Banning kids from VPNs and social media will infringe on adults’ privacy

A proposed new law banning children from using social media and virtual private networks (VPNs) in the UK would frustrate adults and invade their privacy by requiring them to verify their age to use a range of everyday sites and services, legal experts have warned.

The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) came into force in July 2025 and forces websites to block children from viewing pornography and content deemed dangerous by the government. The legislation was meant to make the internet safer, but tech-savvy kids can easily circumvent the measures.

Facial recognition technology designed to verify age can be confuse with screenshots of video game charactersand a VPN makes it trivial to appear as a user from another country where age verification is not required.

So the news that the most visited porn site saw a 77 percent drop in visits from Great Britain due to OSA should be taken with a grain of salt – users are probably just changing the settings to appear as if they are coming from countries where age verification is unnecessary.

Now opposition peers in the House of Lords have tabled amendments to the forthcoming Child Health and Schools Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament, in what appears to be an attempt to close these loopholes. But their broad wording means they are likely to affect much more than social networks.

The bill was submitted by the Ministry of Education with the aim of supporting children in care and improving the quality of education. But a digital rights expert Heather Burns he says it has become a “monster”, with online safety clauses shoehorned into a largely unrelated law.

Debates over the bill have resulted in lawmakers “talking about online safety one minute and literally school milk the next,” says Burns. “They basically put big complaints about the Online Safety Act into this bill.”

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

Another amendment bans the use of VPNs by those under 16. Given how easy it is to fool age verification tools, this solution is not without its obvious flaws.

“These are terrible amendments,” he says Neil Brown at the decoded.legal law firm. He believes the proposed legislation risks making it illegal for children to use a variety of everyday services, while forcing adults to be age-verified to use them, which risks exposing their web browsing habits to the government or hackers and the public if data is leaked. He is also skeptical of the main argument that banning services for children makes them safer.

“I’m not absolutely convinced that banning kids from social media is the right way to go about it,” says Brown. “The piece I’m missing in all of this, the huge gap, is, can someone please clearly and succinctly describe what the problem is that they’re trying to solve?”

Brown says there is broad agreement that OSA is not fit for purpose, but there are differing views 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 pass parliament as the Labor government has already said they will consult the VPN ban for children separately and in access to social networks. Australia has already banned social media for under-16s, and the European Union is considering similar legislation.

James Bakerspokesman for the Open Rights Group, said The new scientist that the amendments would allow sthe Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology to add sites and services at will to the list making them fall within the Department’s remit.

“This would require adults to hand over personal or biometric data to third-party providers to generate digital-age credentials simply to access lawful content. Children’s safety is vital, but giving ministers sweeping powers to make communications conditional on digital ID is a deep and risky extension of state control,” says Baker.

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

“It’s such a witch-hunt culture, and if Wikipedia had an age verification system, they’d be able to get that data,” says Burns. “That seems to be the future some people in the UK want by making age checks.

It was managed by the Ministry of Education, which proposed the bill New Scientist’s questions to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which did not respond.

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