The UK's Online Safety Act's new mandatory proof-of-age checks have been implemented on many websites now. The intent of the law comes from a good place, but it's been badly bungled and heavy-handed. It was designed to stop kids seeing porn etc, and to protect them from potential abusers, paedophiles, groomers, gambling, the glamourising of smoking and vaping, recreational drugs and alcohol, addictions, images of self-harm etc.
Some smaller services and businesses will have to update their hardware and/or software at their own cost, otherwise risk a fine or even some prison time. How the sites who are told that they need to implement the proof-of-age checks seems to be pretty arbitrary - even a Reddit subreddit about cider drinking required proof of age for you to be let in!
Kids will very quickly learn how to bypass these age-checks, and, quite understandably, lots of adults don't want to be forced to give so much private information away, just to keep doing what they've been doing for ages. Sales of VPNs (Virtual Private Network) and (less secure) proxy services have recently skyrocketed in the UK, the government is now considering if it should ban VPNs and proxy services entirely, and pornography users are wondering what else could be done with the personal information they might have to give, especially if their face is scanned. And then there's the potential problems with the security of end-to-end encryption, and how it could attract malicious abuse.
At the moment, the methods of proving your age are: passport, driving licence, credit card checks, open banking, digital identity services and (currently paused) biometrics such as facial recognition scans and AI face scans to see how old you look. These AI-assisted 'probable-age' facial scans are very controversial, for obvious reasons.
Anyway, these links should help you decipher my babbling!
www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-demand-skyrockets-in-the-uk-as-age-verification-checks-are-enforced
www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/could-vpns-be-banned-uk-government-to-look-very-closely-into-their-usage-amid-mass-usage-since-the-age-verification-row
Some smaller services and businesses will have to update their hardware and/or software at their own cost, otherwise risk a fine or even some prison time. How the sites who are told that they need to implement the proof-of-age checks seems to be pretty arbitrary - even a Reddit subreddit about cider drinking required proof of age for you to be let in!
Kids will very quickly learn how to bypass these age-checks, and, quite understandably, lots of adults don't want to be forced to give so much private information away, just to keep doing what they've been doing for ages. Sales of VPNs (Virtual Private Network) and (less secure) proxy services have recently skyrocketed in the UK, the government is now considering if it should ban VPNs and proxy services entirely, and pornography users are wondering what else could be done with the personal information they might have to give, especially if their face is scanned. And then there's the potential problems with the security of end-to-end encryption, and how it could attract malicious abuse.
At the moment, the methods of proving your age are: passport, driving licence, credit card checks, open banking, digital identity services and (currently paused) biometrics such as facial recognition scans and AI face scans to see how old you look. These AI-assisted 'probable-age' facial scans are very controversial, for obvious reasons.
Anyway, these links should help you decipher my babbling!
www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-demand-skyrockets-in-the-uk-as-age-verification-checks-are-enforced
www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/could-vpns-be-banned-uk-government-to-look-very-closely-into-their-usage-amid-mass-usage-since-the-age-verification-row
