Australia, the UK, France, Germany, and multiple US states have each cooked up various "age verification" laws centered around the idea of shielding kids from large parts of the internet. Read criticism of these laws and you’ll see bypassing the age verification systems with a VPN come up as a reason why the laws are not only futile, but can do more harm than good.
As adults become the collateral damage of online age verification and other mass surveillance programs, this post will walk you through the different types of technologies and their risks so you're able to navigate this increasingly complex landscape.
None of the recommendations or products mentioned in this post are sponsored or influenced by the companies that make or sell them. We are just fans and customers!
Avoid Free VPNs
The go-to solution for disguising your real location is a VPN. I'm sure many of you are familiar with them and there’s a post about VPNs on this blog (it’s a great read, the person that wrote it is pretty cool), but it's a dishonest industry with many pitfalls for the uneducated. Using the wrong VPN service can result in a huge exploitation of your privacy.
The easiest way to avoid large privacy risks is to absolutely not use any "free" VPN services. Due to the nature of how a VPN works, the provider of the service can potentially have deep knowledge of everything you do on the internet. Nobody is running a free VPN out of the goodness of their heart, so they are likely doing it to capture large amounts of internet activity to sell to a data broker.
Facebook's free VPN, Onavo, famously got busted doing this in 2018. Hong Kong based UFO VPN did the same thing in 2020, despite claiming they don't keep logs. In 2024, the US Department of Justice arrested the operators of MaskVPN and DewVPN for using those customers as part of a botnet malware. Even paid VPN providers like NordVPN aren't perfect, updating their terms and conditions in 2022 to state NordVPN co-operates with law enforcement requests.
Finding reliable information on VPN providers is difficult as they're also masters of SEO spam, artificially boosting their results in search engines, paying desperate influencers to promote their service, and every other shady marketing trick you can think of. Here are some reliable resources of information you can refer to when deciding which VPN service to trust:
- Surveillance Self-Defense Guide - regularly updated and maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
- Privacy Guides - volunteer run non-profit project to educate people about internet privacy.
- CHOICE - member funded Australian consumer rights group.
While a VPN can disguise your location to a computer, it doesn’t disguise your identity or change that an act you do while logged in to a VPN may run afoul of the law where you, the person doing that thing, is located.
Alternative DNS Servers
Sometimes the blocks on websites are government mandated, and the most common way this is done is at the domain name level. Your internet provider has a big list of domain names (called a DNS server), and when you type in something like google.com in a web browser, or your favourite app tries to talk to the cloud, a DNS server tells your device where to go on the internet to find whatever you've requested. If the site you want to visit has been blocked by your ISP's list of domain names, you can use someone else's list instead.
This is called changing your DNS resolver or your DNS server. It can be more secure than your ISP's DNS server and with extra features like malware and ad-blocking built-in. Some privacy friendly DNS resolvers include:
Build Your Own VPN
Got a friend or family member you can trust? Set up your own VPN and cut out the suspicious middleman! This requires a bit more technical knowledge, but if you want to give it a shot there's never been a better time. You get the benefits of a VPN but with an end-point that's indistinguishable from a genuine home internet user, so it’s almost impossible to block, plus you can have some confidence your friend or family member isn't going to sell your internet usage activity to a data broker to offset their unprofitable VPN business.
Tailscale is a great way to get a DIY VPN running without all the messy configuration. Install the Tailscale app on your devices, then install it on your friend or family's devices, tell Tailscale on your device to use their device as an ‘Exit Node’, and off you go—all your internet traffic is sent via their internet connection via an encrypted tunnel between your device and theirs. Not even Tailscale can see what you do. Just make sure you ask for your friend or family’s permission before installing Tailscale on their devices!
If your friend has an Apple TV in their home, that's a great device to install Tailscale on as the Apple TV is typically always powered up, even if there's nobody home. Tailscale has great documentation on how to use it on an Apple TV and how to set up any device as an Exit Node.
Don't Let The Bastards Win
There's an old internet saying that "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". It was first uttered in the hallowed spaces of Usenet back in the early 90s, but it's still true to this day. Age verification might be the latest preoccupation in their never-ending war against queerness and sex, and it might end up being effective at knocking some people off the internet, making their world smaller than it should be, but we can fight back.
- You could use a VPN—the right VPN—to teleport your internet connection to a slightly more enlightened jurisdiction.
- You could try a more privacy focussed DNS resolver. Not only is it more secure, it reduces your metadata footprint.
- You could run your own VPN with Tailscale, using a trusted internet connection as your exit-node. It's not as hard as you think!
As always, continue to support organisations fighting back on the spread of age verification across the internet:
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