Proton VPN had increased their signups by 1400% after UK introduced the age verification system

According to this report, the UK has decided to introduce a verification to prevent children and underage users from accessing adult content; therefore, for that, the sites and apps should use methods like facial recognition. However, this goes against users’ privacy, these kinds of restrictions can be overcome easily by using a VPN.

Due to this, one of the most reputable VPN, Proton VPN, reported an increase of 1400% during the first day of the introduction of these measures. This proves that these kinds of measures are useless, as the people who wanna use these kinds of services often know how to bypass the controls.

Here in Korea, there are similar restrictions for adult content, but they are easy to skip through a VPN. At the end of the day, it is the government trying to control the contents and get information about your private life. This is dangerous, as many times the systems are not protected enough and potentially could be a data leak, as we saw recently with SKT. If this data is leaked, it is impossible to protect.

This also could go against democracy, as one of the needed factors to make a democracy work is the freedom to access information. Potentially, a non democratic government could try to use these systems to prevent access and check who had access to information against them. Thankfully, the good thing about the internet and the most beautiful thing about it is that it is open to everyone, and we should keep it like that. For me, it is parent’s responsibility to control and manage the behaviour of their underage children online, even though sometimes this is not easy.

Source: Mashable.com