Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2026/05/15/mozilla-to-uk-regulators-vpns-are-essential-privacy-and-security-tools-and-should-not-be-undermined/

by WithinReason • 2 months ago

808 331 2 months ago

blog.mozilla.org

msuniverse2026• 2 months ago

UK regulators are just hearing another excuse for a loicense.

anonymous2024• 2 months ago

And also VPNs are tools to open doors in the minefield of legislations that they need to create to improve the incoming of some business, not of the people that voted for them.

egamirorrim• 2 months ago

The UK gov needs to sod off with all this 1984 BS

ifwinterco• 2 months ago

UK is not and has never been a free society, UK elites have an authoritarian streak.

Historically they were fairly smart at doing it subtly but the mask slipped during Covid and they never really put it back on.

Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular. Normies supported covid lockdowns and they don’t want their kids watching porn either.

The people yearn to be ruled and nannied

budududuroiu• 2 months ago

I've heard people on HN make the argument that a blanket ban is better because their kids won't feel it's unfair that only their family implements strict internet blocks

pibaker• 2 months ago

Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular.

This stuff wasn't unpopular on HN until it actually happened. Almost every submission on HN about social media had people calling for similar regulations or even outright bans. It was not until they actually started asking for IDs when HNers realized what they really wanted to achieve with these laws.

wqaatwt• 2 months ago

There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.

iLoveOncall2• 2 months ago

VPNs are essential privacy tools

Does Mozilla not understand that this is the exact reason why the UK wants to forbid them?

reddalo• 2 months ago

And that's also the reason why they introduced "age verification". It's not age verification, they couldn't care less about children.

Age verification is just mass surveillance under a fake name.

tryauuum• 2 months ago

"privacy tools" doesn't sound strong enough. "tools to bypass censorship of the future fascist government" sound better, though longer

I always remember a video snippet of some meeting in US, some chinese looking woman says something like "Mao took our guns and killed us all, I'm never giving up my rifle". Some politician reminds her that they live in the democracy. She asks him something like "can you guarantee me that in 20 years it will still be a democracy", which he admits he can't

found the video https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/1c13kkz/survivor_...

robotswantdata• 2 months ago

1984 was meant to be a warning, not the UK’s digital infrastructure roadmap

juleiie2• 2 months ago

1984 is extremely naive.

It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check.

So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give freedom away if only they get a stable job and housing in exchange. Or if it hits these other guys they don’t like at the moment.

It’s all much, much less dramatic than Orwell. It is an ordinary, everyday erosion of your rights until one day you will realize that you lost something very important but it will be no longer possible to say it out loud.

One such example is China where all dissent was eliminated because people there prefer comfortable cage. Or Singapore. Seemingly majority doesn’t give a flying dick as long as government buys them.

Maybe the Orwellian times were different but it is what it is. It’s easier than ever to just buy people.

amiga3863• 2 months ago

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty and forced labour regardless of wage. But Stalin ruled through fear, within his party and without. His secret police looked everywhere for dissent and punished it severely. They bugged people, followed people, cultivated informers, asked children to inform on their parents, tried to instill loyalty to the state over and above their own family... they "disappeared" people (either shooting them or sending them to gulags), sometimes entire families. To send a message to any other potential rebels. And unsurprisingly, people wanted out. It was already illegal to leave the USSR without permission, the Berlin Wall was just the most prominent part of that. One of the reasons people stayed in the USSR was because even if they had a chance to escape, they knew the party would punish their family. This is the real world that Orwell amped up. The "memory hole" is code for Soviet censorship, which was rife - see the NKVD commissar vanish here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...

You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country?

Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?

miki1232115• 2 months ago

Which is why I like "Brave new World" a lot more.

It actually asks hard questions and explores the tradeoff of an "utopian dystopia." In contrast to the society Orwell describes, where the government is cartoonishly evil, the one of "Brave New World" genuinely cares for the happiness of its subjects, and most of its subjects are genuinely happy, even if we disagree with the methods that it uses. This is by design; I read somewhere that Orwell wanted to position 1984 in explicit contract to Huxley, killing any debate on whether his described society was better or worse than the one the book was written in.

I think he heavily underestimated the human ability to ferret out the truth when the only thing the state gives them is lies. Even without access to reliable news sources, most people will at least realize that the news is lying to them. Even if they don't know what the truth is, they'll know that it's not what they're told it is.

I think the key to a working dystopia is to genuinely make people's lives pleasant. We care about the economics a lot more than we care about the politics. If you're a free democratic socialist republic and decrease people's monthly meat rations, citizens will riot and demand true democracy. If you are a democracy and the price of meat goes up due to the bird flu epidemic, people will riot and demand communism and wealth redistribution.

SwtCyber5• 2 months ago

Most people probably don't "give away freedom" in some explicit bargain. They accept one small exception at a time: this restriction is for children, this one is for safety, this one is only for bad actors, this one is temporary

tim3335• 2 months ago

I don't think 1984 is naive and there's maybe a certain naivete in comparing the UK protecting kids from porn to the 1984 type stuff - torture chambers for thought criminals and the like.

protocolture3• 2 months ago

It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check.

No it doesn't make that assumption? The crazy tricks are for the engaged, for the outer party members. The proles just get bread and circuses.

spwa42• 2 months ago

I always thought in the 1984 story people get into trouble despite themselves. The main character is not trying to overthrow the state at all. He wants the girl, and writes down his thoughts, making it easy to accuse him.

