Now, seeing many European governments tirelessly push for these new measures to protect the children, I'm pretty sure that the children are finally going to be safe online.
On mobile a VPN isn't always effective in avoid geoblocks. Some apps are able to determine I'm in the UK and still ask for ID - reddit is one for example, if you stumble on to an adult subreddit. Using the web interface avoids this.
The UK has also moved to force ISPs to block certain bittorrent search engines.
The UK is not shy when it comes to invading your privacy or censoring the Internet.
Ah, yes, the existing research doesn't agree with our biases, so let's fund new "research" that does.
Just for one example; it would be trivial for Apple and Google to put age estimation on my phone, verify it on opening the web browser and provide a zero-knowledge proof of age to websites in a way that does not reveal my identity. All the infrastructure is already there, and it's relatively trivial to turn it on. The downside is that this will only work for people who are older than about 25 because of the uncertainty of face-to-age recognition, but it would be a start.
Another way to do it is for my bank, who know my age already, providing a similar credential that I can feed into the zero-knowledge proof engine on the phone.
This was all done properly for the covid tracking apps, at a time when the phone providers actually wanted to do tracking with anonymity - this is a similar problem, and it's easily cracked by technical means.
And you don't even need zero knowledge proofs if you perform on-device content detection - turn it on for kids, keep it off for adults. Modern phones have more than enough TPU capacity to do this.
But none of the actual implementations I've seen are truly anonymizing, and they all rely on trusting some really dodgy companies with your identity and browsing habits. Yes, the more respectable ones have security and privacy policies that are audited, but will they always? The cynical answer is "no", because history shows that someone will always do something sooner or later if (a) it makes money, and (b) they can get away with it.
Everything I see suggests that the desire for mass surveillance is the driver, and the "protect the children" front on this is a strategem by the people who are really driving this from behind the curtain. There are huge amounts of money to be made by capturing verifiable, blackmailable, personal data, and this is a magic money fountain for those who will be able to mine it.
They're not a high quality source of news - they've more than decimated their journalism staff and replaced them with 'content' staff who are performance monitored on the number of clicks their articles generate.
Content is syndicated in different accents across their range of papers from the national papers, The Mirror and The Daily Express down into a large number of notionally 'local' outlets.
So, take it with a pinch of salt.
If you ban WireGuard using DPI people will start using SSL VPNs.
If you ban SSL you ban the entire internet.
I'm not even taking a side here and what they are trying to do is obvious.
Definitely doesn't shy away from doing it! But one thing I find most irritating is that it seems reluctant to say it proud and loud.
Look at the situation with 4chan and Kiwifarms. They are basically asking to be blocked from the UK and they refuse to. I can't really say why the onus is put on the websites to enact blocks, but my suspicion is the government doesn't like the idea of displaying an official page stating that you are not allowed to see something because the government doesn't want you to.
Nobody is surprised that Russia resorts to this. They are a potemkin dictatorship. But that the UK is also acting as a dictatorship - now that's interesting.
H.L. Mencken
Browsing with a VPN is a frustrating experience. They are abused by many of their users which leads to circular capture checks and straight blocks.
Alternatively, the center starts trying to attract right-wing voters by adopting right-wing ideas like anti-immigrant views or "well, we can sacrifice the climate a bit more" positions.
Keir Starmer is from a "left" party but his actions has shown him to be a centrist, Ursula von der Leyen is quite right. Then again, these are European positioning, as someone's said years ago, the European right-wing would be liberal in the US. And with the currently openly racist regime of the USA, even more so!
They don't even have to do that, the connection can just be left to time out on the client side. This is what they did (and some ISPs still do) for the Internet Archive...
Yes, archive.org is classed as an adult site in the UK.
However, using this reason to induce censorship rules, word by word matching Russia/China playbook is making the goal less achievable if anything.
The "loicense m8" memes are getting less and less funny ...
People need to look at the UK government much more so than the US government in ADDITION. Everyone knows how the USA serves the superrich only these days, but the UK government is kind of polite on the outside, but pure evil on the inside.
* Creates a market for privacy tech of several million teenagers
* Wastes police time chasing down social forums which kids are hosting abroad using their pocket money
* Rubs the noses of the securirati in the fact that they've made it easier for terrorists to hide their comms among the thousands of teenage speakeasies
This is not the 80's when comms tech required capital and man-years of engineering. Setting up forums online isn't even a high-school project.
