You may or may not be aware that the deadline for websites to comply with the UK Online Safety Act has now passed. This means that if they include any adult content (even if that's not their primary purpose), they need properly enforced age checks to access some or all content. This means these requirements aren't specific to obviously adult websites, but also include things like Reddit, Instagram and Bluesky.
We have displayed a healthy sceptisim about this plan in the past, mostly because of just how trivial it would be to bypass these checks. So it has proved - downloads of VPN apps have rocketed in the UK. VPNs allow you to effectively appear as though you're visiting a website from somewhere other than the UK, thereby avoiding any UK specific checks that website has put in place.
People have been finding more creative ways round these checks too. Some of the protection systems that websites have put in place use a video of your face to verify your age. Except... it has no way of knowing what "your" face looks like. Given the realism of some video games these days, it appears that some of these systems are fooled by pointing your camera a character in one of these games.
On the VPN thing - this is very likely to lead to problems for a lot of people. All a VPN is really is "Someone else's computer". If that provider is reputable, you're probably OK. If not (and very few of the "free" ones that people seem to be downloading are), you're identifiably routing all of your internet traffic through who knows what computer, and they're doing who knows what with the information about you that they're gathering.
That is half the problem here. The other half is that it's only the reputable sites that will even be bothering to comply with this law anyway. That means if you're trying to avoid these verification checks, you're more likely to end up on a less reputable site that are less stringent about moderating the content they include, and more likely to include malware that could compromise your device.
So, the problems are clear - if you're someone that wants to get at adult content, whether you're over 18 or not, it's still trivial to bypass these ID checks, and you're more likely to end up in the darker areas of the internet when searching for a site that doesn't include one of these ID challenges.
However, this does overlook one scenario, and potentially the most important one. What this change should, in theory, reduce the chance of happening, is accidentally ending up looking at adult content when you didn't mean to. Certainly in the case of the children this law is targetted at, that is definitely a plausible scenario - innocently clicking through on a couple of links and ending up somewhere you didn't expect. Depending on your viewpoint, that alone is enough of a reason for this change to exist, however annoying it may be for adults that don't want to have to prove their identity. We'll find out over the next few weeks how things stand once the dust settles on these changes.