Comment on I highlighted the VPN part so that everyone knows to not use them
rikudou@lemmings.world 15 hours agoSource? Cause mine (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.
Ofcom is the designated regulator and has the power of enforcement. The law doesn’t define what it set out what age verification means, only that they much be ‘highly effective’ (Section 12 (6)). It is therefore left to Ofcom to set out in its Code of Practices (Section 41 (3)) what ‘highly effective age verification’ means, which is what this guidance is. This isn’t Ofcom being nice, this is them telling you how they’re going to enforce the law.
Nobody is above law. If UK courts are not entirely corrupted, they’ll rule according to the law. This happens all the time with law enforcement enforcing more than the law says.
Should, not must. Like the highway code should rules and must rules.
tyler@programming.dev 15 hours ago
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.
rikudou@lemmings.world 15 hours ago
I don’t believe guidelines are above the actual law.
tyler@programming.dev 15 hours ago
www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k81lj8nvpo
Ofcom is the regulator so I’m guessing they read the law a little more closely than you.
rikudou@lemmings.world 15 hours ago
Yeah, that would be a 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.
Skavau@piefed.social 14 hours ago
Reddit is super-screwed then because its full of users doing exactly that anywhere this topic comes up.