England urges age checks on VPNs under Online Safety Act

England’s children’s commissioner has urged the government to close what she calls a significant loophole in the Online Safety Act by requiring age verifications on virtual private networks, or VPNs, that minors can use to bypass age checks for explicit online content. The call comes as a new survey-backed report shows a sharp rise in young people encountering explicit material online, often by accident, prompting renewed debate over how best to balance child protection with digital privacy.

The Online Safety Act, implemented earlier this year, places new duties on platforms to verify or estimate users’ ages before granting access to explicit content. But VPNs, which reroute internet traffic through remote servers in other jurisdictions and mask a user’s actual location, can render those protections ineffective. In the wake of heightened enforcement and age checks on sites like adult content providers, VPN usage has surged, complicating the government’s objective of restricting underage access.

The commissioner’s report draws on responses from 1,020 people aged 16 to 21 and finds that 70 percent had viewed explicit content before turning 18, with a substantial portion...