Banning children from VPNs and social media will erode adults’ privacy

A new UK bill banning children from using social media and virtual private networks (VPNs) would frustrate adults and infringe on their privacy as they will have to verify their age to use a host of everyday sites and services, legal experts warn.

The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) came into force in July 2025, requiring websites to prevent children from viewing pornography and content that the government deems to be dangerous. The legislation was intended to make the internet safer, but tech-savvy children can easily circumvent the measures.

Facial recognition technology designed to verify age can be fooled using screenshots of video game characters, and VPNs make it trivial to appear on websites as a user from another country where age verification is not mandatory.

So the news that the most-visited porn website saw a 77% drop in visits from the UK as a result of the OSA should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt: users are probably just changing their settings to make it look like they’re from countries where age checks aren’t required.

Opposition peers in the House of Lords today proposed amendments to the upcoming Child Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, which appear to attempt to close these loopholes. But their broad wording means they will likely affect more than just social media.

The bill was introduced by the Department for Education to support children in care and improve the quality of education. But digital rights expert Heather Burns says it has become a “monster”, with online safety clauses embedded in a largely independent law.

Debates over the bill saw lawmakers “talking about online safety one minute and literally school milk the next,” Burns says. “They basically incorporated into this bill outstanding grievances regarding the Online Safety Act.”

One amendment seeks to ban children under 16 from using social media, but defines it quite broadly as “user-to-user services.” This means that a host of other platforms will fall into the same category, including Wikipedia, WhatsApp, forums or even a shared family calendar.

Another amendment prohibits the use of VPNs by those under 16 years of age. Given how easily age verification tools are fooled, this solution is not without obvious flaws.

“These are terrible amendments,” says Neil Brown of law firm decoded.legal. He believes the proposed legislation risks making a variety of everyday services illegal for children, while requiring adults to face mandatory age checks to use them, potentially exposing their browsing habits to the government or hackers, and to the public in the event of a data leak. He is also skeptical of the main argument, that barring children from services makes them safer.

“I’m completely unconvinced that banning children from social media is the right way to solve the problem,” Brown says. “What I’m missing, the huge gap in all of this, is: Can someone please clearly and concisely lay out what the problem is that they’re trying to solve?

Brown says there is broad consensus that the OSA is not fit for purpose, but opinions differ on why: child safety campaigners say it doesn’t go far enough, while digital rights campaigners say it goes too far.

He also doubts these amendments will be passed by Parliament, as the Labor government has already said it will hold separate consultations on banning VPNs for children and on access to social media. Australia has already banned social media for under-16s and the European Union is considering similar legislation.

James Baker, spokesperson for the Open Rights Group, said New scientist that the amendments would allow the sThe Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology will be able to add sites and services to a list at will which will bring them under the jurisdiction of the ministry.

“It would require adults to hand over personal or biometric data to third-party providers to generate a digital-age identifier simply to access lawful content. Children’s safety is vital, but giving ministers sweeping powers to subordinate communication to digital identification is a profound and risky expansion of state control,” says Baker.

Burns warns that the legislation would leave a paper trail of citizens’ browsing habits, which may be risky now or in the future. The US Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform recently requested information on Wikipedia users who, for example, edited an article about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“It’s kind of a witch-hunt culture, and if Wikipedia had an age verification system in place, they could have pulled that data out,” Burns says. “This is the future that some people in the UK seem to want by demanding age checks.”

The Ministry of Education, which proposed the bill, ordered New scientist questions on this subject to the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Technology, which did not respond.