<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08/04/didnt-take-long-to-reveal-the-uks-online-safety-act-is-exactly-the-privacy-crushing-failure-everyone-warned-about/>
"Well, well, well. The “age assurance” part of the UK’s
Online Safety Act has
finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week
and a half ago. And what do you know? It’s turned out to be exactly the
privacy-invading, freedom-crushing, technically unworkable disaster that
everyone with half a brain predicted it would be.
Let’s start with the most obvious sign that this law is working exactly as
poorly as critics warned: VPN usage in the UK has absolutely exploded. Proton
VPN reported an 1,800% spike in UK sign-ups. Five of the top ten free apps on
Apple’s App Store in the UK are VPNs. When your “child safety” law’s primary
achievement is teaching kids how to use VPNs to circumvent it, maybe you’ve
missed the mark just a tad.
But the real kicker is what content is now being gatekept behind invasive age
verification systems. Users in the UK now need to submit a selfie or government
ID to access:
* Reddit communities about stopping drinking and smoking, periods, craft beers,
and sexual assault support, not to mention documentation of war
* Spotify for music videos tagged as 18+
* War footage and protest videos on X
* Wikipedia is threatening to limit access in the UK (while actively
challenging the law)
Yes, you read that right. A law supposedly designed to protect children now
requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support
communities. People struggling with addiction must undergo facial recognition
scans to find help quitting drinking or smoking. The UK government has somehow
concluded that access to basic health information and peer support networks
poses such a grave threat to minors that it justifies creating a comprehensive
surveillance infrastructure around it.
The Wikipedia situation is particularly telling. When an educational
encyclopedia that hosts over seven million articles and sees five edits per
second calls your law unworkable, maybe it’s time to reconsider?
And this is all after a bunch of other smaller websites and forums shut down
earlier this year when other parts of the law went into effect.
This is exactly what happens when you regulate the internet as if it’s all just
Facebook and Google. The tech giants can absorb the compliance costs, but
everyone else gets crushed."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
