Why the UK’s Online Safety Law Misses the Real Problem
Published Date:
Last Updated:
The UK’s newly enforced online safety rules aim to prevent children from accessing 18+ content online, but in reality, they are both technically flawed and trivially easy to bypass. From the moment the legislation came into effect in July 2025, young people and adults alike have been finding workarounds, raising serious doubts about how well this policy has been thought through.
Take VPNs, for example. These tools allow users to mask their location and appear to be browsing from outside the UK. Within hours of the rules going live, VPN downloads in the UK surged. It is legal, simple, and completely undermines the law’s intended effect.
Worse still, the so-called advanced facial verification systems are already being exposed as laughably weak. One user managed to fool Discord’s age check by holding up a screen showing Norman Reedus’s character from Death Stranding. The AI believed it was a real person. That is how fragile these systems are.
And yet, adults are now expected to upload passports, scan their faces, or hand over sensitive personal data just to view legal content, while underage users slip through the cracks unnoticed. The result is ineffective protection for children and a growing loss of digital privacy for everyone else.
The hard truth is this: many parents simply are not doing their jobs. Modern devices like iPhones, Android phones, and Windows PCs come with built-in tools that let parents block adult content, set screen time limits, and monitor what their children are doing. These controls are widely available. They just are not being used enough.
We should not be redesigning the internet to compensate for poor parenting. The burden of protecting children online must sit with those responsible for raising them. It is not acceptable to infringe on the freedoms of every UK citizen just because some parents have not taken the time to activate parental controls. Education and engagement, not sweeping regulation, is where the real solution lies.
Sources
PC Gamer – “Brits can get around Discord’s age verification thanks to Death Stranding’s photo mode”
TechRadar – “VPN apps are topping UK app stores right now – here’s why”
TechRadar (privacy edition) – “Age verification requirements have landed in the UK – how the internet will change, and what about your privacy?”