The VPN hunt is on

As regulators look to sharpen the Online Safety Bill, VPNs are now in their sights

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Have attempts to drive underage visitors from pornography sites worked? The raw numbers would suggest so.

Visits to porn sites fell by a third in the three months after age-gating came into effect last July, according to regulator Ofcom, with one site reporting UK traffic falling by as much as three-quarters. How many of those were underage visitors is impossible to tell, but it's not enough to satisfy some: VPNs are now in the firing line.

The Children's Commissioner Rachel de Souza told the BBC in the summer that the age-gate-avoiding VPNs are "absolutely a loophole that needs closing", while tech minister Baroness Lloyd suggested that "nothing is off the table" when it comes to protecting children online. With Ofcom now conducting research into VPN usage in the UK, will restrictions on VPN usage become the next technology battleground?

Ofcom's VPN research

Ofcom's research into VPN usage in the UK was exposed by our sister site, TechRadar. The regulator told the site that it was using "a leading third-party provider, which is widely used in the industry, to gather information on VPN usage. "The provider combines multiple data sources to train its models and generate usage estimates," Ofcom added, suggesting the monitoring tool is using Al analysis. "The data we access and use in our analyses is fully aggregated at the app level, and no personally identifiable or user-level information is ever included."