Sites block for GDPR because they want to abuse visitor data and privacy
Sites block for OSA because they don't want to abuse visitor data and privacy
Are they really going to register individual topics for Reddit?
Wait,
> Post on social media website X claiming that content relating to protests has been age-gated due to the Online Safety Act.
Now we're reporting individual tweets?!?
The amount of geoblocked/shutdown sites by far exceeds the "intended" [0] targets.
[0] Everyone knows that the collateral damage is intentional and this was never about porn.
>>43152154 ("In memoriam (onlinesafetyact.co.uk)"—147 comments)
>>42433044 ("Lfgss shutting down 16th March 2025 (day before Online Safety Act is enforced) (lfgss.com)"—555 comments)
>>43152178 ("Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act"—87 comments)
Get back to work Nicholas 30 ans. The Uniparty demands another day of sacrifice.
So I ask myself - could I come up with a simple HTML page that would be illegal in the UK without age verification checks? I won't host pornography, but it seems to cover a lot more than that. Photos from contests? Calls to overthrow the government?
I'd put it under some creative commons license so other people could host the exact same content. What if there were thousands, or tens of thousands of sites that did it. It'd be wonderful if people were willing to put their money where their mouth is how them how impotent and illegitimate their laws really are.
There are blocked sites but you have to look for them in different sections of the site.
One site shown at the start of the other pages, adult friend finder is showing as blocked, however I can access it from my UK provider so honestly not sure what value this site brings (yet) apart from highlighting those that have a self-enforced blackout due to "451 Legal Reasons".
I'm on mobile so difficult to copy and paste - but that site was the top of an alphabetical list after I made my way past a few VPNs.
I also don't think it would take the UK too long to block sites like what you're describing. It's now totally doable that ISPs would run non-whitelisted websites through an AI screening before serving them to the user. Or they might choose to go after individuals accessing them multiple times, as repressive governments go after individuals possessing/viewing politically "harmful" material.
Do you think I could get them to send me a certificate and everything?
Speaking as a Brit, I wish Wikipedia would just go black for the UK. That might focus some minds.
Canada and Australia are jumping in [2] [3].
[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
[1]: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2024/france/la-loi-sren...
[2]:https://facia.ai/news/canada-proposes-age-checks-for-online-...
[3]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-11/age-verification-sear...
I'm sure someone could whip up some merch super quickly as souvenirs/protest
Same difference. Making a pedantic distinction to mud the waters is the real disinformation.
If you are a local site by a local company on the other side of the world you don't need to block anyone, you just ignore foreign laws.
In the case of those news sites, though I suspect that most are owned by large multinational companies whose lawyers advised that blocking EU visitors is the only 100% sure way to avoid hypothetical retaliations by EU authorities.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords and so on.
Original comment follows: They blocked irish.session.nz: "Resources for learning Irish music by ear". This is either a mistake or a very early example of a political abuse of the OSA. Both are wrong of course and prove what a stupid and concerning thing OSA truly is.
Think it as a bit like GDPR but 1) much more expensive 2) with criminal liability 3) Makes even less sense than GDPR as it does nothing to prevent harm for minors 4) derimental for user experience and users.
"Funnily enough" the companies who lobbied for Online Safety Act, and former Ofcom employees, are now selling age verification check services and compliance services related to Online Safety Act. They have pretty good profit margins there, making even Google and Facebook look poor.
More here:
The King. Sorry to spoil The Crown for you, but Queen Elisabeth II has been dead for a few years.
You know, normal people like you and me.
Likewise. People (organisations/companies), as far as possible, shouldn't be pandering to this stuff, it's not the answer, it doesn't help them or us.
In an extreme case, they could potentially blacklist your ID to prevent you from spreading "harmful" political opinions, cutting you off the web entirely.
A ridiculous analogy but not entirely
This is another draconian powergrab designed by a Tory government and supported by a Labour government.
The Uniparty is real. The control freak technocrats are cut from the same cloth.
So, going forward, will similar pieces of art be blocked in the British Museum as well? Like physically?
Is there any verification on submissions to this?
It requires everyone to upload either ID and/or high quality photos & videos of themselves to a random company. Not just one company one whomever a website chooses for age verification, which can include doing it themselves. This creates multiple massive treasure troves of IDs that will attract hacking attempts (for example the Tea app breach). It creates opportunity for blackmail from this data (for example the Ashley Madison breach but much worse). For those age verification services that require a photo/video, that creates a resource for deep fakes. Plus any 15 year old boy worthy of their digital device will be able to get around age verification using fake id/photos or a VPN, whilst a less savvy adult trying to access information about quitting drinking or drug abuse will face a barrier.
