Over 340,000 Brits want to repeal the UK Online Safety Act here's how to get your say

Date:
Mon, 28 Jul 2025 17:29:44 +0000

Description:
The petition to scrap new age verification rules under the UK Online Safety
Act has garnered over 340,000 signatures so far.

FULL STORY

A petition to repeal the UK Online Safety Act has garnered over 340,000 signatures in just a few days after strict new age verification requirements came into force.

Starting from Friday, July 25, 2025, all platforms displaying adult content must verify that all their users are over 18 years old via robust age checks. Social media, gaming services, and dating apps are also required to shield minors from harmful content via similar checks.

These requirements have sparked concerns among politicians, digital rights experts, and technologists who fear that invasive ID checks could lead to
data breaches, surveillance, and free speech limitations. The petition has
now crossed 100,000 and so will be considered for debate.The next steps are-Contact your MP, ask them to be at any debate- Explain YOUR issues with
the act, my reasons for starting it are probably different than yours for signing it- Keep signing pic.twitter.com/EkYqBdH2AN July 25, 2025

"We believe that the scope of the Online Safety Act is far broader and restrictive than is necessary in a free society," reads the petition created
by Alex Baynham, a Londoner who launched a new independent party, Build, in December last year.

"We think that Parliament should repeal the act and work towards producing proportionate legislation rather than risking clamping down on civil society talking about trains, football, video games, or even hamsters because it
can't deal with individual bad faith actors."

While the UK Parliament must consider for debate any petition that gets more than 100,000 signatures, Baynham encourages anyone concerned to have their
say.

To do so, you should sign the petition, contact your MP, and explain the
reason you are worried. The deadline is October 22, 2025. Yet, considering
the huge response, a debate may be arranged way before that.

Age verification -- what are the risks and how to stay safe

The new rules certainly come as a way to stop children from accessing inappropriate and dangerous content online. Yet, age checks also come with significant risks for people's privacy, security, and other rights like free speech and access to information.

You now need to be ready to scan your face, credit card, or ID document if
you want to access some content on X, Reddit, or Bluesky in the UK. The same goes if you want to play a new over-18 video game, find a new match on a
dating app, or watch a video reserved for adults only.

This involves you trusting these service providers to take good care of this highly sensitive data. Something that, as the recent Tea app hack shows,
isn't always possible. A data breach of this magnitude could expose millions
of Brits to identity stolen, fraud, and other dangers.

Similarly, some experts also argue that getting rid of online anonymity could lead to higher surveillance by leaving such data access vulnerable to abuse.

Experts also fear the new rules could lead to higher censorship as platforms are now required to delete or block all content defined as harmful. A virtual private network (VPN) is security software that encrypts all your internet connections and spoofs your real IP address.

Despite the UK's regulator, Ofcom, suggesting against it, Britons have been turning to the best VPN apps en masse to avoid giving up their most precious data to access a website.

Proton VPN , for example, saw a surge in sign-ups, recording an hourly increase of over 1,400% starting from Friday at midnight.

Talking to TechRadar, a Proton spokesperson said: "This clearly shows that adults are concerned about the impact universal age verification laws will
have on their privacy."

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/over-340-000-brits-want-to- repeal-the-uk-online-safety-act-heres-how-to-get-your-say

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