Every time a government discovers age checks, teenagers rediscover VPNs. The UK’s Online Safety Act pushed sites to introduce heavy-handed age verification, and the immediate effect was not obedience, but a stampede to VPN apps at the top of the charts. Now, officials are floating ideas to restrict VPNs for children, age-gate them, or pressure sites to block VPN traffic, all while insisting that a full ban is not on the table. 🤦🏻♂️
The irony is hard to miss: tools that protect journalists, employees, activists, and ordinary users are being reframed as loopholes rather than layers of safety. If you treat VPNs as the problem, you ignore why people are suddenly so eager to tunnel out of your system in the first place. Push too hard, and you do not get less circumvention; you get riskier circumvention, with kids flocking to shady free VPNs and other workarounds that leak far more data.
A policy that treats privacy tech as a nuisance just ends up weakening both privacy and safety. The smarter move is to design age verification that respects adults, protects children, and assumes that any blunt restriction will be tested by the most motivated users on the network, which usually means teenagers with a lot of time and curiosity. The VPN panic is only getting started, and it will be a revealing test of whether governments can balance safety with the right to a private, secure connection.
TL;DR
🧠 UK age checks under the Online Safety Act triggered a VPN boom
⚡ Officials are exploring VPN restrictions for children, not outright bans
🎓 Crude limits on VPNs risk driving users to less safe tools and shady free services
🔍 The real challenge is balancing age safety with the basic right to secure, private connections
https://www.theverge.com/tech/827435/uk-vpn-restrictions-ban-online-safety-act
#VPN #OnlineSafety #Privacy #UKtech #security #cloud #infosec #cybersecurity
