VPNs are expected to come under the scrutiny of governments implementing policies for the protection of minors online (e.g., UK, Australia), as they are used to bypass controls, according to “Verge.”
When mandatory age verification was applied in the summer on sites with harmful content for minors (e.g., pornography, self-harm, eating disorders) in the UK, VPN services saw an increase in usage of up to 1,800%, while five of the top ten free apps in Apple’s App Store were VPNs.
A VPN is a privacy tool, hiding your IP address so that it appears you are connecting, for example, from Switzerland instead of Greece.
By using a VPN, a tool that offers privacy and security in browsing the internet (especially for journalists, activists, etc.), users can hide their IP address and their activity from providers, making it appear they are connecting from another country. In this way, residents of countries such as the UK can completely bypass age verification.
The most likely scenario is not that governments will call for their banning, as that would be ineffective, nor that they will demand sites with harmful content block users with VPNs (as, for different reasons, Ticketmaster does), but rather the imposition of age verification within the VPN services themselves.
Πηγή: The Verge
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