what are your views on this?
The legislation behind it, namely the UK's Online Safety Act is deeply flawed, detrimental to its stated aim and arguably an assault on free speech.
The organization behind the Act, OFCOM has produced many hundreds, possibly thousands of pages of guidance to be followed in order to assist websites with compliance. The majority of it is over-verbose, word salad. OFCOM has created a Frankensteinian monster that may in the long run cause more harm than good.
This Act serves to replace that old fashioned notion that it is the parent who should in the first instance protect their children from harm. When I was a child so called top shelf magazines were common place as was bullying and peer pressure to do stupid things. We survived for the most part due to good parenting.
Our somewhat dim Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle recently stated that children don't search for pornography, pornography seeks out the child. Really? He clearly doesn't have children which is probably for the best.
So sites containing adult content are now age-gated in the UK which has lead to a massive increase in VPN usage. Adults and undoubtedly children are installing free VPNs by the million but of course nothing comes for free. Some of these VPNs come with payloads that are potentially far more dangerous than pornography. Where there's prohibition there will always be an opportunity for criminals and this is no exception.
This is just one aspect of the Act which is flawed but there are many others. I'll save the rest for another time!
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www.theguardian.com
