Having already installed itself as the nation’s digital nanny with its online censorship law, the Online Safety Act, the government is now peering into the last remaining corner of online privacy and wondering whether it, too, might benefit from a sturdy padlock.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has confirmed that ministers are examining new powers to move beyond social media age limits and into the architecture of private browsing itself. The latest idea involves ID checks for VPN use and chatbots.
Naturally, this is all for the children.
A VPN, or virtual private network, is often treated like a villainous contraption, but it’s actually a tool that encrypts your internet traffic and masks your location. In plain English, it stops internet providers, advertisers, and sometimes governments from tracking what you read, watch, or search.
Reclaim Your Digital Freedom.
Get unfiltered coverage of surveillance, censorship, and the technology threatening your civil liberties.
Businesses use them for secure communications, journalists and activists use them to avoid profiling, and ordinary citizens use them because they do not fancy being cataloged like rare butterflies in a state-run specimen drawer.
Their entire purpose is privacy and getting around censorship.
Under the Online Safety Act, many websites and apps must now verify age through ID checks or facial scanning.
Access to online spaces has been neatly stapled to identity documentation. Unsurprisingly, VPN use increased sharply once this regime came into force. When you tell a nation it must show its passport to read something mildly controversial, people tend to look for the digital equivalent of a back door.
Now ministers are considering restrictions aimed specifically at under-18s using VPNs to bypass these age gates.
In a public letter outlining the next phase of policy, Starmer wrote that the government is examining: “Limiting VPN access for kids: to make it harder for kids to get around age limits of services or certain functionalities.”
The technical implications are major. To prevent minors from accessing VPN services, providers would have to verify users’ ages before granting encrypted connections. That means collecting identity data at the very point where users are seeking to shield their identity.
A privacy tool that demands age documentation stops being a privacy tool in any meaningful sense. No credible VPN provider does ID checks for access. If they did, the entire premise would collapse.
Starmer, a pro-digital ID prime minister who has supported jailing people for tweets, has argued that urgency is paramount. “Technology is moving really fast, and the law has got to keep up,” he said.
His office has indicated that new delegated powers would allow ministers to introduce further controls without fresh primary legislation, enabling action “within months, rather than waiting years for new primary legislation every time technology evolves.”
The government is also consulting on banning under-16s from social media entirely, restricting features such as infinite scroll and autoplay, and extending rules to AI chatbots. Starmer stated: “The action we took on Grok sent a clear message that no platform gets a free pass.”
Technology Secretary Liz Kendall struck an even more posturing note:
“I know that parents across the country want us to act urgently to keep their children safe online. That’s why I stood up to Grok and Elon Musk when they flouted British laws and British values.
“We will not wait to take the action families need, so we will tighten the rules on AI chatbots and we are laying the ground so we can act at pace on the results of the consultation on young people and social media.
“We are determined to give children the childhood they deserve and to prepare them for the future at a time of rapid technological change.”
There it is again: urgency, childhood, protection. The language is comforting. It is also politically immaculate. Who wants to be the person arguing against children’s safety?
Beneath the warm rhetoric lies something colder. Requiring identity papers to use encryption would hardwire state oversight into the basic mechanics of the internet. It reframes encryption itself as something to be gated and permissioned.
VPNs are legal. They are widely used for legitimate security reasons. To put age verification at their entrance would be among the most far-reaching state interventions into online anonymity seen in a Western democracy. It would place the United Kingdom in uncomfortable company, closer in spirit to overt authoritarian regimes where encryption is treated as suspicious by default.
Britain is already experiencing a decline in civil liberties that many observers find troubling. Expanding executive control over private browsing would be a statement about who ultimately governs the invisible spaces where citizens read, think, and explore.
Wrapping this policy in the language of safety does not disguise what it represents: a government claiming the authority to decide when and how its citizens may browse in private.
Of course, that is what Starmer wants. He is openly supportive of digital ID frameworks and has backed an overreaching approach to online speech. This is a political choice to expand executive control over private life. It should be confronted with the gravity it demands and the suspicion it has earned.
