VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in【FT Interview】

VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in【FT Interview】

From inside the Financial Times headquarters in the heart of the city of London, this is the FT interview brought to you by TV Tokyo. This week’s story, VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in. New regulations have come into force in the UK aimed at protecting children online with many websites now required to verify users ages. But instead of complying, large numbers of British internet users are sidest stepping the system by turning to VPNs. A VPN or virtual private network is a tool which allows internet users to hide their location, making it appear as if they’re browsing from another country and in doing so, bypassing the new restrictions entirely. To unpack what the new online safety act means and how people are responding to it, we spoke with Tim Bradshaw, the FT’s global tech correspondent. [Music] So the UK has been talking about introducing new rules to try and tame the kind of content that people see online for many, many years. And after years of debate, the online safety act was finally passed under the previous Conservative government in 2023. But because this is one of the first pieces of legislation anywhere in the world to really try and put strict rules around what children can see online and even what adults can see online and hold some of the biggest and smallest tech companies in the world responsible for enforcing that. It’s taken a couple of years for them to figure out how to do that. So what we saw in the past week is the most uh strict part of the rules starting to come into force which is around what people who are under the age of 18 are able to see online in the UK. And so that requires uh a number of things from uh tech companies and online video providers. It means that they need to know who is over 18 and who is under 18. It needs to find ways of verifying that in in a way that the UK’s media regulator thinks is robust. And then it needs to know which content falls under the rules that is for adults and which is for children. And so in some areas that’s fairly straightforward. Pornography is clearly something that the government has decided should be for over 18s. Everybody knows what pornography is. There is a second tier of content which is seemed uh deemed to be harmful which includes areas like uh information around um suicide and self harm which in the UK in particular there’s been a real outcry over children being exposed to it and very sadly some children have taken their lives as a result of encountering that kind of content on really mainstream social media sites and so uh the biggest platforms for online social media in the world, Tik Tok, uh Instagram, YouTube are all having to introduce new age verification technology as well to ensure that children don’t just stumble across that kind of content even though their own rules prohibit posting that kind of thing online. [Music] Mandatory age verification on the internet is a really difficult challenge. Traditionally, many people used social media services without giving their real name at all. And so the idea that now you have to try and figure out how old they are sometimes without asking their name is a really tricky problem. Offcom, the UK’s media regulator, has recommended uh a handful of technologies that they believe work reliably. and they range from sharing your driver’s license or your passport identification with a with a website to using your phone number or your email address which has often been associated with other online accounts um for a number of years and so it’s it’s likely that that’s associated with an adult. Um you can also use uh your bank account. The UK has an open banking system which makes it very easy for you to log into your bank from other sites and and you can use that. And then the final system that they’ve recommended is is just a facial a facial scan. So you you hold your phone up and record a short video and that then is used to guess whether you look like you’re over 18. And the final option, age verification technology providers tell me is by far the most popular among regular users for doing this. Particularly if we’re talking about age verification for adult websites, many of them do not want to hand over their driver’s license or their credit card details to a porn site. So actually, even though it seems strange that they are showing their face to it, it’s just a face. It doesn’t know your name uh or where you live. And so that’s um done in a way that uh age verification providers say is done with privacy in mind. They delete the image of your face afterwards and they say it’s fairly reliable that you can usually guess at least within a year or so how old that person is. So you end up with a system that actually works kind of similar to buying alcohol in a physical retail store where um if you look like you’re over 21, you probably won’t be asked for ID. So that’s how a lot of the um the really strict adult content sites are going about this. However, that is not how the biggest social media platforms are going about this because they argue that they try not to have pornographic or suicide content on their sites. And so, they can use a slightly lighter touch way of checking people’s ages, which involves looking at the stated ages of your friends online. [Music] So VPNs or virtual private networks are a very established technology online for effectively disguising your physical location to the website that you’re visiting. That means that your regular internet service provider or your mobile phone network can’t see where you are. And so when these new online safety rules come into force, because this is British law, this only applies to people accessing adult websites from the UK. So if you look like you’re accessing it from the Netherlands or from Japan, those rules don’t apply to you. Usage of VPNs in the UK