this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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How should this be enforced? Mullvad doesn't even know where the customers are from (if they pay anonymosly), so they can't check if the legislation applies to a specific customer.
Also (and I'm not trying to legitimate such law projects), age verification without identity leak is possible. The government needs to distribute a ZK proof system linked to ID cards which creates a signed proof including "holder of the ID is over/under 18" and a service-dependend pseudonym (to prevent repeating the proof for other users).
I don't think it's intended to be enforced very well, just to 'boil the frog' so to say. Either that or incompetence & not realising it won't work.
Even if it passes and isn't enforced well it'll legitimise more surveillance & identity checks. It'll probably be terrible for privacy on people who aren't as tech literate to avoid it.
This is pretty much it. Someone will google "what's the best VPN" and get an AI generated answer that leads them to some bigger service that adheres to identification laws. That'll filter most regular users.
The good news is that the youth will find all sorts of ways to bypass it
In order to make it easier for the CGHQ to track and watch every single civilian in the UK all the time, the UK Governement is de facto creating a generation of Britons trained to evade such surveillance, something which wasn't happenning in the previous "less than perfect but still good enough" surveillance system.
geoip.
To comply, mullvad would just display "service not available in your country" page to IP addresses from UK ISPs (on a page with a footer that reminds users that they have a Tor Onion Address and accept permissionless cryptocurrency payments)
Or mullvad could ignore it, since they are a Swedish company.
You could probably make a pretty good run at it from GEO IP databases and ICAN blocks. It wouldn't be something the government is good at, but they could hire security contractors to put up somewhat effective barriers for people. Trying to enforce the rest of the world to do that for them is more complicated.
There are tons of ways to do age verification without leaking, if you had something opensource that digests something from an id and just signs a message in realtime that the user is of age, but there's a lot of room there for espionage. you REALLY need to be able to trust those apps.