One upon a time, encryption math was regulated as a munition and the act of sharing open source software was tantamount to weapon smuggling. Once upon a time, VPNs were being banned by credit card companies. Part of the rise of bitcoin was the idea that you would need it for services like VPNs that credit card companies refused to service. Today, VPNs are openly advertised as piracy tools for getting around media geo-restrictions. Once upon a time, ISPs throttled torrents and so torrents become encrypted. Once upon a time DNS was to be poisoned in order to block filesharing websites (see COICA and PROTECT IP acts). All those efforts also came to nothing. These too will die.
It seems like your VPN setup has a leak, or the real location is obtained otherwise through the operating system (locale setting or GPS).
I would be surprised if your locale leaked on GrapheneOS for example.
This is a privacy nightmare on all fronts and a horrible limit on freedom of speech. These kids will be learning how to drive a car, yet unable to contact their extended family over Messenger or follow news on Twitter. For everyone else, it means no anonymity or secrecy which has a chilling effect on free speech at a time when fascism is growing within democratic countries and dissidents are being imprisoned or murdered.
Yes, there are some really big problems with social media, but keeping children away from it doesn't fix the problems - it just leaves them for the rest of us to deal with. Let's fix the root of the problem, starting with the recommendation algorithms that inherently polarize people by building echo chambers around them and pushing divisive content all in the name of "engagement".
2. Children start using VPNs to bypass the ban
3. Age-gate VPNs
4. Repeat steps 2-3
Truly a masterful plan.
Or you can simply let free plans only terminate inside their own country. I noticed recently that TunnelBear has done this with their free plans — the "fastest" endpoint, which is the only one that is free, is now a UK endpoint. It still meets the security need anyone might have from a VPN.
I am honestly not that bothered about adult content age gating in principle, and I never really have been. I personally think sexual content is not remotely immoral but that it's reasonable to say the very young shouldn't be able to see it. It's not a freedom of speech issue.
Given the practical impossibility of parental regulation of access to devices when cheap phones and PAYG exist, the problem is the practice of it: how do you do that in a way that is privacy-preserving?
I feel that Apple has coped with this pretty well: they decided I am an adult automatically based on how long I have held an account.
I also think the UK PAYG mobile providers handle this well: they have simply always blocked adult content until you unlock it. I haven't bothered and I have never seen the content wall (except when deliberately testing it) so I believe its boundaries are drawn quite well.
Though I do routinely use one site that might end up blocked over time because it sits right at the boundary of the law's interest. So one day I might need to, I guess. And I have considered what I might need to do about a website for my own photographic work, which sits on the edge of the ofcom rules interest in practice.
We are missing secure anonymous age attestation but I think that will come.
I do think American critics tend to interpret this in terms of the morality and religion battle-zone that riddles US culture and encourages US states to try to police morality in bizarre ways or to extend "porn" rules to things like information about sexuality, gender or sexual health (which would just not happen here because we're actually not really religious or prudes; there is essentially no religion in our politics, which is ironic considering the C of E have seats in the Lords).
I don't think American critics should really leap to judge UK rules when you have two dozen different states imposing rule sets that in some cases came first and in many are wholly unworkable.
UK concerns are about child access to extreme material and about sexual exploitation, fundamentally. It's not easy and it's clear some aspects of the legislation are difficult, but accepting criticism from Americans as if the US position is clear, unambiguous and robust is no longer something we should entertain, especially lessons about the morality of free speech from the US administration, given their apparent selective contempt for it.
And yet, govt will find it's impossible to regulate the creativity of software engineers.
There's always a way around, but this direction is concerning.
https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/blair-and-th...
https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/di...
The even more concerning thing is that we've got a far right party that have been leading in the polls for most of the last year.
This is a very dangerous situation.
> how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?
> You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport.
https://reclaimthenet.org/starmers-social-media-ban-surveill...
> Ms Kendall told Nick Ferrari: “I told MPs yesterday I'm going to come back to the House with a statement on the issue of VPNs in July. There are very strong views on both sides of this. For some people, it is about privacy, and it is the ability to use that is really held strongly by people. And for others, they say they should be banned because kids are using them to get around. And so I— the main thing that we've done is we've commissioned additional research on this because I've not been happy with the evidence."
Sounds like they realize there are two sides and no "clear winning argument" in either direction, that's why the additional research is needed. Sounds a bit more nuanced than what I expected based on your snippet.
Perfect is impossible, but if its stigmatised then the network effects stop being so punitive to children who have reasonable parents.
it's the 10-80-10 rule: 10% of kids will still access social media, 10% will never... but 80% can be swayed.