jumped hugely last week after these new online safety rules around mandatory age verification came into force. We saw VPN apps jump to the top of the app store, displacing even chat GPT, which has been the top of the app store for a long time. And we saw some providers of VPNs say that they had seen a 10-fold increase in usage uh from before the new rules came in. So, ProtonVPN, which was the top of the app store charts, they saw an 1,800% increase uh in a few days. NordVPN, which is another very large provider, saw a th00and% increase versus before the new rules came into force. And so what it appears to be is that a lot of people, and it’s hard to tell whether they are adults or children, have decided they don’t want to go through the UK’s age verification process. They would rather just pretend to be in another country and bypass it altogether. And that is a really difficult thing for the government to enforce. They have said that websites cannot recommend that you use a VPN to get around the new age verification systems. But because VPNs are legal, there’s not a lot they can do about it. There are risks associated with using VPNs, especially free VPNs because the traffic that you’re using that you’re viewing the websites that you’re viewing um the material that you’re consuming online is disguised using the VPN to your regular internet service provider or your regular mobile network, but it is completely visible to the provider of the VPN. So you are not invisible online, you’re just showing it to a different internet provider effectively. And so that means using a reputable and privacy-friendly uh VPN provider is really important because otherwise that that company might just be gathering up all your online information um and then using it for advertising or or maybe worse maybe it could be used to commit fraud or something like that. [Music] There is a reason that large parts of the internet have not required age verification before over the past 30 plus years that the web has been around is that it’s just really really hard to do reliably. And so I think criticism that there are holes and um ways of getting around the online safety acts age verification regime are legitimate. But it’s also just a problem that I don’t know if it can ever really be solved. It’s a really hard argument for the government to make to say, “Hey, you please please use this. Please go through the legal system when you can just flip a switch on your phone and and suddenly you’re in the Netherlands or or America.” And so I do think there is a responsibility for the broader community here, not just the government. Parents need to educate their children about what online safety looks like and you know to to warn their kids that there are bad people on the internet that will try to um say mean things to them or or or or tempt them to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise want to do um rather than just relying on this government system to protect their kids. It’s it’s it’s something that needs both. And and the way that you the way that you bolster these online safety rules, I think really is for parents to take a more active role in what their kids are watching online, which is easy to say when uh when you don’t have to do it. It is it is tough to see how this problem can be solved. It’s something that that um has taken many years to even agree on what the law should look like. And even after it was passed, many people in Britain disagree with certain aspects of it. We’ve seen opposition politicians calling it for it to be repealed entirely. Um, which I think risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s it there are good intentions behind this legislation, but the devil is in the detail of how it is implemented and how Offcom chooses to enforce it. I think it is right to go after porn sites in particular and make sure that they have very robust age verification because that is clearly content that is not appropriate for a 13year-old. I think it is also important to make sure that the big social media platforms that are used by billions of people around the world enforce what they say are their own rules about keeping children safe online. And I don’t think that all comes down to checking whether that person is over 18. I think it needs um not just uh a range of different measures on um how you actually check that person’s age, including using machine learning and and and and also and and teen accounts that parents can control, but also potentially auditing of the algorithms that these social media platforms use to serve up content to all of us and to make sure that harmful content does not get amplified by these platforms own technology. I think um that is also part of the legislation. But I think ultimately there are um we have seen the big tech companies step up and become more responsible than they were a decade ago in controlling what is shown to children. But I don’t think it’s the end of the road for that. And I think um more pressure from lawmakers around the world will only make these platforms better for everybody. And in fact, we’ve already seen improved age assessment technology rolled out by YouTube in the US following the changes that they’re being required to make in the UK. And so actually, if the UK’s online safety legislation does anything, it forces companies that are not based in the UK to to raise the bar for safety online for the whole world. As the UK continues to take bold steps, other countries like Australia are watching closely as they plan to put in their own regulations to keep children safe online, weighing the same balance between safety and freedom. But with growing resistance from the Trump administration and the rising use of VPNs, the question now is whether these laws can truly shield the youngest users in a borderless digital world. From London, this has been the FT interview. Thank you for watching.

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