The UK proposes a VPN ban for kids, and I have mixed feelings

Since the arrival of the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, anyone in the UK who wants to access sites featuring adult content, including the likes of Reddit and Bluesky, must upload their ID or provide similarly strong evidence to prove they’re over 18. A lot of adults are understandably perturbed by the idea of having to upload scans of their passports or driver’s licenses for fear of privacy violations or data breaches, so they use VPNs to get around it.

But, right now, children and teenagers can just as easily circumvent these age checks using VPNs, so a proposed amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill would force VPN companies to verify their users’ age. On the surface, I get it. There’s a lot of awful, soul-rotting content online that young people shouldn’t be viewing. While the best VPN services are designed to protect people (or, at least, their privacy), it outwardly makes sense to age-gate them if indeed children are using them to access harmful content.

But I still have mixed feelings. Adult content has the capacity to do a lot of harm to kids and teens who happen to stumble upon it, but this will come at the cost of their online privacy at a time when mega-corps continue to absorb scary amounts of information from internet users, then twist it to fuel their AI systems or sell it off to the highest bidder.

This problem exists with or without an under-18s VPN ban, as we can’t magically take back all the data that has already been swallowed up. But my other concern is what constitutes adult content and whether kids could lose access to helpful resources as collateral damage. Here’s a list provided by the UK government:

• Pornography
• Content that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for either self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide
• Bullying
• Abusive or hateful content
• Content which depicts or encourages serious violence or injury
• Content which encourages dangerous stunts and challenges
• Content which encourages the ingestion, inhalation, or exposure to harmful substances

It’s still early days for all this, as the proposal will need to pass through the UK’s House of Commons, but it’s easy to imagine teenagers being deprived of useful educational content that they may not be receiving from parents or school because it’s deemed adult. Meanwhile, what makes content abusive or hateful? On paper, it seems obvious that children should be protected from content like that, but the job of deciding what is and isn’t harmful certainly won’t be clear-cut.

Once again, this all seems like a situation where governments are struggling to understand and play catch-up with the online world. The real solutions involve making changes to the education system, while creating safe spaces for children that allow them to access important content and interact with their peers without having their data extracted or putting them at risk from dangerous content.