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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that the EFF does not highlight the best option, here: use a VPN to a jurisdiction that doesn't have such ridiculous laws.

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It might be bad for an activist group to advocate just ignoring the problem into a different jurisdiction.

They could sell it as "if your IP geolocation is inaccurate, or if the statute does not apply to you."

But FWIW VPNs can get flagged for suspicious behavior. YMMV

VPNs are increasingly useless, with Cloudflare in front of 80% of the public net. I always wonder if people giving this advice try it themselves, most major sites are unusable with a common VPN provider.

In many cases, using a VPN is a great way to get your account flagged as suspicious.

Care to share more details about this? Which account? What do you mean by “suspicious”? What specific effects does this have?

I use a VPN 24/7 on one machine. Zero issues even with banking, although sometimes I have to answer CAPTCHAs.

Your VPN provider shares their IP lists publicly. For a lot of website owners, blocking those is a simple way of getting rid of 80% of spam.

And yet I don’t get blocked. Curious.

Some sites block or offer a degraded experience for VPN traffic. This happens occasionally when I use Mullvad.

Some examples: Imgur loads but does not display any content. USPS's website does not load.

Now that I think about it USPS is the one place I get blocked. Still, it seems like people facing an age gate should be able to circumvent it without much hassle on a regular basis.

What VPN?! Proton literally doesn’t work on anything

Then more people need to use a VPN!

"Give up" is not the best option. Certainly not from the EFF's perspective.

I mean, the best option is to fight this legislation, and AIUI they're doing that too. But this article is not about that, it's about how to minimize the harm if you encounter it.

The days are numbered on this technique working. After enough countries enact their own age verification laws tech companies will just make that the global default policy, and I'm sure the opportunity to harvest user data will not be left to waste. Many sites already block and throttle VPNs.

When that day comes I'll stop casually using the internet or search for the underground alternative.

I think EFF does not recommend for or against VPN in general because it's not always a clear win, depending on the VPN and the use case.

https://ssd.eff.org/module/choosing-vpn-thats-right-you

Next step: the same government that is demanding the age verification will ban VPNs.

Everyone seems to forget that using VPNs to violate your local laws gives lots of good ammo to the authoritarians that want to ban VPNs. The answer isn't to use a VPN to get around it (and thus give fodder to your enemies) but to change the law.

While I agree with this in spirit, here in the UK both major parties along with the public at large generally support these types of laws.

Two of the major parties support it, but it's not entirely obvious how much public support there is; it's not most people's top issue, and it's easy to make polls say what you want depending on the question you ask.

You'd get different answers if, for instance, you ask "do you want to have to show ID or submit a picture of your face in order to access many sites on the Internet".

The entire concept of public support breaks down when the majority of the public doesn't actually know what a VPN is.

I'm not sure there'd be much of a difference because the British people are broadly speaking a rather paternalistic society.

I would guess the vast majority of parents support these laws. They are disgusted with the social media platforms who shrug and pretend they are just dumb pipes when it comes to filth, predators, and harmful content, while at the same time keeping users engaged with addictive algorithms and tracking everything every user does and knowing everything about them.

I sincerely doubt that the average UK (or US, or French, or German) citizen even knows what a VPN is beyond "that thing you sign in to for porn," let alone knows enough about it to have an informed opinion on the laws surrounding them.

Neither does the average politician, so where exactly is the impetus for changing the law going to come from?

But it's easier to ask a relative few ISPs to block VPNs than it is to police the behavior of millions of individuals.

Not especially feasible if you want to support businesses. More likely is trying to demand that VPNs also enforce age verification, which business-targeted VPNs might do, and then ban the ones that don't.

I doubt this would be workable.

They could, sadly, however, make it a crime to bypass things like The Online Safety Bill. Downloading or using Tor, for example.

At that point, the only sane option is to become a criminal.

Yep.

> For example, in 2025, Wisconsin lawmakers escalated their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN. Another proposed Michigan bill requires “An internet service provider providing internet service in this state [to] actively monitor and block known circumvention tools.” Circumvention tools being: VPNs.

https://www.eff.org/pages/vpns-are-not-solution-age-gating-m...

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