Nothing about what he thinks about strikes me as odd or unique in the least. He has simple and obvious reasons for doubting the state ... and only for a little while.

tempodox• 2 months ago

Reality has become indistinguishable from satire.

anjel• 2 months ago

First observed by Tom Leher in the early 1970s

becquerel• 2 months ago

And you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today.

speedgoose• 2 months ago

While their arguments are sound, Perhaps Mozilla should disclose in this document that they are also a VPN reseller.

rvnx2• 2 months ago

It would sound like an advertisement though, so in some way it’s better they don’t mention it

foldr5• 2 months ago

It’s better to hide conflicts of interest?

(Edit: I don’t disagree with Mozilla’s position, but failure to declare an obvious conflict of interest undermines their credibility.)

RobotToaster• 2 months ago

This is the Mozilla foundation, the VPN seller is Mozilla corporation.

foldr5• 2 months ago

The foundation does get some of its funding from the corporation, though.

rustyhancock• 2 months ago

I may be in the minority but I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla's approach here.

They link to the full document which lists their VPN subscriber count near the top of the about Mozilla section.

Izmaki3• 2 months ago

They also advocate for if not enforce HTTPS. Would this be bad if they were also a trusted CA selling signed TLS certs to companies?

rvnx2• 2 months ago

Interesting that they mention the UK but forget that the EU also wants to protect the kids by banning VPNs

SiempreViernes• 2 months ago

So your strategy when you are trying to change someones mind is to mention a lot of other people think like the mind you are trying to change?

Could you explain what is the theory behind that?

windowliker• 2 months ago

This blog post is highlighting their specific contribution to the UK government's open consultation[1], not a general call for sanity. There's a link to their open letter at the end of the piece. No doubt they will write other authorities when the need arises.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...

gib4442• 2 months ago

That would be interesting if the UK were still in the EU, no?

globular-toast3• 2 months ago

This is a fairly difficult problem. I think the internet should be for adults only, like many other things. But we've fucked up by giving children internet access and it's going to be hard to undo it. I think rather than fighting these measures we need to work on alternatives because keeping children off the internet is a good idea, we just need to implement it in a good way.

What about just banning phones for children? Could we ever make that work? It would be like cigarette bans except we now have 5 year olds addicted to tobacco and addict parents who don't want to make them go cold turkey.

Public libraries and schools can be used for genuine research purposes, but not addictive shit. And implemented ad blockers at the network level.

iLoveOncall2• 2 months ago

Or we could realize that there are already 2 generations that grew while having access to the internet and turned out perfectly fine?

ben_w2• 2 months ago

We are many things, but "fine" isn't one of them.

How much the problems today are due to, rather than coincidental with, the internet, is a much more difficult thing to discern.

wafflemaker• 2 months ago

Who knows?

Sexualization of teens is a thing. I personally blame social media together with showbusiness. But kids had access to the internet at the same time.

And the internet was slightly different than it's now. It had much more sharp edges that we learned how to live with.

But it also was much less predatory. World's smartest psychologists and programmers didn't work 80 hour weeks for small fortunes to make it as much addictive as possible.. if it was only that. It's also as triggering and depressing as possible, because distressed and depressed people are engaging more and can't stop.

What I mean to say is that you can't really draw an equal sign between internet we grew up with and the one we give (or choose to limit) to our children.

I don't mean we should block them, just that it's not the same.

globular-toast3• 2 months ago

I would be one of those two generations. I dispute your point on two grounds: first, the internet today isn't what it was back then; secondly, I, and many of my peers, didn't turn out just fine.

Back then the internet was a wild west run by thousands of clever people. It was like living in a neighborhood full of people kind of like you. Nobody built it to be addictive or to cultivate attention. If you wanted something you searched for it. Nowadays everyone is on there and it's run by evil adtech companies. Kids these days are not having the experience we had back then.

It also didn't really do us much good. Already back then geeky types like me had somewhere to retreat to and we did. It took me years to learn real social skills and build a life off of the internet. When I see headlines like "Gen Z aren't having sex" I'm hardly surprised. They're not having sex because they're on the internet. What's more is nobody is learning to be an adult at all. People are in a adult bodies but still totally children at heart. They don't own anything, shun responsibility etc.

aboardRat44• 2 months ago

I had internet since I was a kid. By attacking the internet you are attacking my homeland.

globular-toast3• 2 months ago

How old are you? I had the internet too but my homeland is already gone. Forums are empty, IRC channels quiet. It's just garbage run by adtech companies now.

borzi• 2 months ago

That's why the government wants to get rid of them.

aboardRat44• 2 months ago

Didn't people make kinda that huge and broad movement too terminate PIPA and SOPA?

Could you, my wonderful Western friends, do that again?

