Government considers crackdown on under-18s using VPNs
The use of VPNs by under-18s in the United Kingdom to circumvent age checks is now squarely in the crosshairs of the government.
Within its broader consultation on online safety, the government said it would specifically address the issue of under-18s using VPNs to circumvent recently implemented age verification checks in the UK.
As a result of the recently passed Online Safety Act, websites serving adult content including pornography are required to implement robust age verification checks to ensure that no under-18s in the UK can access potentially harmful content.
These measures have been widely implemented, but they can easily be circumvented by the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), services which allow UK users to encrypt their web traffic and route it through a region of their choice, thereby bypassing the UK’s age verification requirements.
Many VPN services are offer free usage tiers and do not have robust identity verification requirements, making it relatively trivial for a user to download a VPN app on their mobile or desktop device, activate the service, and browse websites as if they were in a different region to the United Kingdom.
When announcing its three-month consultation on online safety, which will also include a potential ban on the use of social media by UK children under the age of 16, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the government would specifically consider the use of VPNs to circumvent Online Safety Act protections.
“The consultation will include a range of other options, too, such as whether there should be curfews overnight, breaks to stop excessive use or doom scrolling, how we ensure more rigorous enforcement of existing laws around age verification, and action to address concerns about the use of VPNs to get around important protections,” Kendall said.
A day after this consultation was announced, the House of Lords voted in favour of an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would see all VPN use banned by anybody under the age of 18.
This amendment would prohibit the use of VPNs by children, placing the responsibility on VPN providers to ensure that UK minors are prevented from accessing their service.
While peers voted to pass this amendment, it is expected that the government will vote it down while it waits for the results of its own three-month consultation on broader measures to strengthen the Online Safety Act.
However, the dual signal from the House of Lords and the government against VPN usage by minors, coupled with the call by many Labour MPs to impose a ban on the use of social media by under-16s, points to a possible crackdown on these measures in future.