If they ban bog standard VPNs and find out they're still being used, they'll punish the VPN companies.
If the VPN companies create workarounds and avoid the punishment, they'll punish the payment processors.
If the VPN companies start using esoteric workarounds and taking cryptocurrency for payment, then they've mostly won -- most people aren't going to deal with that shit.
All the while, they'll still go after the social media/etc companies for allowing circumvention of age-gating. So the social media companies will crack down on our ability to visit their sites with any sort of privacy.
My point: laws are all imperfect but can still have a huge effect. Pointing out work arounds doesn't change that.
For context, I'm really disturbed by the recent move to punish people seeking privacy instead of the social media companies that are enabling this social media shit. They know who the companies are, since that's who they're going to punish for not age gating. But they'd (I'm talking about US based age-gating pushes as well) rather fuck with our privacy and make our PII more susceptible to data breaches than tell the social media companies to eat shit.
car culture < childhood
This isn't a cynically curated viewpoint. It's some* of what we have and what that cost.
* also trespassing culture & stranger-danger culture. We have ruined roaming and the development it nurtured.
Companies will be exempt (with remote employees having to identify linking their IP and computer's fingerprint with their real identity), and the next step, after using the law to silencing dissent, will be penalisation.
Quite often, people in power don’t want to hear the truth, they want to hear their own words/views parroted back to them.
I've never had this issue (using Private Internet Access on iOS).
It's pathetic how they use sobbing families to push it through, similar tactic like before Iraq invasion.
same players behind the scenes.
We've had time to witness the damage of a dopamine-doomscroll. I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes. And we've seen the complete lack of positive action from platforms. Roblox is full of paedophiles and Grok was letting you nudify your classmates just a few months ago. These places aren't suitable for kids.
I don't want a ban on VPNs. That isn't being suggested, just making sure they're also age-checked. But some inconvenience is a price worth considering.
Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from outside social connections.
People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.
Famously at the exact same time UK was claiming there was no evidence of the medicinal use of the cannabis, the UK was also the biggest exporter of it, and all was then turned into Sativex, a cannabis based medicine, not approved for use in the UK of course (individual import is allowed).
Interesting is that the husband of one of the very prominent Home Secretary and later Prime Minister is a senior executive in the producet.
Of course there's no suggestion of the financial interest of them in keeping a monopoly. See also: https://leftfootforward.org/2021/04/revealed-uk-is-the-world...
You're trying to frame it as an "inconvenience" and not a blatant attack on the fundamental freedom of expression. I get that social media is bad, but sometimes (often) the cure is worse than the illness.
Going the other way around to try and watch British TV I used to find with a normal hosted VPN services could still figure out I wasn't in the country, but now I have a Tailscale exit node at my mum's place in the UK it always works fine.
So I suspect it all comes down to the IP source, probably a residential IP is the best possible case and with commercial VPNs it depends on how hard they work on isolating their IP blocks from known datacentres.
This is happening worldwide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_laws_b...
Sure, whatever. Maybe in some ways.
> I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes.
... but not in that way.
I personally knew children who'd been solicited directly by adults before there was even an Internet. Including me, if you use the definition of "child" that seems to be popular in this sort of debate (and, by the way, it wasn't a big deal).
We did not shut down the world because of it.
If they ban the commercial providers, payment processors will be the first to enforce it. And Google and Apple will throw the 1-Click solutions out of their app store for users from those countries immediately. And with that the topic is effectively dead even for most "geeks". At this point the goal is already pretty much achieved, most people are cutoff and under heavier surveillance. Next comes the group that know what a server is, how to rent one, what OpenVPN or Wireguard are. But many of the most used websites already make your life difficult if your IP is from such a range.
It goes on. At each step you can argue "there is still a way, as long as you got networking with other countries". Absolutely correct, but at each step the group who knows how and is willing to invest the energy shrinks. And the intended goal will likely already be achieved at the mentioned phase 1 above. The fact that some people still find ways isn't really a gotcha in this matter.
And at some point they will criminalize it. Does it matter that they are unlikely to catch you? Is it worth the risk? And if so, what if you catch strays for it from an unrelated matter. Ultimately they will simply target the devs that help build easy solution for the less tech-savy.
One big reason why you want to keep a bunch of nerds tunneling out around anyway is that you keep useful, defusing attitudes like that floating around. Aka "It's not that bad, there are still ways around it, haha, those idiots".
