VPNs Not Foolproof Against Age Verification, Electronic Frontier Foundation Says
Virtual private networks, or VPNs, aren't the effective loopholes to age-verification laws that many think they are, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff said in a blog post Friday. Currently, 19 states have laws that require age verification before a user can access sites containing adult content, said bloggers Paige Collings, EFF senior speech and privacy activist, and Rindala Alajaji, EFF legislative activist.
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Since Florida’s age-verification law was implemented Jan. 1, PornHub has blocked access to its website to Florida-based users in protest, Collings and Alajaji said. In the days leading up to the law’s implementation, the platform expressed concerns that age verification would compromise privacy and posted alerts on the site for Florida users, warning them they were going to lose access to PornHub, the blog said.
The law and subsequent restriction of PornHub resulted in a spike in Google searches for VPN access across the state, according to Google Trends data cited in the blog.
“While VPNs may be able to disguise the source of your internet activity, they are not foolproof -- nor should they be necessary to access legally protected speech,” Collings and Alajaji blogged. “A VPN should not be seen as a tool for anonymity. While it can protect your location from some companies, a disreputable VPN service might deliberately collect personal information or other valuable data. There are many other ways companies may track you while you use a VPN, including GPS, web cookies, mobile ad IDs, tracking pixels, or fingerprinting.”
VPNs work by “rout[ing] all your network traffic through an 'encrypted tunnel' between your devices and the VPN server,” the blog said. “The traffic then leaves the VPN to its ultimate destination, masking your original IP address. From a website's point of view, it appears your location is wherever the VPN server is.”
Because age-verification requirements vary from law to law and state to state, it will be hard for VPN providers to keep up and ensure the restrictions can be bypassed, Collings and Alajaji noted.
“The ever-growing conglomeration of age-verification laws poses significant challenges for users trying to maintain anonymity online, and have the potential to harm us all -- including the young people they are designed to protect.”