UK Push to Broaden Online Age Checks Faces Backlash as Kids Evade Safeguards

Overview

• Privacy and internet-rights groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, the Tor Project, the Open Rights Group, and the Internet Society issued a joint statement warning that wider age checks could turn the internet into age‑gated zones and restrict access to information.
• The UK is taking views on stricter rules through its Growing up in the online world consultation, which explores a minimum social media age, limits on features like infinite scroll and autoplay, tighter rules for AI chatbots and gaming, and broader use of age checks.
• Under Ofcom’s child‑safety framework, services that children use may have to add stronger age checks, filter harmful content from feeds, improve moderation, and face fines or court‑ordered blocks if they ignore the rules.
• An Internet Matters survey found age checks are now common on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Roblox, yet many children say they can bypass them with fake birthdays, borrowed logins, spoofed faces or VPNs, including one case where a drawn moustache fooled a facial check.
• Families report only modest safety gains since the Online Safety Act took effect, with about half of children seeing more age‑appropriate content but harmful material still widespread, while parents raise fresh privacy worries about ID data being stored or reused and advocates press for safer design over access bans.