I mean, all of it is even on video and largely on YouTube.

ayashko• 2 months ago

Something I learned just recently—the Australian government (surprisingly!) actually recommends VPN usage, they even provide a bit of a guide and how to; https://beconnected.esafety.gov.au/topic-library/advanced-on...

monk_grilla• 2 months ago

That’s funny, I wonder if they might remove it since it is a common way for people to circumvent the ID requirement laws for certain sites.

hiisukun• 2 months ago

They probably should at least update it -- I don't think a government should recommend free VPN services. Too many of them are a form of botnet, malware, ddos, etc.

mjmas• 2 months ago

The very same office of the eSafety commissioner that is enforcing age verification for social media.

https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/blogs/social-media-minim...

danw1979• 2 months ago

Yes. Isn’t effective regulation of dangerous products wonderful.

ropable2• 2 months ago

You say that like it's a bad thing. Not everyone thinks so.

badgersnake2• 2 months ago

The UK government does whatever Meta tells them to do. We tax cigarettes because they’re bad for you. Let’s tax algorithmic news feeds.

canbus• 2 months ago

And who tells Meta what to do?

badgersnake2• 2 months ago

They do what makes money, or what they think will make money.

tim3335• 2 months ago

I'm curious what Meta has changed UK policy wise? I'm a Brit and not heard of such policy changes.

lyu07282• 2 months ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20qwz9xzr9o

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...

Basically Meta wants age verification done by devices, the device makers (apple, google) want it on the platform, two sides who don't want the responsibility. On the other side are hundreds of billions invested in companies that offer age verification to websites (persona, etc.). All of these monied interests generate billions into lobbying/corruption efforts that drive all the legislation across the western liberal "democracies" rn.

usr11062• 2 months ago

User to Mozilla: Cannot read your statement with a variant of your own browser because you have it "protected" by an internet gatekeeper.

HDBaseT3• 2 months ago

Are you referring to Cloudflare?

I am using a fork of Firefox and it works perfectly fine.

usr11062• 2 months ago

Yes, Cloudflare. It says: Your browser is not supported. Use another browser or upgrade. I would upgrade if the vendor of this weaker embedded device provided something...

I know Cloudflare works fine on Firefox desktops and probably also on Android.

acd• 2 months ago

Actually with data fusion VPN does not fix privacy. Ad networks does data fusion of Javascript browser finger print. So you are de cloaked any way on a VPN

867-5309• 2 months ago

most vpns block ads

pretzel52974• 2 months ago

not if the fingerprint code is coming from the first party server which is the case for most modern malware.

fartfeatures2• 2 months ago

You absolutely should not be using the same browser for general browsing and VPN based browsing. Check out Mullvad Browser, based on Tor Browser but without Tor.

Havoc• 2 months ago

I hear the UK regulator did want to respond but Mozilla office doesn't have a fax machine. So the grandpas in charge of regulating modern tech just took a nap instead

cryo326• 2 months ago

I have seen some of the inside of this and it's not quite as clear cut.

One side of this is driven by a bunch of not too reputable think tanks behind the scenes who persuaded a couple of fringe academics to agree with them and push for it via the civil service. The government is taking bad, paid for advice. I don't know what the agenda is there but there is one and I reckon it's commercial. Probably a consortium of businesses wanting to create a market they can get into.

However the security services do not agree with the government or the think tanks and actually promote advice contrary to the regulators. They will ultimately win.

Attacking the regulators and revealing who is behind all this is what we should be doing.

gib4442• 2 months ago

They will ultimately win.

Sorry, who will win?

ktallett4• 2 months ago

This comment is a little unclear.

However no matter what the government or security services want, they won't be able to stop people who want to use VPN or End to end encryption. Nothing would ever change in that regard.

cryo326• 2 months ago

The technology bit doesn't really matter though.

The real problem is that the legislation would bring the power to prosecute people who use them or use it against them.

The security services aren't having any of that shit because it puts their position at risk both from the front-facing side and recommendations and guidance issued and from their own operations.

miki1232115• 2 months ago

VPNS need money to operate, and money businesses have anchors in the real, physical, brick-and-mortar world, which is ultimately under control of the British police, with their extendable batons and prison bars.

If you make money by laying asphalt on British streets and get paid in British pounds, there's no way for you to pay an internet business in Malta if the British government doesn't want you to. Sure, there's crypto, but crypto needs businesses which let it interface with the British banking system, which the UK government can instruct banks to shut down.

maccard7• 2 months ago

That’s because they don’t want to stop VPNs, they want to criminalise the ones they don’t have visibility into.

MagicMoonlight• 2 months ago

Bullshit. GCHQ loves new ways to spy. Being able to harvest all traffic is their dream. I’m sure they already do harvest it all.

If they cared about privacy and security they wouldn’t be [redacted].

cryo326• 2 months ago

Their job is also to secure national infrastructure. Compromising that through policy would do more damage.

shreddit• 2 months ago

Why does your last sentence sound like something yoda would say?

cryo326• 2 months ago

Probably the massive hangover I have. Sorry.

pretzel52974• 2 months ago

[flagged]

abc123abc123• 2 months ago

This is the way! It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone, in return for not having to care about their offspring and the illusion of 100% safety.

I think the authoritarian trend accelerated during corona. Our western political nobility got a real taste for power, and they have not been able to free themselves from that afrodisiac ever since. Therefore chat control, 1, 2, 3, and when that didn't go as planned... lo and behold... age verification, and that of course needs control over vpn, and encryption, and there we go... chat control slipped in through the back door.

Soon we can no longer criticize china if this keeps up.

jermaustin1• 2 months ago

It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up

... every aspect of parenting.

jMyles• 2 months ago

how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone

...is there evidence that it's parents who are the constituency you describe?

mschuster91• 2 months ago

It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone,

It's not like parents have much of a choice. When you gotta work 2 jobs to barely make rent and groceries, you need some sort of "safe space" to pawn your children off to.

tlogan2• 2 months ago

I do not think parents are the one pushing these controls. They are busy raising the kids.

