VPN use rises following Online Safety Act’s age verification controls

As the UK’s Online Safety Act came into effect on Friday—along with its age verification controls—the use of virtual private network (VPN) services has skyrocketed by up to 20-fold across the region.

Top10VPN, which monitors VPN traffic around the world, spotted UK VPN traffic spiking 1,327% on July 25, compared to the daily average over the prior four weeks. The traffic didn’t slow down on the days following, either, increasing 1,.712% above the pre-July 25 baseline on July 26, and by almost 2,000% on July 27.

The Online Safety Act forces a variety of websites to verify a user’s age, ensuring they are 18 years old or over. This doesn’t just apply to the obvious porn sites, but to a broad array of other categories: social media, gaming, and even search. The content considered harmful under the bill isn’t just sexual either, but covers areas including suicide, self-harm, and content related to eating disorders. Sites that don’t comply risk fines or even bans in the UK.

The more stringent law means that simply checking a box saying you’re over 18 won’t cut it. Instead, the UK’s communications regulator OFCOM suggests several ways for sites to verify a person’s age:

• Using open banking information (where a person submits information from their bank that proves their age)
• Photo ID matching using facial recognition
• Proving your age to your mobile operator who then approves you on the site’s behalf
• Checking your credit card (only adult UK residents can get one)
• Analyzing your email to see if it’s likely to have been used in an adult situation (a mortgage application, say)
• Using digital identity services such as a digital ID wallet (the EU is working on one of these)
• Estimating a person’s age from a selfie.

OFCOM argues that all methods must be implemented in line with UK privacy law, but it’s understandable that adult users might consider this a privacy risk. It’s also likely that some minors will want to flout the rules and access content that the government doesn’t want them to, especially given the wide scope of the law. Both these reasons are likely why VPN activity has soared since the law kicked in.

When you browse the internet directly, your computer uses an IP address that your internet service provider gives you. The site you’re browsing can use that to determine what country you’re in. A VPN is a program that connects your internet browsing device to the VPN company’s computer. That computer then serves as your jumping-off point to the internet.

Because VPN providers have networks of these computers around the world, you can pretend to be in another country of your choosing when using a VPN, meaning people often use them to bypass censorship laws. As more countries have been restricting access to adult content, they have also become a tool for internet users to dodge age protection laws.

UK Science Secretary Peter Kyle downplayed the use of VPNs in a Guardian interview yesterday, arguing that “very few children” were seeking harmful content online. Yet according to OFCOM, 8% of children between eight and 14 in the UK access online porn every month. That figure increases to almost one in five boys in that age bracket.

Kyle insisted that the government had solved up to 90% of the problem. “That 10% that’s remaining, or whatever that percentage is? We’ll go figuring it out as we move forward,” he said.

Per Wired, the Proton VPN service tweeted that its UK signups surged over 1,400%. “Unlike previous surges, this one is sustained, and is significantly higher than when France lost access to adult content,” it added.

VPN service Windscribe also tweeted a graph showing what appeared to be a massive spike in daily sign-ups on July 25.

And AdGuard also reported a spike in traffic, “Website traffic from UK users has surged by more than 60%, with visits from Android devices more than doubling and iOS traffic up by nearly 100%,” it said. “VPN installs in the UK have also grown by 2.5 times, and we’re seeing a clear increase in traffic from keyword searches—a significant share of which is related to adult content.”

Kyle told the Guardian that he was not going to ban VPNs, but that he would be looking “very closely” at how they are being used.