LONDON, UK and WASHINGTON, DC – The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which mandates age verification, came into full force on July 25th. Many users in the U.K. woke up to a radically different digital world, with popular communication services such as X (formerly Twitter) and Discord blocking user access to certain content unless users verified their age. Unsurprisingly, users in the U.K. immediately downloaded Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications from their app stores, allowing them to change their location and circumvent the strict age verification requirements of the OSA.
Coupled with recent revelations about a massive data breach in Tea, a popular application used by women for dating safety, the event further underscores some of the privacy concerns that emerge when utilizing hard identity verification online.
“These two events show some of the serious challenges presented by age verification online. Users do not like this mandate, especially when trying to access legitimate content on their favorite sites. There are very real privacy and surveillance risks created by this process. While protecting children online is a laudable goal which we share, it is clear that the UK’s solution is not the correct approach,” said James Czerniawski, Head of Emerging Technology Policy at the Consumer Choice Center (CCC), an international consumer advocacy group.
A petition to repeal the UK Online Safety Act has already netted over 340,000 signatures since the new age verification requirements came online. The UK Parliament must consider for debate any petition that gets more than 100,000 signatures.
Mike Salem of CCC’s U.K. office added, “Now that users are bypassing these restrictions with VPNs, it’s only a matter of time before officials start talking about banning those too. It illustrates how this is more about control than it is about safety. Once you normalise surveillance and censorship in the name of safety, the slope gets very slippery, very fast. A fresh debate on this matter is very much called for.”
Keeping kids safe online is essential, but policymakers around the world must seek to understand the fundamental limitations of most known modalities of age verification.
The Consumer Choice Center holds that companies should be free to deploy age-gate features where appropriate, but it shouldn’t be a mandatory requirement with the threat of legal penalty for noncompliance.
“The good news is that there is a robust ecosystem of resources available to educate parents on how best to keep their children safe in this increasingly digital world. If the government wants to have a positive impact in keeping kids safe online, it starts with making sure it’s enforcing existing laws already on the books and adequately supporting law enforcement entities to do their job under the law,” concluded Czerniawski.
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The Consumer Choice Center is an independent, nonpartisan consumer advocacy group championing the benefits of freedom of choice, innovation, and abundance in everyday life for consumers in over 100 countries. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Washington, Brussels, Ottawa, Brasilia, London, and Geneva.