And this is for ANY website that has a very broad range of content that the OSA mandates age verification for. It's easier for a website to err on the side of caution and just block the UK. That especially includes websites that have zero reporting back to Meta/Google/etc... for usual marketing profiling. If anything it pushes more people into the limited, monitored and advertising driven Meta/Google web.
However the privacy attacking malware they embed on there to mine data from their users would apply, and that's why they block it - because America allows abuse of their citizens data, but Europe doesn't.
Of course there is no enforcement for an entity attacking European citizens in this way so they could do it anyway, but like with cookie banners the point isn't to comply with a law, the point is to get citizens to blame the law rather than the abusers.
It's an even worse idea to make the block list public lmao
You guys seem to be right behind the US when it comes to fascism 2.0 though.
When the parent does the enforcement themselves then they can be put under direct pressure by their children to drop the ban. When the government does it then the parent can say, honestly, sorry, there’s nothing they can do about it: It’s out of their hands. The child only has access to tier 1 support [parent] and the support agent’s only response is “sorry, corporate policy [law] requires AV for certain sites, there’s nothing I can do. Is there anything else I can help you with today?…”
I don’t say this to make the laws easier to swallow but the social economics of it make it more understandable why this law might be so popular with anyone already overloaded with angry teenagers.
Next up: the Bedtime Is At Nine PM Act 2026, Tuck Your Shirt In Act 2027, and No We Have One At Home Already Act 2028.
But criminal damage is down. Of course, if you call the police for criminal damage, everyone knows they won't turn up and you'll just get a crime number, so unless you're claiming on insurance you're probably less and less likely to report it.
We shouldn't be aiming for London (with 200 phones stolen every day as it is) to reach the level of the worst European or American cities.
In the case of E2E encryption, it's definitely a hill to die on, there is no way to make a backdoor "only the good guys" can access. But in this case, the long standing refusal for the tech industry to engage in even the lightest of lobbying towards having legal regulation for standards seems to bite us in the ass every now and then. We've seen it time and time even for things that are non controversial and would clearly benefit everyone: why is BCP 38 not mandated by law in any country? Why is IPv6 at the ISP consumer edge not mandated by law?
All of this could have had the same effect if instead of putting the onus of age verification on millions of websites, you instead put it onto the "customer end device", with some definition as to have it only apply to anyone who sells devices used to access online content with more than X% market share (meaning effectively Microsoft, Google on behalf of all Android OEMs and Apple, plus TVs and console makers).
You'd also put into law what content providers need to do to become compliant. It drops from "having a robust system of age verification" into "if you're serving content over HTTP and your content is for over 18, you need to send a specific over 18 header". If you're publishing an app on a walled garden app store, you need to specify the age rating (as one does already). If you state your page is good for under 18s when it's actually over 18, you then incur a fine.
Then it's really just up to OS makers to build support for the above into the parental controls functions that mostly already exist. Implement the header checking on the browser. Then restrict over 18 apps and outside app store that aren't explicitly authorised: this ensures no alternate browsers could be installed or ran by a child, while leaving them freedom to roam the web and install under 18 apps. The issue with existing parental controls is twofold: the web is a wild place and manually vetting every single app your kid wants to install is overbearing so everyone gives up on parental controls.
Then it's a matter of, when you buy a phone for your kid, you click a button "the user is a child, enable parental controls, set the grown up password". If parents fail to even do this, then clearly it's their own fault?
You'd specifically leave out non-HTTP protocols and leave a bunch of technical loopholes that could be exploited by technically minded people. It would both limit the amount of wreckage to things the common people doesn't even know it exists and make sure this wouldn't creep into places it doesn't belong. Sure, teenager who downloads Arch into a USB pen drive and boots off it can then access whatever they want, or someone who finds they can get into IRC and XDCC a bot for hot JPEGs, but at that point they clearly earned it.
I get the feeling that we've fucked it, left very important regulations up to people who have no clue and now we get the most onerous and worst implementation possible of things every single time put into law. We could have done the same with cookies, there's like, three browsers. Remember P3P? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P
Oh look, that foreign entity now has a profile of you, and what sites you've visited.
Fast forward a year, they get hacked (or maybe even just sold), a copy of your personally identifiable details are pinched along with your browsing history.
I really really hope you weren't being naive enough to go down the utterly stupid "nothing to hide" route with your line of thinking.
The best path is one of calamitous implementation that scares off other countries and embarrasses this one into a u-turn. But it's increasingly unlikely.
