'A disaster waiting to happen' — Cybersecurity experts react to UK age verification law

By George Phillips for Tom's Guide
Sunday, August 3, 2025

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It's the view of one expert that we could be seeing the "new normal," and he suggested we may have to accept "some compromise of our privacy."

Dr Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of security company ImmuniWeb, accepted that there is disagreement over the law's effectiveness. However, he said, "we probably need to accept it as a new reality that will likely become the 'new normal' in many countries pretty soon."

"There is a compelling interest to protect our children from harmful content," Dr Kolochenko said. He continued by saying, "it is true that protection of minors will probably require some compromise of our privacy — if properly implemented."

Proper implementation would mean securely handling sensitive information, minimal to no sharing and deleting it once age verification checks are passed. If this is done, Dr Kolochenko believed "the mandatory age-verification mechanism may hold water," but other experts are not so sure.

Dr Kolochenko addressed the VPN loophole we have seen many Brits taking advantage of, and hypothesized VPN traffic being targeted in the near future. "We will probably see additional legislation pretty soon that will require adult-oriented websites to ban VPN traffic," he said.

"Certainly, some VPNs will remain undetected. However, about 90% of most popular free and commercial VPN services can be fingerprinted and will likely be blocked by adult-content providers, closing the loophole."

We are yet to see any indication of this or even an outright VPN ban in the U.K. This would be incredibly dangerous and amount to internet censorship. In countries where internet censorship is rampant, VPN providers have to turn to obfuscation. Read Full Article