It began as a plan to “keep children safe online.” It has become a national realization about how far the government can reach into the digital lives of its citizens.
The UK’s Online Safety Act has turned into a case study in how a law written for protection can give no protection and end up with mass surveillance.
When peers in the House of Lords met this week to examine its effects, they sounded little like guardians of youth safety, and it was easy to tell they don’t have enough self-awareness to realize they’ve helped unleash a monster.
Lord Clement-Jones, the Liberal Democrat technology spokesperson, noted that young people are already avoiding the law’s controls.
VPNs, he said, are now used on a “widespread” scale, which “risks rendering age-assurance measures ineffective.”
The statement revealed a central problem: the people being protected are already finding their way around the digital ID rules. They always will.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales expressed the issue plainly. Calling the Act “very poorly thought-out legislation,” he told The House magazine: “We will not be age-gating Wikipedia under any circumstances, so, if it comes to that, it’s going to be an interesting showdown, because we’re going to just refuse to do it. Politically, what are they going to do? They could block Wikipedia. Good luck with that.”
Wales’s refusal is part of a natural broader discomfort with the idea of regulating access to information through identification.
Under the new law, platforms must verify users’ ages through ID checks or similar systems. Millions of users will have to prove their identity before they can post or browse. Privacy groups describe this as a national identity program introduced without open debate.
With data breaches still frequent across both government and corporate systems, the setup creates an environment where every login carries potential exposure.
VPN use has increased in response. These tools, once associated with cybersecurity professionals, now serve anyone who prefers to maintain privacy online. They allow people to move through the internet without revealing personal data.
Hellbound and Down 