Mentioning VPNs is also explicitly illegal
Source? Cause mine (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50 aka the fucking law) doesn’t say anything like that.
Section 4.37 of Ofcom’s Guidance on Highly Effective Age Assurance for Part 3 Services:
In addition, service providers should not publish content on their service that directs or encourages UK users to circumvent the age assurance process or the access controls, for example by providing information about or links to a virtual private network (VPN) which may be used by children to circumvent the relevant processes.
That’s guidance, not law.
Should, not must. Like the highway code should rules and must rules.
The Fucking Law does say that, you’re just not reading it closely enough.
Source: your source
Well, nope.
Okay 🤷
Not who you’re responding to but techlinked called out that it’s illegal as well and showed the legislation text in their video. But if you’re not implementing the ID check in the first place then mentioning vpns doesn’t matter at all. I can’t even get your link to load.
Edit: timestamp 1:50 https://youtu.be/uGJHzPHOFXM
I don’t believe guidelines are above the actual law.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k81lj8nvpo
According to Ofcom, platforms must not host, share or permit content encouraging use of VPNs to get around age checks.
The government told the BBC under the Online Safety Act, it will be illegal for platforms to do this.
Ofcom is the regulator so I’m guessing they read the law a little more closely than you. And BBC states that the government explicitly told them it would be illegal.
Reddit is super-screwed then because its full of users doing exactly that anywhere this topic comes up.
I very much doubt it has anything to do with being a citizen. The law would apply to the company making the statements itself.
“platforms must not host, share or permit content encouraging use of VPNs to get around age checks.”
I’ll also note that this doesn’t seem to even be in the official documentation.
Simple defense: “I wasn’t encouraging anything, I was just informing them.”
Yeah, that would be the first time enforcement didn’t really bother to read the law they should be enforcing.
So they might add it later when stuff like this becomes more common, but right now it’s not illegal, according to the law and disregarding everything else that doesn’t really have any legal hold and is really just a guideline.
You didn’t read the second sentence of that quote.
Wait, what‽
Source?
Source: Dude trust me. It’s not there anywhere.
Reminds me of a professor who linked a pirate copy of the text book in his syllabus and warned several times do not attempt to use these sources because doing so is a violation of copyright law! Please purchase the book!
I know someone who did that with his own book. Why? The publisher fucked him over in terms of pay. He even corrected a mistake in the original one.
As a counter to your story, I had one professor who required his students to purchase his own locally produced textbook, which had a new version with different exercises every semester or year, and I guess he made good money off of that because everybody thought he was an asshole for doing it, but he did it anyways.
Yeah, happily enough that wouldn’t fly here and is actually considered a felony and surely cost someone tenure.
Not that they won’t try to find ways around it (and surely some do), but if it’s too obvious it lands them in hot water fast.
There was a law professor who lost both his tenure and law licence for it at the other university in the town I studied while I was there.
I fear that calling them out so obviously it will just push them to target vpns next.
Blocking vpns is tricky in a western society because so many companies cannot function without them.
They wouldn’t block the protocol, just the most common commercial providers. That’s very easily doable.
hey Alexa, deploy an ec2 instance of openvpn with a socks proxy and email me the connection info.
what is “dumb club” ? will vmess prevent authoritarians from packet sniffing?
Then Brits can use TOR 😎
If they block the publicly-accessible nodes too, they can use bridges.
That’d quickly become a game of whac-a-mole.
Many have tried that, IMO getting the word out about VPNs even to non-technical users is important because most people still don’t know what that is. If they ever try to ban VPNs, even non-technical people will know how to use them and how to avoid the bans.