Saline95156• 2 months ago

Did you ever heard a parent asking for this in the real world? Parents who care either don't give smartphones, or dumbed-down ones that they can control.

Asking for less tech at school is not an authoritarian move, but rather a point of view about how schools should work.

If you asked me, I think that parents should throw away their TVs and minimize screen time at home, both for them and the kids. However I won't ask this to be enforced by the State - if anything, it will make my kids more competitive against the cartoons-infused ones of the other parents.

braiamp2• 2 months ago

How about this: nobody shall be unsafe online or offline, and the state shall guarantee it. That's a foundation you can build law on, instead of hoping every child got lucky with their parents.

functionmouse• 2 months ago

you're describing a cage

Izmaki3• 2 months ago

I think North Korea is attempting to do this, for example by punishing not only the criminal but also their immediate family to a life-sentence in working camps, if the person commits severe enough crime.

I don't think it's as successful as it sounds on paper, from the comfort of our western society homes.

miki1232115• 2 months ago

I'm against any kind of age verification legislation, but this is a really bad argument.

It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."

In theory, one could implement age verification by negligent parent imprisonment, in practice, I don't think that would work, and definitely not in all cases.

If we accept the premise that children having unfettered access to the internet is a bad thing (which, again, I don't think we should), there have to be multiple layers to it. Punishment is one, increasing friction and "making honest people honest" is another.

throwthrowuknow2• 2 months ago

These systems won’t work any better than identification requirements for alcohol and tobacco or anything else. Maybe you didn’t know anyone who drank or smoked when you were a teenager but they are pretty widespread even when parents aren’t negligent. Systems like the proposed ones will be even easier for kids to find a way around.

I’m somewhat in favour of these foolish attempts at control because they always drive innovation in technology to circumvent them and adoption of that technology creating a thriving underground scene. Content piracy and alternative platforms could use a resurgence and this is just the thing to get it jumpstarted.

pretzel52974• 2 months ago

We don't hold parents responsible for most neglect. Why is this special?

goalieca• 2 months ago

It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."

Define “properly” and how often do the self-righteous themselves cause harm. I see a strong desire for people to want to “control” all outcomes on everything and have everyone in the world think and say and act as they want.

iamnothere4• 2 months ago

“Properly” is the choice of the parent, except in some narrow cases we’ve defined culturally.

The last thing we need is society deciding in detail how children should be raised. CPS horror stories are bad enough as it is.

pjmlp• 2 months ago

Since it is fashionable tiktok subject nowadays, you do it like genx and boomers.

We turned out alright.

Xelbair• 2 months ago

It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."

Like with normal cases - have court go over this.

But decision if any form of age lock should be implemented or not is up to parents. You cannot just shift argument to "you HAVE to restrict children from internet or else!"

SeanDav2• 2 months ago

It has always been the responsibility of parents to raise their children "properly" (whatever that means). What is special about internet access that now requires the government to legislate for it, and as a side-effect, greatly reduce the privacy of the rest of the population. This is without even addressing the argument that these measures may even make the privacy situation for children worse.

heresie-dabord2• 2 months ago

It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."

Nor can it, because it takes a village to raise a human being.

And in this (global) village, we have determined that we will monetise everything... and for the victims, there's thoughts and prayers. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_and_prayers

cynicalsecurity• 2 months ago

It's not about children. It's about re-introducing Stasi.

notrealyme1232• 2 months ago

Not to be to overly reductive, but you could use the same argument for drugs and weapons.

phatfish3• 2 months ago

It's not being reductive at all. I'm certain parent commentor doesn't have kids so they don't care. If someone was using the street outside their house to deal drugs and causing problems they would be happy for the police to "regulate" that activity.

It's just selfishness. "I want some privacy utopia on the internet (which can no longer exist, the internet isn't the place of the 90s and early 00s), so your kids can be exploited by social media and porn".

rightbyte3• 2 months ago

You argue against "individualist societies" but then blame "their parents" for not coping with the kinda impossible task of protecting their kids from big tech or the surveillance state.

It is a collective problem with collective solutions.

malfist• 2 months ago

So your solution to preventing "surveillance state" is to unmask everyone on the internet? Now who has the inconsistent argument

pretzel52974• 2 months ago

I did not say anything about protecting kids from big tech or the state?

Even if I had, your argument is we must surveil more to protect the kids from the surveillance state?

Forgeties796• 2 months ago

Parents are expected to do more than you can imagine and everyone has an opinion on how they’re supposed to do it, especially in the US. You’re a terrible parent if you can’t keep a 5 year old from ever alerting somebody to their presence, but you’re also a terrible parent if you give them an iPad for a few minutes so they don’t bother people.

This whole thing where parents are expected to do it all themselves is actually a new phenomenon. Historically, across basically every culture, it was up to the community to raise all the kids together. To sacrifice and make compromises together.

Your parents likely didn’t have to deal with YouTube. There were basic laws in place that guarantee the content on broadcast TV fell within certain limits. Was that unacceptable to you as well? It strikes me that you take for granted the fact that you could never have been exposed to Alex Jones as a child. Let’s not pretend your parents knew everything you watched and saw, they just knew it could only be so bad most of the time. Yet you now expect parents to know everything on every screen in front of their kids with no assistance ever as the “attention economy” machine attacks all of us. It’s not a fair fight at all and your response is “parents just solve it yourselves” without a second thought.

