The crossbench peer who played a key role in shaping new landmark UK rules to protect children online has defended the legislation and its age-verification requirements, saying its success should “give us confidence” to go further.
“No one a year ago believed that you could redesign the digital world so it didn’t splurge self-harm, suicide and pornography at a particular demographic,” said Baroness Beeban Kidron, a longtime child-safety campaigner in the House of Lords. “Guess what? We can.”
In her first interview since regulators began enforcing elements of the Online Safety Act that require websites to verify users’ ages before they can access adult content, Kidron said tech companies had “an abysmal record of child safety” and “wilfully ignored it for at least two or three decades”.
“The only changes they’ve made are because we’ve forced them through regulation and legislation,” she told the Financial Times. “We wouldn’t be having this detailed battle [over online safety] if we had something [from the tech industry] that was fit for purpose.”
Amendments made to the act by the former filmmaker before parliament passed it into law in 2023 have helped build one of the world’s most ambitious regimes to boost child protection on the internet.
Kidron said the responses to last month’s introduction of age controls for many sites should not detract from progress the law was making. Those ranged from surging use of virtual private networks that disguise a user’s location to complaints from free speech evangelists in Silicon Valley and the rightwing populist Reform UK party.
“This is not a moment for everyone to throw their toys out of the pram and walk backwards,” she said.
But Kidron urged regulator Ofcom to take privacy more seriously as it enforced age verification, warning the issue would “become a culture war if not done properly”.
The watchdog had become “too close to the tech sector” and “should have been tougher about privacy” when it proposed systems that platforms could use to ensure that users are over 18 when accessing adult content, she added.
Ofcom has recommended a range of tools to verify users’ ages, including bank or credit card checks, scanning photo IDs, links to phone numbers and email addresses, and analysing facial features via photo or video.
Meta, Google-owned YouTube and TikTok are among companies testing out data-driven systems that infer a user’s age by tracking their usage, rather than confirming their identity directly.
Many websites have launched age-verification systems over the past few weeks, either developed by themselves or by third-party providers, and many people accessing a wide range of social media apps, pornographic sites, games and music services from the UK since late July will have been asked to prove their age in order to gain full access.
Despite tech companies’ assurances that they would safeguard or delete images of users’ faces or identity documents, critics say the system is vulnerable to hackers exposing a mountain of personal data — often from sensitive sites that users may not wish to be publicly associated with.
Kidron said many of the complaints over age checks could have been avoided if Ofcom had been stricter in its requirements for how the providers of verification services handle personal data.
“They say vaguely it should be privacy-preserving but they don’t really deal with that properly,” she said. “The government can be tough about privacy and the tech companies can choose it . . . this equation that age assurance must be a data grab is just not true.”
UK traffic to some of the most popular adult sites fell by almost half in the first two weeks following Ofcom’s enforcement of the new law, at the same time as VPN usage increased many times over.
“Do not assume that every VPN that has been downloaded is a child trying to get around [age controls],” Kidron said. “Many of them are adults trying to preserve their freedom . . . to access that [material] in private.”
Even if children were using VPNs, that would count as an improvement over the previous status quo where it had become “normal to offer pornography in the playground”, she said. Before the new rules there was no “hurdle” to do so, with many children encountering explicit material on social media without looking for it, she added.
“It’s really an important part of childhood to transgress,” Kidron said. “[Using a VPN] is like a child climbing out the window at night when you’ve grounded them . . . They know what they’re doing.”
Kidron was also critical of the dispute between Reform leader Nigel Farage, who has called for the Online Safety Act to be repealed, and technology secretary Peter Kyle, who accused opponents of the law of siding with the notorious late paedophile Jimmy Savile.
“This pathetic fight for the headlines that’s been going on for the last couple of weeks doesn’t start in the right place,” she said. “Everybody seems to have got a little bit lost in the trees and forgotten about the wood.”
