UK Government Urged to Restrict Access to VPNs for Minors to Prevent Circumvention of Controversial Online Safety Act
The children's commissioner for England has urged U.K. government ministers to implement age-verification requirements for VPNs to curb minors using them to circumvent the Online Safety Act.
Written by Aleksander Hougen (Co-Chief Editor)
Reviewed by Jackie Leavitt (Editor at Large)
Last Updated:
VPNs became the most downloaded applications in the U.K. last month following the implementation of the Online Safety Act. In response, the children’s commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, urged the government to extend the age verifications to apply to VPN apps, telling BBC Newsnight that VPNs are “absolutely a loophole that needs closing.”
The Online Safety Act requires platforms that host potentially harmful content for children to verify the age of all users. This obviously includes pornography sites but also social media platforms like reddit, X, Facebook as well as content platforms like YouTube and Spotify.
Since its passage in 2023, the law has been criticized from many different directions, including privacy groups, academic institutions and even the Wikimedia Foundation. The latter launched a legal challenge to avoid being categorized as a platform subject to the most stringent provisions of the law.
The challenge was dismissed earlier this month and the Wikimedia Foundation is reportedly considering restricting access to Wikipedia for U.K. users.
The petition from de Souza to age-restrict VPNs came as part of a wider report on children’s exposure to online pornography, which surveyed 1,020 people from the age of 16 to 21. Among other findings, the report found that on average U.K. children are first exposed to online porn at the age of 13, with 27% of respondents saying they first saw porn online before the age of 11.
The report goes on to point out that VPNs make it trivial for people to circumvent the age verification requirements of the Online Safety Act. If a user is connected to a VPN, online platforms and websites won’t need to comply with the age verification requirement since it no longer recognizes the user as being in the U.K.
For its part, the government has yet to make an official response to de Souza’s report and petition, with a government spokesperson telling the BBC that VPNs are legal tools for adults and there are no plans to ban them.
If the government chooses to follow the advice, it would be a serious blow for digital privacy and the freedom of the web for U.K. residents.
So far VPNs have provided a reliable workaround for people who are unwilling to upload legal identification to use social media, but if age verification becomes required for the VPNs themselves – if reputable VPNs don’t pull out of the U.K. entirely – that would no longer be the case.
Given the news, we here at Cloudwards recommend that any of our readers in the U.K. sign up and download the VPN of their choice now, in case age verification is implemented on the registration or download stage. You can check out our list of our Best U.K. VPNs to find the most suitable one.