I do not agree with all these age verification and surveillance state initiatives we are seeing. I am categorically against them. But your philosophy is harmful and frankly selfish. You live in a community. You have to make compromises.

none2585• 2 months ago

Why should I be responsible for raising someone else's children or give a shit if they see porn? Who cares.

Sounds like you made a decision you regret and expect everyone else to bend their life around you. It is selfish to assume others will take care of your shitty kids.

tlogan2• 2 months ago

Sadly, this is how societies eventually tend to become. They need the younger generation to be “properly” raised (definition of “proper” really depends on the society).

If the side effect is that you also end up controlling adults and making them behave “properly,” then that is considered a plus.

freedomben• 2 months ago

While I agree with your comment at a high level, simply saying it's the parents job k thx bai is not going to cut it. Parents have to have the tools we need to do our jobs. I don't want the government touching it with a 10 foot pole, and no adults should have to give up their freedoms (these kids will be adults some day after all, so even if we're doing it "for the kids" we need to consider the world we're building for them), but the tools available to parents right now are way too inadequate, unless mom and dad are rich enough to buy enterprise-level tooling.

If we don't want to lose our freedoms, we need to offer constructive and realistic solutions that don't involve the government. Simply saying "not my problem" may feel good, but it's going to end up with a government-enforced tech dystopia.

maccard7• 2 months ago

Parents have the tools already here in the UK.

ISPs come with adult content disabled by default and someone has to opt in to it. Every major OS (Windows, Mac, iOS, android) ships with device level parental controls. Games consoles enforce these based on birth date. ISPs here also provide free network level filtering on top of that. All of this only matters if the parents don’t bypass them when asked.

If a kid is determined enough to get past Apple family controls and the network level filtering on their home network, they’ll have a VPN from a dodgy source in 15 minutes. The solution is to use the tools that are there right now, or accept that age verification is coming for everything.

lurkshark• 2 months ago

The part I don’t totally understand with the age verification laws is that as I understand it, the websites need to implement the age verification. It seems like the bad actors just won’t do that, and we could’ve made compliance easier for the good actors by just requiring something like the Restricted to Adults label as a meta tag.

https://www.rtalabel.org/

6r17• 2 months ago

You have stated everything in your answer. I want to point out that the problematic starts with who controls the safety. Yes tech-constructors should be obligated to build their software such that the end-user can exercise any kind of required control and yes the parent should be liable. None of this require the government forcing identity through the OS layer.

coffeefirst• 2 months ago

Okay. How?

I have a little boy. He does not use computers yet. One day he will. His friends will have YouTube or it’s spiritual successor and everyone in his school will be on TikTok where they’re hammered with whatever brainrot gets the most engagement.

What do you propose, exactly?

akho• 2 months ago

What age are you worried about?

phatfish3• 2 months ago

I will do everything in my power to keep the tech bros out of my children's life. Yes, that includes being a responsible parent. It also includes societal norms being established. Just as was done for alcohol, nicotine, movies, porn mags ect.

I guarantee you are not as dedicated as me trying to protect my kids, so there will be age gates, and that includes VPNs.

Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for free, so there is also a pretty powerful corporate interest to lock them down. In the case of the "corporate content provides" vs the "tech bros", the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I'll take a win however it comes.

Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it. I'd bet their user base skews to older people, more likely to be parents.

Ylpertnodi• 2 months ago

Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for free,

I don't use my vpn for 'shit for free'.

maccard7• 2 months ago

Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it

Presumably your support is for a browser developed by Google instead, as they are clearly not interested in surveillance or being in your children’s life?

twobitshifter2• 2 months ago

every corporation is running a vpn network. Every router manufacturer builds them into the firmware so you can safely access your home network. there’s a much bigger use case than free stuff.

pocksuppet7• 2 months ago

That is a thought-terminating cliche. Everyone has some responsibility to everyone else. That's what living in a society means.

If Facebook decided to start showing hardcore porn to people it identifies as being under 14, would you blame the parents for letting the kids use Facebook, and not blame Facebook? If you would blame Facebook, that means you believe Facebook has (at least some) responsibility.

QuadmasterXLII• 2 months ago

A complementary policy is to not give six year olds publicly funded mandatory chromebooks their parents don’t control. This can reduce the pressure coming from these parents to warp and twist the web till it is safe for a six year old to have free access to an uncontrolled chromebook.

cmurf• 2 months ago

Elderly undue influence costs victims billions.

I shouldn't have to consider getting a parent an under 18 account to protect them better.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 months ago

"Do you know who's responsible to make sure children are safe online? Their parents."

Parents have the responsibility to do what is necessary to protect their kids

In the case of parents v. so-called "tech" companies, who should win

What happens when the companies are protected from parents by Section 230

SwtCyber5• 2 months ago

Yet platforms should be accountable for the harms they create (in some way it has to be regulated)

ferfumarma• 2 months ago

Harms to adults. No children should be on the platforms, and it's up to the parents to regulate it.

trollbridge• 2 months ago

As a parent, then, what do you do when a public school district hands every 7 year old a Chromebook and has completely inadequate filtering on it?

bcraven• 2 months ago

Take it off them when they're not in school.

vedaba• 2 months ago

I do criticize where individualism and those kinds of societies have gone wrong, but I also think it's going to be very hard for a parent to control that.

fn-mote2• 2 months ago

A single parent, definitely.