The Online Safety Act has to be understood as a regulation of the Big Tech platforms that form what we might call the NormieNet. Your web page is unlikely to come to the attention of politicians, Ofcom (the relevant regulator) or the wider public, so you almost certainly would not suffer any adverse consequences, even if you were a resident of the UK.
Britain has a long history of libertarianism - it's where American libertarianism came from - but British libertarians don't make florid speeches about how free they are, they just quietly do whatever it is they want to do without telling anyone who might object. During the coronavirus pandemic, the UK had particularly strict lockdown regulations, because the Johnson government believed that most people wouldn't take any notice of them.
I'm sure someone will come along soon to tell me that this is a terrible principle on which to run a country, but the truth is that Britain is governed entirely by realpolitik, because the historical record shows that strongly principled government does not endure[1].
Crap times ahead!
Likewise for every Reddit link and probably more.
I wish the website made a better effort at filtering those because it muddies the point when the government can point out that half of the list is actually accessible in the UK (even if some are behind an ID wall).
Just need to come up with something to put on the page.
I'm far more bothered by this being yet another nail in the coffin of web forums. The issue is the burden the regulations place on any site which hosts user-generated content. For small low-risk sites the burden isn't all that great - OFCOM have some guidance on their website - but it's still enough to be offputting. A 100-user web forum isn't going to want to bother with it, so those run by UK nationals are just pulling the plug, while those run elsewhere are just blocking UK users because it's the easiest solution.
Which reminds me, I should go and disable comments on my blog...
The crime rates in other places is irrelevant if the city you've lived in for the last 20 years has become noticeably more dangerous.
This is not "a narrative that keeps being pushed without merit", in fact the people who dismiss such claims are often the ones who live very insulated lives.
More importantly, you can't deal with potential crime by making real arrests, because then you have to start arresting people who haven't done anything.
Source: Lived in India for 15 years.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/region_rankings_current.jsp?reg...
To be clear, also a Brit
> And for everybody out there who's thinking about using VPNs, let me just say to you directly, verifying your age keeps a child safe. Keeps children safe in our country. So let's just not try and find a way around. Just prove your age. Make the internet safer for children. Make it a better experience for everyone. That's surely what we should aspire to in this country.
It's a grave insult to think someone would even believe this.
EDIT: Pictured in the video is Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kyle
My son figured out free VPNs when he was 8-9. This is only stopping adults.
Brexit has markedly made the UK's economy weaker, there are less opportunities, the opportunities that exist outside of finance/tech are quite low paid compared to other European countries while the cost of living in London is absurdly high when compared to other major European cities. It's the perfect storm coupled with high immigration: blame immigrants for the lack of opportunities caused by a policy pushed by anti-immigration rhetoric, it will just feed into giving power to Reform which, if given power, will continue to crash the UK's economical prospects.
The ship has sailed, it will take the UK quite a while to correct course, perhaps even a generation or so... While that correction course happens British society will just keep eroding away.
EDIT: Since there is one (dead) comment on this: To reiterate: The Crime Survey surveys people and tracks the rate of crime people state in a response to a survey that they have experienced. As such it includes crimes that are not reported.
https://policinginsight.com/feature/analysis/most-crime-has-...
Put up a page saying you support "Palestine Action". Given that group is (currently) a proscribed "terrorist organisation" (and therefore illegal to support, obvs.), your page would definitely be illegal in the UK.
(Although I suppose there's the light risk that MI6 might decided to rendition you with $LOCALCOUNTRY's assistance if they're feeling exuberant.)
I've been here 25 years, and most of the areas that used to be sketchy are now not.
Given we know from comparing e.g. Crime Survey data to polls about peoples beliefs about crimes that peoples beliefs about crime rates in the UK are not remotely well correlated with actual crime rates, that page doesn't tell us what you claim it does.
It tells us that out of visitors to Numbeo, people who claim to live in 3 British cities report that they are more worried than most others.
For Bradford, the data is based on just 131 contributors in the last 5 years:
If Ofcom does decide to pursue you, they will start by asking to see your risk assessments and policy documents, and would then in theory proceed to legal action, but in practice would just ignore you, because you're just protesting, and they have no chance of getting the millions in fines out of you.
I'm not sure what content you could put on your page, but if anyone suggests a message of support for a protest group called Palestine Action, I most strongly recommend that you don't do this, because the nature of their protests has led to their proscription as a terrorist organisation, and the resultant legal action against you would be of a very different nature.
Also, any hypothetical attempt to abuse the OSA to rein in political dissent would almost certainly be subject to legal challenges under the ECHR.
There are areas where people do drugs openly, and overdosing, too, and no one cares. A cop walked past a lady overdosing.
