AN internet privacy expert has said she was called a “paedo” during a UK Government meeting after raising concerns about the Online Safety Act (OSA).
The legislation, which came into force on July 25, mandates that websites verify users’ age – often using facial recognition or photo ID – before granting access to adult content such as pornography, violence, or material on self-harm and eating disorders.
Heather Burns, a tech policy specialist and author of Understanding Privacy, told The National the UK Government and Ofcom had been on a “full-scale media blitz … really hammering down on the lines that this is about children and it's about pornography”.
However, she said: “It's not. It applies to any service provider anywhere in the world whose services could theoretically be accessed in Britain. It applies to a bare minimum of, the last figure I saw was 60,000 companies.
“What we're seeing over the past week is six years of narratives collapsing into reality in real time.”
Burns warned of threats to journalism and freedom of information, noting that sites like Reddit have begun age-checking users accessing “things like forums about war crimes in Gaza and Ukraine”.
“This is escalating quickly,” she added. “We're one week in and platforms are censoring news content – because they have to.
“I think we're going to see more journalistic content blocked or age restricted before we get a resolution here, and that's scary.”
The issue has seen Wikipedia launch a court case against the UK Government because, Burns explained, “they've been thrown into Category One compliance requirements, which is full-fat, full-on, on the grounds that Wikipedia has articles about self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders”.
“If young people can't find straightforward, factual, curated information on an encyclopaedia, where are they going to go? They're going to go to the really nasty places you wouldn't want any child looking at.”
She added: “History tells us that it's never a good idea when governments start demanding censorship of encyclopaedias.”
The tech expert said she had spent the last six years of her career focusing on the OSA, but that she had been admonished for raising concerns during a meeting with the-then Tory-run UK government.
“I was actually in a meeting with the [UK Government in 2020] where I was called a paedo for trying to point out these issues to them,” Burns said.
“You go back to the office and talk about it and everyone gives you a round of applause and says, ‘You're in the club now. You're not up in the club until you've been called a paedo’.”
Labour, which has taken over defending the Tory-introduced act, has used similar rhetoric against Nigel Farage by raising the spectre of Jimmy Savile after his Reform UK called for the legislation to be repealed.
A UK Parliament petition calling for the same has passed 430,000 signatures, but Burns said the “ship has sailed” – and questioned Reform’s motivations.
She also warned the act may offer a blueprint to far-right movements in the US “who want to ban information about contraception and human reproduction as sexually explicit material”.
Burns, now completing a Masters at the University of Strathclyde focused on US internet law, said: “There are Americans who are looking at this OSA and going, ‘Jackpot. This is showing us how to take any content we don't like and call it sexually explicit or unfit for children’.
“What if you're maybe 15 and thinking, am I gay? Can you ask that anymore? No, you can't, cause that's explicit.
“I really do worry about the global implications.”
Having been involved with the act since 2019, Burns described its drafting as “classic rent seeking – a policy term meaning when the lobbyists basically get to draft a law in their own interests”.
“The OSA has basically been legislated in this way in order to create a business model for age verification providers,” she added. “People don't understand that.
“The other thing they don't understand – although they may be starting to figure this out – is that if you're age verifying children, you're age verifying everyone. All of us are going to have to start giving our identification to any one of these providers, some of whom don't have great cybersecurity practices.”
She cited the ongoing Tea App scandal, where images, IDs, and messages of thousands of women were leaked, despite promises that the data had been deleted.
“There's now a layer in between [you and the website you’re looking at] provided by a third party, and we're just supposed to trust them,” Burns said.
Ways around the rules: VPNs and fake IDs
Instead of uploading ID, many UK users are circumventing the rules via virtual private networks, or VPNs – tools that allow them to appear to be browsing from countries with looser rules.
Burns said that if Labour were to consider banning VPNs, “people are going to start talking about the UK in terms of places like China and Russia”.
However, she thinks such a move is unlikely. “It's a safety matter,” Burns said. “You know who is a huge fan of VPNs? The MoD.
“They want people in Ukraine to be able to access information … They want people in Russia to be able to access information not filtered by Putin.
“So if you're talking about [banning] VPNs to protect children, you're actually making everybody exponentially unsafe.”
Fraser Mitchell, the chief product officer at SmartSearch, warned that children may instead turn to fake IDs, posing broader risks.
“It's vital to remember that the threat from fake IDs extends far beyond simply viewing websites,” he said. “These sophisticated deceptions are integral tools … from identity theft and major financial fraud to money laundering, human trafficking, and even funding terrorism.”
What can be done about the Online Safety Act?
While Burns believes repeal is no longer viable, she said the act’s default “presumption of guilt” must change.
“The text of the law literally says you are a child until you can prove otherwise,” she explained. “Your site is riddled with [dangerous content] until you can prove otherwise.
“I think any resolution has to start with flipping that on its head … The presumption of guilt before innocence, and the presumption of active complicity in the worst horrors of mankind, needs to go.”
Paul Bernal, a professor of information technology law at UEA, said that there is no one solution to the problems sparked by the OSA, which he argued “claims to deal with a lot of disparate, disconnected and often very vague problems”.
“Look at each problem carefully and independently,” he added. “Yes, things like sex education at schools, particularly for boys, could help with porn. This won’t – they’ll run rings around the OSA.”
The UK Government was approached for comment.
