme. It uses Zero Knowledge Proofs, so that one of your 'IDs' could be a simple 'Is over 18' ZKP, without involving your name or anything other detail. These are not tracked by government or possible to associate with your wider identity. This is one of the examples listed in the framework docs. > "Unlike with a physical document, when using a digital identity, you can limit the amount of information you share to only what is necessary. For example, if you are asked to prove you are over 18, you could provide a simple yes or no response and avoid sharing any other personal details." (from https://www.gov.uk/guidance/digital-identity https://www.gov.uk/guidance/digital-identity ) There's a huge amount of disinformation circulating about the digital ID scheme, and the government's messaging over it has been catastrophically clumsy. Which is a pity, because the system has clearly been designed with civil liberties in mind (ie defensively) and for citizens it's a serious improvement over the current system.
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  > if you are asked to prove you are over 18, you could provide a simple yes or no response and avoid sharing any other personal details I can't imagine how that would operate, esp. given we're told this ID will not be a digital ID card you can "show".
  - squidbeak 8mo ago
    It's an app, and data is submitted with a tap to approve. The data is just attribute / proof pairs (eg nationality:British / true), and the bundles assembled from these pairs will differ between use cases. Nightclub proof of age would just need the 'over 18' proof, while opening a bank account would need a photo, name, address, date of birth, nationality etc. In other words, there isn't a single Digital ID. The 'ID' is just a container for a specific use. They can be reused, but they will often be single purpose or generated from the attributes saved in your wallet the moment a service requests your data. The best way to think of this is that it gives you a way to pass on your citizen data with authority, and without having to overshare.

throw__away7391 8mo ago

Every government in the world right now wants to get their hands on the controls and put their thumb on the scales here. Modern social media has proven to be effectively remote control for their citizens, nothing like this kind of power has never existed before and is absolutely irresistible to politicians. Expect them all to be laser focused on this until they're able to seize complete control, no matter how long it takes or how roundabout the path to this is.

pnut 8mo ago
Counterpoint - Governments are attempting to wrest political control away from coordinated global corporate fascists.
- pjc50 8mo ago
  Yes and no - you need to check whether each individual politician, not just party, is taking money from said global corporates, because they have a lot of money and UK politicians are cheap. Not to mention the opaque mess that's Reform UK financing.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- FrostViper8 8mo ago
  The "coordinated corporate fascists" (your words not mine) are providing a platform where I can challenge the the state and be seen by potentially millions of people.
- iamnothere 8mo ago
  Many of these governments are directly funded and directed by said corporate fascists. The opposition is hardly much better. There’s no good guys at the state level here.

ed_blackburn 8mo ago

I think we need to accept that age verification makes the internet safer. What we cannot accept is age verification's use as a mechanism to pry too far into peoples lives. When we can separate age verification from who am I, most people will be happier. What's tricky is who validates age? Your ISP? Your government? Your OS? A thirty party? Who accredits third-parties, and can you trust them? I'm convinced there's a way to solve this do we can keep the internet safe and not intrude massively on peoples privacy.

bjackman 8mo ago
I don't think it's possible? You could imagine some sort of certificate scheme where the govt issues a thing that says to a 3rd party "we certify this person is 18 but in a way that doesn't reveal who they are". You could also implement that in a way where, even if the 3rd party reports the details of an authorisation to the govt, the govt can't say who was involved in that auth. But in the latter case, the system is wildly open to abuse coz nobody can detect if every teenager in the country is using Auth Georg's cert. The only way for that to be possible is if the tokens let you psuedonymise Georg at which point it's no longer private. The answer is to leave this shit to parents. It's not the government's job. It's not the government's business.
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  > The answer is to leave this shit to parents. See Australia. Many parents helped their children evade the ban. https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/04/social-media-ban-parents-help-teens/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/04/social-media-ban-parent...
  - iamnothere 8mo ago
    That should be the parent’s choice, no?
    - chrisjj 8mo ago
      That's what got us in to the current public health emergency. It is a luxury we cannot afford if we are to stand a chance to get out. https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s125 https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s125

bilekas 8mo ago

Privacy has an age rating now ? Seems a little ironic forcing anyone under 18 away from being able to have extra layers of privacy and in some cases security online.

chrisjj 8mo ago
> Privacy has an age rating now ? It always did. https://www.keygreer.net/family-law-faqs/what-rights-do-children-have/ https://www.keygreer.net/family-law-faqs/what-rights-do-chil...

giacomoforte 8mo ago

Are there any remaining western countries with strong free speech protections? UK and Germany weren't ever good in this department but now worst than ever. US supposedly good but I wouldn't risk it in practice. Australia I hear is also quite bad. Canada and NZ I don't know. I expect Denmark and Sweden to have somewhat weak free speech laws too. Norway and Finland I expect to be good. France I expect to be just slightly better than Germany. Netherlands and Switzerland, I have no idea. Czech Republic I think has strong protections. Italy and Spain and Ireland, I heard mixed reports about. Poland, Greece, Slovenia, Portugal and other unnamed countries I don't know at all.

notTooFarGone 8mo ago
How is age verification and free speech in any case related? You can solve the problem of age verification without limiting your free speech right. Those two get entangled all the time and it does not make sense.
- FrostViper8 8mo ago
  If your ID is tied to your anonymous identity this creates a chilling effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
- anonymous908213 8mo ago
  Non-anonymous free speech is a bit of a red herring. If you say something publicly, especially in this era of mass data, you are perpetually liable to be punished for it at some point in the future. If not by the current government, potentially another. Virtually every country in the world has experienced authoritarianism at one point or another, and there is never a guarantee that it won't again. Saying something publicly tied to your identity is signing up to be imprisoned when an authoritarian who doesn't like what you said seizes power. We have many historical examples of dictators rounding up and executing wide classes of people, so we know this threat model is more than just a hypothetical but rather something that can and does realistically happen at various times and places. Therefore, in practice, anonymity is the only way to safely express oneself in public. Privacy is the true bastion of the freedom of ideas. This is naturally lost when the means to communicate privately are stripped from us, when every word we've ever said is recorded and tied to our identity. Age verification could possibly theoretically be implemented in a way that does not immediately infringe upon privacy, but you surely know that there is no world in which it will ever be implemented in such a way.