You should watch videos of YouTubers going to these areas if you do not want to do it yourself.
The areas are famous for tourists where most phone snatching is rampant, 18 a day at a minimum, on one famous street alone.
FWIW, I am talking about London.
People doing drugs isn’t a danger to me.
[1] https://x.com/GregHadfield/status/1878113938593730650?lang=e...
As things stand, it's coming:
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...
Reform UK will repeal the Online Safety Act.
Zia Yusuf, tech entrepreneur and head of Reform UK Department of Government Efficiency explains this here:
A few sites are covered by DNS/IP blocks by network providers separate to the Online Safety Act, but no sites are - at least so far - blocked by providers because of the OSA. These are mainly piracy related. E.g. The Pirate Bay.
The blocks/age verification due to OSA are done by the sites themselves under threat of steep fines.
This is all in the finest British tradition of passing the responsibility to someone else so you can point fingers when you get blamed. UK authorities love getting industry to "self regulate" as much possible, under threat of more restrictive laws or court challenges when they don't regulate hard enough.
The upside from a government point of view is that these blocks then are hard to challenge in court.
In the era of LLMs this is even more true. Every single chatbot I tried (DeepSeek, Grok, Claude, ChatGPT) except ChatGPT immediately gave numerous and detailed instructions on how to easily bypass the bans. I'm sure one could trivially push ChatGPT outside its love for big brother as well, if they cared to do so.
It's not clear to me who exactly such bans are effective against, and to what end. Obviously the government gains an immense amount of power so they're going to love it, regardless of its efficacy.
However, this is a list of "blocked sites" composed mostly of sites that are not blocked.
That sounds a lot like the Swedish defense, that Malmö only looks bad because the reporting standards are more rigorous. Meanwhile there are literal hand grenades exploding on their streets daily.
With 131 biased samples over 5 years, to continue with Bradford, who are not asked about actual crime, but about how they feel about it without an qualification as to whether they have any actual experience with it, this site is not saying anything useful.
Presenting it as if it is ranking cities by actual crime rates is ignorant of the data gathering at best, and at worst blatantly dishonest.
Then again given the hyperbole you're employing regarding Malmö, I should perhaps not expect you to care much about the veracity of data - yes, attacks with explosives is an escalating problem in Sweden, but nowhere remotely at the scale you're claiming.
Crimes (like phone, expensive items in a bag snatching) happen in rich areas, too.[1]
... is that gambling sites are except.
I may need to prove my age to visit Reddit (and soon Wikipedia) but not to visit Bet365, Ladbrook's, Paddy Power etc etc.
Need I tell you who some of the biggest lobbyists and political donors have been?
I witnessed the aftermath of a murder last week in Stoke Newington! (Saw that the road had been closed off)
I've seen women publicly urinating into drains on a busy road (Hackney)
There are massive increases in the number of homeless people (Tooting, Clapton, Shadwell), several times I've seen a homeless looking person harass women passing by.
Seen needles lying around (Shadwell, Commercial Road)
The general advice now is never to wear a watch in Central London, this wasn't the case 10 years ago.
I've seen security guards restrain people trying to leave shops in Central London after they shoplifted.
So yeah, some areas might not look sketchy, and these gentrified places (e.g. Stoke Newington) might be ok if you stick to the bars, restaurants and then Uber home, but for a lot of people these remain dangerous if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The “think of the children” angle is certainly there to make the bill more morally appealing, but is it actually popular with parents? Or anyone, other than politicians?
The kids in question are those of millennial and Gen-Z(!) parents. They’re not a generation that doesn’t understand the internet.
That’s not to say that some restriction wouldn’t be welcomed, but did the OSA really come from these parents?
I'm also not seeing any more homeless in London now than I used to see on Oxford Street when I lived by Marble Arch in 2000, for example. There were large encampments in the subways near Marble Arch at that time - I've not seen anything like it since.
> The general advice now is never to wear a watch in Central London, this wasn't the case 10 years ago.
Says who? I've never heard anyone say this, and don't know anyone who'd worry about wearing a watch in Central London.
And UK is doing fuck-all about it, they care more about who said what online. It is absurd.
As for your personal experience, sure, that is valid. It really depends on when you go out or what you are wearing.
Visiting a gambling site isn't restricted, but signing up and gambling is.
Furthermore, violent crime throughout the entire western world (not just England and Wales) has been dropping from its peak in the mid 1990's.
Unfortunately these facts don't fit in with the Daily Mail narrative and what people want to believe.
Crime overall is at a low level historically in the England, per the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which track actual victims through surveys.