A group of parents? I’m more hoepeful.

(In my country,) There are many levels of government between the individual and the nation. Sometimes that is a curse. But sometimes change needs to start locally. This is an excellent example.

kelseyfrog• 2 months ago

Expect more of the same then?

I've gotten exactly one response on what that looks like. The parent suggested writing custom moderation rules for his router. He was serious that this was feasible general solution.

tomhow• 2 months ago

Please don't post ideological flamebait on HN. We're here for curious conversation. There may be a substantive point in your comment, but it's wrapped in inflammatory rhetoric, which is what we're trying to avoid here. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. Particularly note these lines:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

charcircuit2• 2 months ago

It should be possible for VPNs to only give UK customers UK exit nodes so that sites can still properly enforce the law. Same thing with having VPNs that ban explicit sites. It's not an all or nothing thing.

Chance-Device3• 2 months ago

I think this is a genuinely difficult problem that happens to look exactly like what you’d need for extended surveillance. When I think about it seriously, I end up coming up with the idea of a whitelist enforced on device for local accounts used by children.

This would probably block most of the internet, and allow access only to sites that are validated as being safe. This would put a lot of pressure on sites and service providers to ensure safety, such as children-only walled gardens within their broader services.

We already have piecemeal attempts at something like this through on device private age restriction software, but it’s not organised at the state level, and I think it’s not effective enough as a result.

If legally enforced it could be made into a pretty effective system that would give adults freedom and anonymity and provide safety for children, while pushing the costs of child safety onto the platforms, which is where it belongs. If you want to cater to children, prove that you can make it on to the whitelist. Otherwise that’s an audience you’re just not able to access.

rileymat22• 2 months ago

There are already whitelisting solutions that can be installed on devices controlled by parents.

amiga3863• 2 months ago

... that don't need the identity of the parents to work.

Nor do these devices require the identity of non-parents who will never enable the childproofing mode

Nor does legislation invert the burden of proof and require the device's manufacturer obtain and store identity documents just to use the devices, otherwise it must restrict all access to a small handful of "kid safe" actions.

These aren't "child safety" laws, they're "adult anonymity eradication" laws

Chance-Device3• 2 months ago

That don’t really work because this isn’t a nation state level enforced system, and realistically the only state that can force such a thing is the US. If they worked, we wouldn’t be here having this discussion.

JumpCrisscross5• 2 months ago

the idea of a whitelist enforced on device for local accounts used by children

What’s wrong with making it the social media companies’ problem? If they sign up a child, they get fined. Everyone is then incentivized to come up with solutions. If some of those are shit, restrict them. If they’re not, great.

Chance-Device3• 2 months ago

Did you actually read the post that you’re replying to?

ryandrake3• 2 months ago

If they sign up a child, they get fined. Everyone is then incentivized to come up with solutions.

This already is the threat, and all the solutions social media comes up with are eerily “Age Verification” shaped. They are all going to be shitty.

EmbarrassedHelp• 2 months ago

Because your "solution" creates massive privacy violations unless age verification and age assurance are banned, and result in even larger fines.

JumpCrisscross5• 2 months ago

Is the charitable reading of whatever’s going on in Europe right now that European states don’t believe they can hold American tech giants accountable to their laws? I genuinely don’t see why a law banning under-14 year olds from social media wouldn’t be the first step.

ryandrake3• 2 months ago

Because it’s not a good idea, everyone else becomes inconvenienced and/or subject to spyware just to arbitrarily age-limit something that doesn’t have to be age limited, and despite that inconvenience, it will inevitably be worked around by motivated 13 year olds.

JumpCrisscross5• 2 months ago

to arbitrarily age-limit something that doesn’t have to be age limited

There is evidence of a growing consensus that this does have to be age limited. Both in the research and in voter polls. (I personally believe in it.)

it will inevitably be worked around by motivated 13 year olds

The same goes for liquor and cigarette laws. They're still of net benefit.

foldr5• 2 months ago

This isn't only happening in Europe: https://ondato.com/blog/florida-age-verification-law/

The real answer to what's going on is one that HN doesn't like to consider. It's simply that a lot of people in a lot of countries are worried about what children are able to access on the internet and want the government to help restrict it.

I don't support these sorts of restrictions. However, HN seems completely unable to have a sensible discussion about them because most posters are convinced that this is all part of some kind of sinister authoritarian scheme. In reality, it's just some bad legislation pushed by various people who largely have good motives, and who are concerned about something that is a real problem.

The bad legislation should be opposed. In order to do so effectively, we have to address the actual concerns driving it, rather than railing ineffectually against a largely imaginary authoritarian conspiracy.

jonathanstrange• 2 months ago

It's worth pointing out that some people under some circumstances need to use VPNs. For example, timestamp.apple.com stalls when I call it from my machine, so I cannot sign any executables for macOS. When I use a VPN that changes my IP number, signing and notarizing works perfectly fine. My CI chain would literally not work without a VPN.

braiamp2• 2 months ago

I love how the comments miss that the problem these laws address deserve addressing, but from the producers side: making safe products for the public. This specific solution is fashioned after tobacco and alcohol regulation, which was never primarily about parental supervision, it's about what can be sold and how. And in public health we'd want everyone moving away from both not just kids. The boneheadness of age verification is that unlike tobacco and alcohol, where the best we can do is restrict access, online harm can actually be fixed at the root by regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place.

phatfish3• 2 months ago

The issue is, to regulate the service Meta (or whoever) provides, they have to age gate anyway. Unless the service is child friendly for all users. Which would mean; follow and friend limits, usage limits, blackout periods after 9pm, only seeing posts from friends, no algorithmic "time line". That sort of thing.

