With such types of bans, there is no way to properly enforce this. All this does is put people in worse positions and risk more online. All children will find a way to get past this one way or the other.
And if they’d manage to properly enforce it? It is unclear how exactly would under 18s become more protected from not being able to use vpn.
I have never heard anyone express concern about VPNs. Only the government.
You can read that both ways.
The UK government has gone completely nuts. It’s only a matter of time before they attempt to outlaw E2EE in general.
The US tried to ban encryption way back. Perhaps UK is slowly trying to do that so it sticks this time? I don’t know. It’s impossible for me to rationalize the idiocy from once a global superpower.
They already have : (
Only 3 more years until the next general election. Three. More. Years.
Pls make it stop 
How are they going to enforce this?
I heard it will apply to app stores at the point of download. If you already have the program it won’t apply. But won’t my VPN provider need to check? I trust companies like Proton but have never age verified any other service. How will they enforce access to Tor or is that exempt?
It sounds like Signal will be affected. Will I need to find a zero knowledge alternative?
I don’t think they can properly enforce this.
Sure, some closed off or highly controlled marketplaces like app stores may be subject to checking for your age but there are always going to be ways to bypass this. This will likely result in a fragmented manner in which people download and install apps on their devices.
If Apple truly wanted to be the good guys here, they would allow you to install such important apps independent of app stores like how you can on desktop. But we will have to wait and see how terrible they want to keep being with the ongoing enshittification plaguing the company at the moment.
If VPN companies are “forced” to comply, there will be a clean updated copy of each app and each update thereafter on torrent sites for all to download and use the app like nothing changed. And I also reckon this will lead to some “trusted” sources who provide these torrents for everyone’s sake. This is all but a given should it get this far.
Why exactly?
It meets the criteria for requiring age verification without having an exemption. SMS and email is exempt but I think Signal is exactly what they are targeting. They don’t seem to understand encrypted email exists bet it is also required for government services.
Obviously I’ll install a FOSS zero knowledge messaging application and it won’t be difficult convincing everyone else to use it. Children will find ways around these laws and privacy will be dead.
All of my computers have redundant VPN programs installed and stored in a portable format. Whichever provider ignores the government will get my money. I’m going to download Mac and Windows versions as well now. My router has a VPN client but I’ll need to change that to another country. I’m also going to start torrenting lots of stuff while I still can.
I was in a used tech shop earlier and the shelves were bare. A used 500GB SATA SSD was the same price as a new 1TB one. This shop can be expensive but come on! I think everyone is stockpiling now.
I think the better way you should evaluate VPNs is whichever provider cannot even provide data even if they wanted to is the one you/we should be using. That’s all VPNs PG currently recommends seeing how you can purchase and access it anonymously and the VPNs themselves don’t log anything so there is no PII they have.
On a UK note but unrelated somewhat they want to ban social media for under 16s similar to what is happening in Australia, I’d imagine it will be a similar age verification to login / download social media apps.
My inernet provider can see which VPN service I’m connecting to and VPNs which don’t comply can be blacklisted in the UK. A knock-on effect of this is websites voluntarily enforce age verification, regardless of where my VPN is set to.
Another consequence is future mobile devices with unlockable bootloaders and independent app stores might be banned. If one large market does it this practice will become the norm internationally.
Scanning for child abuse is next. This will require AI in every device or external auditing and broken encryption.
How would the UK force a Swedish company aka Mullvad to comply with this? Mullvad can simply just say fuck off like how 4chan and Kiwifarms did with age verification. It isn’t Mullvad’s problem that people in the UK is using it. The only way I can see the UK can enforce it is to ban the use of VPN.
If any non-UK VPN providers comply with this I wouldn’t trust them and never use them again. If they can comply with this what stopping them from complying with a backdoor in the future? It is honestly a good test to see which VPN provider has a spine.
I really feels bad for the people in the UK. 
Tor might be a good workaround for this, ISP wont be able to predict your entry node. Route traffic TOR → VPN if you need extra security insulating the exit node
Pretty speculative at this point. Anything is possible, but Im not sure how any modern government would enforce where you install software from. Even Chinese & Russian citizens find ways to install VPN clients
This would require (1) tremendous local AI processing capabilities, or (2) government mandated network connections. Both would seem to face considerable hurdles
That is something they are going for. They just aren’t saying it in so many words. or maybe they did, and I missed it.
What will likely happen is that UK blocks Mullvad’s website from even opening and hence blocking people from using it. That’s the idea. Obviously, this won’t work.
It kinda is when a country is blocking their residents to access and sign up to their service. These are the folks who need it the most too.
Apple devices have had this capability since 2021. Phones from 2015 have basic object recognition. It isn’t implausible. At the very least they can run checksums on files.