Age verification. Denial of privacy in the name of protecting children, in a way that only harms them.

Under the guise of protecting children, the UK’s Online Safety Act has introduced sweeping online surveillance measures — forcing millions of users to give up privacy just to browse the internet.

From July 25, 2025, any site or platform hosting content classified as "not safe for children" must verify the exact age of every visitor. This doesn’t mean a simple "Are you 18?" checkbox. It means:

• Uploading your government-issued ID

• Scanning your face

• Linking your credit card or mobile carrier account

• Or using third-party digital ID systems

  
  

All this data — sensitive, personal, irreversible — will be collected and processed simply to access a website. Non-compliant platforms face massive fines or even nationwide blocking.

What exactly is considered as "adult content"? Not only pornographic and other NSFW related sites have to implement age verification. Government also requires content that content that “encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for self-harm, eating disorders, and suicide"; and, among other things, “content which depicts or encourages serious violence or injury.”

This led to sites like reddit, to restrict access to subreddits such as r/periods, r/stopsmoking, r/stopdrinking or r/sexualassault. They provide support for people in hard times, or important information about sensitive topics, and it was often teens who got help this way. Now to use them, users must verify their age by submitting ID. Teenagers, kids and everyone who isn't willing to submit their most important documents to a website, have been cut off from what for some, might've been the only source of support. All in the name of "Protecting children".

Other content to which access is being restricted, are political news. About what's happening in Gaza or in Ukraine. This isn't content that teenagers should be "protected from". It's knowledge about what's happening in the world, and how the world is reacting to it. And still, not only teenagers and kids are being cut off from it. Everybody not willing to verify their age is.

And not verifying the age is the rational thing to do. Companies constantly have data breaches. Both big and small ones. Now let's imagine, that thousands of ID photos suddenly get stollen, and go on dark web. With someone's ID in their possession, identity theft is nothing for a hacker. Same goes if the method of age verification is face scan. If hackers get their hands on those, then again, they can pretend to be this person, and get a loan, or open an bank account, or commit cyber crimes, as the person who face scan or ID they have. That would obviously be a hell for anyone who's identity would be stolen.

Other danger is, what if , due to a data breach, a list of visitors of PornHub, or other pornographic site, along whit what videos they have watched would go online? Or if the same happened with site for people who experienced sexual abuse? How would it impact jobs of these people? How would their friends and families react?

And to add to all of it, age verification doesn't even work. The systems used by Reddit and Discord are being fooled by screenshots from the game Death Stranding. VPNs allow users to pretend to be browsing from somewhere other than the U.K. And many determined children or teens will just steel the ID form wallet of a parent, and still get access to whatever they want to.

And sadly, UK may just be the beginning. The US supreme court recently upheld a Texas age-verification law, and half of the American states, have passed laws with similar intentions and implementations, usually under the guise of preventing access to porn. Lots of services decide to ask for age and identity verification — anything that requires a credit card is effectively doing so.

If the people allow this to happen, the internet might change forever, with much of it being cut off, unless you agree to reveal who you are.