That regulation would be orders of magnitude more difficult to implement. Just look at the malicious compliance the cookie regulations created, that was a single modal.

Better to just ban it for under 16s. That might happen before my kids are old enough to be fully exploited.

rileymat22• 2 months ago

It is unclear to me what VPNs have to do with the conversation with respect to age gating.

If a government has the ability to fine content providers for providing content to its citizens, why accept IP verification is good enough to determine the user’s jurisdiction and not fine them anyway for providing the content?

coldtea4• 2 months ago

The regulators don't want you to have neither privacy nor security (from them).

zkmon2• 2 months ago

USA entities tend to think that terms like "privacy", "security" have same meanings and assumptions across the globe, and that the USA laws are universal. Maybe they also think that entire world is just as dumb or dumber than USA.

For a start, you should consider this fact: Privacy for a bad actor goes directly against the security for citizens and good actors.

So when you talk about privacy you are making an assumption that it is contributing to safety. But for whom? Bad actors or good actors? Without such qualification, you are just talking lofy-sounding but meaningless ideals.

aboardRat44• 2 months ago

If you don't like privacy, publish your bank card number and cvv in response to this message.

zkmon2• 2 months ago

You misunderstood. When I say privacy I was referring to hiding things from authorities, not from other citizens. Every power that authorities are entrusted with, is direct result forfeiting of privacy or freedom by citizens. That's the definition of a nation.

You can have 100% privacy and freedom if you are stateless. But when you wish for the benefits of being a citizen, it comes at the cost of privacy and freedom.

luke727• 2 months ago

I think that's a silly argument, but even if we accept it at face value 1) VPN usage is difficult to detect and 2) bad actors are still going to use VPNs. This line of thinking removes privacy from good actors while doing nothing to address security concerns from bad actors.

SwtCyber5• 2 months ago

I agree that privacy and security are not identical, and that bad actors can benefit from privacy tools too. But I don't think that makes privacy a "lofty but meaningless" ideal

Nasrudith2• 2 months ago

There isn't qualification for a reason - it doesn't fucking matter when it is both or neither. You might as well further your Dunning-Krueger by complaining that the US failed to develop bullets that only hurt bad people!

mr-wendel• 2 months ago

Here is my beef. I'm pro-VPN. The ability to gain more control over who can track your online communication is a net-positive to me, personally and philosophically. However, I can't justify their existence from a utilitarian perspective.

Practically speaking, when I look at the actual number of people affected by VPN I estimate that:

  - Very low: Protecting political activists and dissidents
  - Low: Circumvention of overzealous blocking and surveillance
  - Low-to-Medium: Hiding abusive and malicious behavior
  - Medium: Additional layers of trust and network security (mostly business related, which makes it tangental to the consumer VPN market)
  - VERY High: Enabling piracy and avoiding geo-content restrictions (no judgment on good-vs-bad, just asserting magnitude)

I believe that management at VPN companies are extremely pro-consumer protection (if only because their cash flows depend on this). I absolutely trust the system and network administrators. They don't want to track or look at the data flows because the odds of seeing something nasty is quite high. I have a fair amount of professional industry experience to back this up.

So... conundrum! If I take the position that piracy-related stuff isn't a net drag and that business VPN use is fundamentally a separate beast, VPNs in this context are hard to justify.

SwtCyber5• 2 months ago

Age-gating VPNs fails, becausw it probably won't stop determined piracy or abuse, but it will make privacy tools feel abnormal, regulated, and less available to ordinary users and families

avazhi• 2 months ago

That VPNs are undoubtedly essential privacy and security tools is precisely the problem the UK government has with them.

azalemeth• 2 months ago

It is perhaps worth highlighting that Mozilla has done this in response to a specific UK government consultation [1] all about "growing up in the online world", which has, buried about 30 pages deep, a specific question about age-gating VPNs and similar technologies.

As far as I can tell, there is no requirement to be a UK citizen to answer this – if you are, were, or could be resident in the UK I urge you to fill it out and help provide a voice of reason...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...

SwtCyber5• 2 months ago

I think better enforcement against harmful platform behavior and better digital literacy would do more without normalizing surveillance as the default

jiaosdjf• 2 months ago

I just don't accept any ban on VPNs, I will just be a criminal. I'm not fighting for a country I'm not allowed to wave the flag of and I'm not respecting any digital safety laws that simply do not apply to me because I am not a child. I will provision my own infra if thats what it takes, I simply don't care. Fuck this country.

wormius• 2 months ago

Has Google made a statement like this?

I guess since I complain about Mozilla a lot for their past 5-10 years (minimum) of poor management decisions, I should give them their due when they do come out with a statement of support on our rights.

palata4• 2 months ago

Rather than age-gating technologies like VPNs, we believe that regulators should address the root causes of online harm by holding platforms to account

Honest question: if you tell Pornhub "now you will be fined heavily if you let 10-year old kids access porn", won't Pornhub implement some kind of age verification?

How else would the platform "address the root cause"?

iamalizard• 2 months ago

The easiest, and the fairest way in my opinion, is to realize parents can and should be responsible for what their children read. Just like you wouldn't give your kid access to your BDSM porn magazines from the 80s, you shouldn't let him online without supervision.