Havoc 8mo ago

Email your MP if you’re in the uk https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP

moritonal 8mo ago

I don't get why the device changes the blame logic. If child-services knew a parent was constantly watching/leaving around adult-content near children, that'd be considered the parents fault. If a parent lets a kid watch anything they want on TV and the kid watches adult content, it's the parents fault. But if the parent gives the child a phone, and doesn't manage what apps they use or content they watch, now it's the companies fault?

simion314 8mo ago
Does big tech help the parents? Can I set the age of the child in the phone user account and then the browser will report the age to the websites and the nice websites will aknowledge it and deny minors to watch adult content? No big tech and browser makers did not put their hurds of developers to handle this and forced the governments to try more retarded solutions. This big OSes should have a super easy activation procedure where a parent will enter the birthday of the account user and then the tech should do the magic,/ What are the current solutions for Android and iOS? To buy some apps and give them root permissions and they will filter out webpages or block entire domains ?
- lemoncookiechip 8mo ago
  You can block the entire internet and whitelist specific domains. There's multiple ways of doing this, from router parental controls, specific OS tools in iOS/Android, Windows, as well as apps specific to it, and all it takes is for a parent to care enough to make a simple Google or Youtube search and learn if they don't know, and don't even know to know that they should care in the first place. The failure here is two-sided. One and the most glaring are the parents who let devices raise their children, this hasn't changed since before home computers were a thing. Secondly it's a failure of the state for not educating both adults and teenagers on best practices when using online platforms to be safe. If they're interested enough in policing people's web habits, they can spend time and resources on educating the masses. The best time to start doing it was 20 years ago, the second best is now and it could take a decade plus for it to have a meaningful impact. Also this is important. The UK, like it or not, is a nanny state. They like to use child safety as an excuse to police adult habits, and more important their speech. There's quite a few times they've admitted to this plainly without any ambiguity. "The Online Safety Act 2023 (the Act) is a new set of laws that protects children and adults online" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act... There's also examples of them being asked directly in interviews and they admit to wanting to police adults speech and content they consume online. Australia is in a similar predicament and honestly most of the world is rolling towards this, just not as fast as the UK. The UK unfortunately has incarcerated people for simply lifting cardboard signs saying Free Palestine. They've jailed people for innocuous social media posts on Facebook and other platforms. I'm not proud of the USA for a lot of reasons, especially lately, but one thing that any and all Americans should be proud of is their Freedom of Speech protected by the First Amendment, it's the most American thing and one of the best aspects of America that other countries should aspire to, and I hope that the jabs Freedom of Speech has taken over the past decade doesn't make it crumble away.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

pieshop 8mo ago

Amendment 92 of the bill, added by Lord Nash during it's passage through the Lords says: > “consumer” means a person acting otherwise than in the course of a business; > “relevant VPN service” means a service of providing, in the course of a business, to a consumer, a virtual private network for accessing the internet; It's quite specific wording for a piece of legislation, just VPNs. It excludes businesses but, as written, it wouldn't include network proxies, or remote desktop protocols, or TOR, or web/mobile applications that fetch pages for you, any of which could be used to circumvent the bill. The slippery slope argument could be made that those things would have to be added for this bill to have any meaningful impact, and that would require the amendment to be written in a very non-specific way. I'm not hopeful that the Government would recognise that as overreach (ignoring that the amendment already is).

fmajid 8mo ago

The UK usually ties with Australia for the industrialized country vying to be the greatest enemy of the Internet.

hiprob 8mo ago

Does the house of lords really do anything, though? At best, they can delay decisions, but what power do they really have? Aren't they just a bunch of rich people funded with taxes doing basically nothing?

Certified 8mo ago

This would force everyone using a VPN to submit ID verification in one fell swoop

Bender 8mo ago

OpenSSH, Tinc, Wireguard and a myriad of other open source tools can also be used as a VPN. One only need a place to connect to and egress from. To me that means VPS/Server providers will also need to do age verification. Most VPS/Server providers also allow configuring reverse DNS. That leaves only CIDR blocks as a way to tell it is not residential. One could also egress from residential elsewhere assuming the friend has spare bandwidth that could be balanced and capped using sch_cake.

cedws 8mo ago

The government isn't doing any favours for its image by simulatenously trying to ban X, and introducing all of these internet controls. It just fuels the narrative that the government is trying to shut people up and control the spread of certain ideas. Then when you add in that weird "education" game they paid for, Pathways[0], it feels like a very coordinated effort. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/25/ai-generated-british-schoolgirl-becomes-far-right-social-media-meme https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/25/ai-generate...

Palmik 8mo ago

Is there yet a low friction way to verify age of UK users that doesn't rely on third party services with questionable privacy implications and exorbitant pricing? I wonder if any of the law makers are investors in those companies.

dmantis 8mo ago
Questionable privacy implications are the feature, not the bug. Surely three-letter agencies, "unknown creators" of chatcontrol proposals in the EU and other state psychopaths care very much about the children! No, they don't. Mass surveillance and the leverage coming from that is the goal itself.