• The UK government has announced a social media ban for under-16s
• Privacy advocates are concerned about the impact of increased age checks
• Some groups also argue that a ban will fail to protect kids online

The UK's "world-leading" plan to protect teenagers with strict social media regulations has drawn immediate fire from privacy advocates.

On Monday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that social media platforms will be required to prevent under-16s from using their services. Restrictions on certain harmful features and curfews are also being considered.

Privacy advocates and VPN companies are particularly concerned about the prospect of more frequent mandatory age verification checks. Justas Pukys, Senior Product Manager at Surfshark, told TechRadar: "While we fully support the goal of protecting minors, mandating that platforms collect government IDs for age verification is a cybersecurity disaster waiting to happen."

More details on how the upcoming restrictions would work in practice — including whether VPN services will become age-restricted — are set to be disclosed next month, with implementation expected for Spring 2027.

Just a week earlier, Starmer handed Big Tech platforms another controversial ultimatum, giving them three months to implement on-device scanning technology to block children from viewing explicit images.

The issues with age verification

Mandatory age verification remains the primary concern for privacy advocates.

Romain Digneaux, public policy manager at Proton, points to last year's leak of 70,000 Discord users’ government-issued ID photos as a stark reminder of the risks when age checks become a routine requirement for online platforms.

"We all must remember that age verification for children alone doesn't exist. Age verification for children is age verification for everyone," Digneaux told TechRadar, arguing that the global push toward age verification is no "silver bullet" for child safety.

Meanwhile, Harry Halpin, NymVPN's CEO, argues that these initiatives may be a pretext for a more invasive agenda. He told TechRadar:

"Currently, children can bypass these restrictions by drawing a mustache on their faces. The point of these technologies is not to protect children but to create a centralized digital ID database to find and track down online political dissent."

Halpin expects age checks to be implemented directly at the operating system level, arguing that this would mean "you will have to scan your ID card and face to use your phone or computer."

However, according to Windscribe's CEO, Yegor Sak, social media providers could use a mix of account history, payment signals, facial estimation, identity vendors, device or app-store signals, and document checks.

"None of that is privacy-neutral," Sak told TechRadar. "If the check is weak, teenagers bypass it. If the check is strong, everyone else gets dragged into identity checks."

When age checks cannot be avoided, Laura Tyrylyte, privacy advocate at NordVPN, suggests that lawmakers prioritize solutions that "minimize the collection and sharing of sensitive personal data" to avoid creating new cybersecurity risks for users.

The wrong solution to a pressing problem?

Beyond age-verification concerns, many commentators fear that banning children and teenagers from social media will ultimately fail to protect them.

James Baker, Programme Manager at the Open Rights Group, argues the ban will fail because it ignores the root causes of online harm. The real issue, he explains, is the "business models that reward harmful content."

This stance is shared by other digital rights groups, including Article 19, alongside several child safety campaigns.

Ultimately, tech experts are united in the belief that a social media ban is not only a threat to public privacy, but a drastic measure that could do more harm than good—leaving parents with a false sense of security.

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