Other than that, there is no "online harm". No root cause of anything that would need to be addressed, no problems whatsoever. It's just information passing through from one person to another.

Laws like age verification will just push kids to even weirder corners of the internet. When will 4chan or motherless implement age verification? On pornhub you see vanilla porn on the front page. On 4chan or motherless you see CP (AI, but still), (fake) rape or (fake) murders. And there are many more sites like those.

palata4• 2 months ago

I believe that it is possible to compromise. Of course, the parents must play their role. But it doesn't mean that it should be legal to publish porn ads to kids, and hope that the parents install an ad blocker, does it?

I don't think we can (and I don't think we should) completely block porn from the Internet. But I could imagine that privacy-preserving age verification on Pornhub could make it slightly less accessible to kids (even it if is by opening a link without knowing what it is). I wouldn't block VPNs though: if someone is able to access Pornhub with a VPN through a country that doesn't mandate age verification, then they will be able to access porn anyway.

And then there is not only porn. To me the value of age verification is really to block kids from accessing social media. And again, no need to block VPNs there: it just has to be less accessible to kids. I don't believe that most kids will get a VPN to access social media. Kids are on social media because kids are on social media, we just need to break the network effect.

cute_boi• 2 months ago

Well, it seems people don’t realize that many parents need to go to work and can’t watch their kids 24 hours a day. Also, accessing a magazine requires much more effort compared to accessing a website, which is very easy to bypass.

1shooner• 2 months ago

You're asking if verified user accounts on a porn site are more or less invasive than the government banning or restricting access to VPNs?

palata4• 2 months ago

I don't think so, no. I'm asking if it is a good idea to ask the government to delegate the addressing of the problem to the platforms.

For instance, the government could provide privacy-preserving age verification and mandate that those platforms use it to check the age, and at the same time not ban VPNs.

Maybe (I am asking) it would make it harder for kids to access social media and porn in general, but it would not make it impossible (they could use a VPN). But I don't think we need to make it impossible for social media and I don't think we can make it impossible for porn:

* For social media, we just need it annoying enough that most kids don't bother using them. I feel like social media are a problem for kids mostly when (almost) all kids have access, because it is difficult to explain to your kid why they should be left apart.

* For porn, there are many ways to access it, it's impossible to entirely block it. And I am not convinced that it is a good thing to make it super illegal. Making it slightly less accessible so that it's not one URL away from the kids, though, may not be so terrible?

We do that kind of compromise for many other things: it's impossible to prevent kids from smoking cigarettes. Still we try to prevent it. I feel like sometimes it's okay to compromise, instead of fighting for all or nothing.

riknos314• 2 months ago

Age gating the VPN age gates (pseudo-anonymous) access to 100% of the content on the internet. Regardless of whether or not you agree with it, age gating only the porn subset of the internet is a much smaller restriction.

palata4• 2 months ago

I didn't say that age gating VPNs was the solution. I just doubt that the platforms themselves can address the problem in a desirable way.

tim3335• 2 months ago

So far age gating VPNs is just a possibility they are considering, not actual policy. I just went on the feedback page to ask they don't do it - it'd be a pain for me.

notepad0x90• 2 months ago

You can't ever win this argument against the public and the powers that be by staking it all on "but privacy is important, don't you like privacy?".

That's what they keep reducing it to. They're also making it a false dichotomy of sorts, but in reality it's a gradient of possibilities. For example, VPNs aren't like Tor in that they can't really resist "NSA" level global wiretap monitoring in any meaningful way. Or even ISP-level data-analysis driven investigations.

It's also important to correlate any privacy protections VPNs provide, with a real-world pre-internet equivalent. paper mail for example has always been subject to Mitm by the authorities. It is possible to divulge who visited what site, and at what time, and only directly to the authorities, and make that disclosure public (after gag orders expire, if any are issued).

You can use VPNs for privacy against all sorts of creepy eyes, but your local government being considered one of those hostile actors is the threat model that's under attack here.

I would argue for example that the pre-internet equivalent would be two people chatting in the privacy of one of their homes. A bit of a stretch, but alright. But in that there must be the element that the two persons are able to identify each other positively. If one of them is harmed by the other, the victim can identify the attacker to the authorities and pursue justice. How can that be done with VPNs? If middle-actors can't snoop, then can logs on both ends positively identify the other party? Was there a common way pre-internet, where people anonymously gathered and discussed things, with capability to harm each other, but without the authorities being able to do anything about it after the fact?

If the authorities are able to gain access to a private key, or some other proof of possession of one end of the connection, can the VPN provider, the network, or the protocol disclose the identity of the source of traffic on the other end?

I'm only making these arguments to point out how nuanced the topic is. The false dichotomy of all-or-nothing for VPNs is silly. this is moving towards an outright ban of VPNs with criminal consequence, and with that all other similar tech (including Tor) and privacy measures go down the toilet. Would you rather have that or propose a nuanced compromise one jurisdiction at a time?

I get this is just PR for Mozilla though.

grougnax• 2 months ago

UK regulators will ban Mozilla Firefox, then

jaspervanderee• 2 months ago

"Regulators". Think about what that means. It's essentially a mechanism to stop the free market of exchange which is detrimental to the debt based system we live in. To stop this, everything you do has to be tracked and no privacy is allowed.

Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

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