They will when it's law. Their purpose is most likely either snake oil, or bypassing geo restricctions on netflix or sports.
1. Ban something
2. People bypass the ban
3. Ban however they're bypassing the ban
4. Goto 2
this is the first time in more than a decade that its not tories in charge, and to get there, labour also had to become conservatives
The alternatives are even more power-mad, fundamentally illiberal parties (Reform, Conservatives), equally pearl-clutching ones that will likely continue on the same road as Labour (greens) and unreliable figures that will flip-flop as soon as they are in power (libdems).
What's left? Count Binface, I guess.
I'm not in favour of this but I'm acknowledging that if the number of children accessing social media drops significantly because of a VPN ban then they've achieved what they set out to do.
I don't like the salami slice tactics of not including this in previous legislation despite knowing that it would be necessary to enforce the social media ban. There would have been a lot less support if it was presented as a complete package that could be debated in it's whole.
Except this has nothing to do with social media nor with children nor with addiction.
So, kill all news agencies and reporters I guess? or would there be a carve out for incumbents so they can cement their market share? who controls the approval list?
It's exciting to think I'll become a dissident like my parents, just because I don't want a slimy, rightwing, greasy friends of Epstein and other known abusers to ID and surveil me.
To be honest, unfortunately, I'm not really sure about this one.
/j or /s
P.S. by the way, is it possible for them to use Hetzner? Don't they need something like credit card?
07:04, 18 Jun 2026Updated 11:02, 19 Jun 2026
New VPN rules are set to be issued by the Labour Party government as part of the under-16 social media ban. The government has not revealed any plans to regulate them, but ministers have said details about action alongside the social media ban, including regarding VPN use, will come in July.
Children's minister Josh MacAlister told the BBC there were "options there about whether we could age-gate VPN use, which would be really welcome".
"We have more work to do to understand the effectiveness and accessibility of different methods, the availability of identity and age attributes at 16, and the privacy considerations of different existing and emerging methods," Ofcom has told the government.
READ MORE People can get extra £69,000 in their pension using World Cup method
Technology secretary Liz Kendall told Nick Ferrari at Breakfast on LBC that the regulator needed to strengthen its enforcement powers and strategy amid concerns companies are not being effectively punished for breaking online safety rules.
Ms Kendall said: “We need to make sure that if fines are given and they’re not paid, we have to take it to the next step.”
On the search data, Richy George, chief revenue officer at IT-AMG, told City AM: “Within hours of the ban being confirmed, the nation’s teenagers appear to have been Googling how to get around it rather than disengaging from social media altogether.”
Baroness Liz Lloyd said there is “limited evidence on children’s use of VPNs,” and has said that the government has no plans to ban them.
However, the government did launch a consultation to “confront the full range of risks children face online”.
“This includes examining restrictions on children’s use of AI chatbots, as well as options to age-restrict or limit children’s VPN use where it undermines safety protections and changing the age of digital consent,” the government said.
Ms Kendall told Nick Ferrari: “I told MPs yesterday I'm going to come back to the House with a statement on the issue of VPNs in July.
"There are very strong views on both sides of this. For some people, it is about privacy, and it is the ability to use that is really held strongly by people.
Article continues below
"And for others, they say they should be banned because kids are using them to get around.
"Yes. And so I— the main thing that we've done is we've commissioned additional research on this because I've not been happy with the evidence.”
Exactly. A little at a time. First it's adult sites, because if you need to show ID to buy alcohol, shouldn't you need ID to buy pornography? Once that's accepted, expand the sphere of control to non-adult sites too by redefining everything as 16+.
I'd be surprised if the law requires much beyond a vague best effort from service providers, but many already block connections from known server hosts and some even VPNs.
An airtight block is not what's required; stopping social media being mainstream for kids is.
You would need to get your sim card out of your phone and use wifi or buy one of them foreign esim
For vpns I actually found that websites that block vpns for some reasons are worse at detecting commercial vpns than when you deploy your own on vps
---
Also I forgot about other things. When my phone for some unknown reason had its region set as GB, I had British ads in YouTube music
I'm trying to discuss this in good faith but that wasn't even an argument. A bland accusation wearing a tin foil hat.
So no, not a ban for all. A ban for minors, and a severe curtailment in general. The parent post might not be 100% accurate, but it's close.
I definitely see both sides of this argument but to pretend the answers here are obvious just means people aren’t being serious. Serious harm is being caused to children and just because that’s a known cliche doesn’t make it not a real concern people have.
The law is very bad at dealing with such realities, see also piracy and drugs. The last time I checked TPB is still accessible in the UK with only DoH.
Most UK citizens do have a credit card anyway (though I in fact do not). It's more than three quarters.
It's not even the only way someone offering a service for what is after all a subscription product could achieve adult verification through existing banking-based mechanisms, because there are also bank mechanisms for making payments through a direct debit, which again you have to be an adult to do in the UK, and everyone can.
KYC processes also work though they are annoying and a VPN provider is inherently not going to want to do it.
But they are going to want to take money and there are these two mechanisms that come with adulthood verification attached.
Apple could do more on this with Wallet — they could let you pay with a virtual debit card that can only be in your wallet if you've passed their adult verification. Would need some card industry support. I am not sure why I can't just associate adulthood with my debit card; that would be a good fix.
So when the citizens inevitably start protesting against the oppression, it's easier to subdue them.
Probably how they can best attach a license to VPN use like they're doing with TV.
For decades companies like Facebook have been saying you just have to let us groom children, there's no way to have this tech and not groom children. Now the predictable consequences of that are arriving: the tech industry is being turned off, because it grooms children.
And when I say groom children, I'm talking about actual child predators, not the transphobic nonsense point.
The trade-offs and how many people care and about what specifically.
E.g., you say "Privacy is a human right", so why is it that half the websites I visit ask for permission to share details of how I use those sites with more corporate "trusted partners" than there were students and staff combined in my secondary school? I'm all on board with just banning this kind of analytics, but there's a lot of people who are more angry with the EU for forcing companies to at least ask for permission before they sell your data to all those analytics firms.
Edit because I'm getting limited:
This isn't exactly something old that has been going on for decades in its current form and the usage has increased especially since the lockdowns. Nations have also been copying each other for centuries, you don't need a secret group coordinating for it with a singular ulterior motive.
Most famously in Roblox (that's now fixed on Roblox side first with age banding, now by sharding it into three parts), and then in socials -- but the impact of, say, Instagram where kids are preyed upon because the algorithms are promoting them to preying populace, and where Meta openly runs experiments with their mental health, knowingly pushing them into harms way, is vastly different from, say, Coverstar.
Impact of abuse from Meta is well documented already, yet Meta is not punished. Kids are being radicalised by being fed toxic content, and it's also well known. Elon Musk's X was knowingly producing CSAM and non consensual nude images of real people and it took a tremendous amount of time for _anything_ to happen - and I don't see Musk on the dock yet?
There are ways to automatically block almost all kids on socials. Take away DMs and comments on the posts from all unverified users and kids suddenly will be much safer. All that can be done today.
The greasy friends of Epstein are running this shitshow, they're in the government (most famously PM of the UK knowingly appointed a longtime Epstein friend as the UK ambassador for the US), they've been covering Jimmy Saville abuses in the BBC, Police forces, the past government, which receives financial incentives from some of these companies to push things exactly the way they want.
Most severe harm to children is caused with the tacit approval of the government and media.
Sneaky access to the socials is not this.
Oh, and you know what? Receipts show it's Meta behind this weird, sudden push for age checks. Meta and their $2B.
So you already know something's off, or at least you should.
Clearly they can't. Mullvad uses WireGuard, so you could, in theory, route through a non-Mullvad peer on a self-administered VPS before coming out of a Mullvad server somewhere else (multihop). There is no way to deal with that outside of deep packet inspection, which even then would be difficult to verify because of the way WireGuard obfuscates itself.
The UK hasn't been quick to deal with Epstein's associates and has a long history of either ignoring or losing critical evidence in CSA cases associated with politicians and public figures.
With that background, mandatory ID makes it easier, not harder, for abusers to act with impunity and/or official protection.
The fact that you think there's no such group is simply insane.
I mean, the very agenda of their upcoming conference was on the front page of HackerNews a few days ago...
For example the vast majority of the UK residents is against the ongoing support and complicity of the UK in the genocide of Palestinians, to which the government orchestrated the whole operation to turn the protest into act of terrorism (!).
Etc.
Apparently if countries all put an age limit on tobacco it must mean there is a secret group coordinating for it for ulterior reasons.
Because capitalism itself is the enemy.
And information assymmetry is a potent tool, as is constant and persistent surveillance. All of these enable extracting more money.
You could argue the benefit to children in repealing it.
But sure, all governments suddenly woke up at the exact same time, give or take a few months, and realized that social media should be banned for kids.
https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2024/0119/1217560-section-31-b...