That's not to say the UK couldn't do much better, but this fearmongering is basically repeating far-right conspiracy claims pushed by the press that are not supported by data including by peoples actual responses when asked if they have actually been a victim as per the Crime Survey.
From The Guardian reporting on Crime Survey numbers for London relative to the rest:
"According the Crime Survey for England and Wales, someone is actually less likely to be a victim of crime in London than they are across the country as a whole. In the capital, 14.9% of people experienced a crime either to their person or their household in the year ending September 2023, compared with 15.7% nationally. But what about different types of crime?"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/26/mobile-ph...
If you do not like The Guardian, search for "central london phone snatching".
Oh FFS.
Do you seriously consider this robust evidence?
Instead, have a look at the Crime Survey for England and Wales (HINT: This tracks peoples experience of crime and so includes unreported crime)
Vandalism, property damage and trespassing. Illegal, sure, but terrorism? Really now...
I'd put that up on a page.
Wikipedia is a popular website that many people depend upon; denying access to UK users would not only create a massive inconvenience along with the temptation that it could be avoided if the law were rolled back, but would also encourage more UK users to adopt VPNs, which would subvert the law's effectivity along with that of a plethora of other authoritarian measures that the UK has in place.
Yes, and they are doing it, and it is a major issue in London. We are not talking about other places right now. It is a huge issue in London.
I've been here 26 years this time (and a couple of years before that) and similarly not noticed it getting noticeably more dangerous.
(on the caveat side, I am a fairly hefty white bloke who apparently "looks scary" which might explain things.)
You are free to walk around these areas (just go to Knightsbridge) with an expensive watch to see if it is true or not. Get back to us safely to report.
Also... I literally just saw a cop walk past a lady overdosing as if all is fine, and did nothing to the woman who threw a bottle at the YouTuber. Who cares if it is on YouTube or not? I saw it regardless.
Wearing a nice watch in Soho, Liverpool Street, Tower Bridge is super sketchy and you're likely to get comments about how 'brave' (stupid) you are. These are just the places I've been to, West London is meant to be much worse.
Edit: Here are some links I found
- "Machete-ban petition launched as London watch robberies rise" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64991862
- Statistics for stolen watches from 2018 to 2023 https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...
When we know that police is understaffed and can't respond to all crime, perhaps you should spend less time blindly trusting the numbers. You, too, can't build an argument on unreliable data. Just like the poster you're replying to.
This was literally pointed out in the comment you replied to.
And can't find any actual data to corroborate that robberies have somehow reached such endemic levels.
EDIT: It gets comical to see that Met stats are now somehow trustworthy after the number of people here making a big deal of distrusting them. But notably the data shows the numbers to be small - in the hundreds per month - and having dropped significantly between 2018 and 2023. Furthermore, most of these crimes are burglary or theft, rather than crimes such as robberies or violence, so the chance of having them taken off your wrist is substanlly lower.
The article then covers an increase in "high-value" watch thefts from 2021 to 2022. Between 2021 and 2022 the numbers did in fact increase, and they were lower in 2021 than in 2023 as well. But we're talking 4885 watches total (not restricted to "high value") in 2021, of which about 1/3 are robberies. So you're much less likely to have your watch taken off you than e.g. your phone stolen.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50
"All providers of regulated user-to-user services that are likely to be accessed by children must comply with the following duties in relation to each such service which they provide—
(a)the duties about children’s risk assessments set out in section 11, and
(b)the duties to protect children’s online safety set out in section 12(2) to (13)."
(so-called ""extreme porn"" was banned entirely by UK law a year or two ago)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
This is funny but actually has sort of existed for decades, in the sense of the TV watershed – no adult content before 9pm, after which point it's assumed children are in bed and not watching TV.
And yes, you are absolutely right that parents do often like these laws. Being a parent is hard, whatever the age of the kids, and parents will be in favour of things that make it easier. Whether that's making TV default-safe in the daytime, or making adult websites harder to access.
That would be hilarious.
The UK law is basically a "go figure it out", which inevitably leads to making shady deals with third parties that are now handling the data of citizens... privacy and data leakage issues abound.
The EU meanwhile is working on a whitelabel application that can confirm nothing other than "this user is above 18" (which they can do because the EU has national ID for basically anyone living in it. It also works for another set of age ranges, as the idea is to also use this to confirm stuff like buying alcohol) and is designed to be easy to implement for anyone without having to get approval from the EU first. (Technical specification is available here[0]). It's not perfect (last I saw, they're apparently tying it to Google Play Services for device verification), but it's a far better attempt than the UK/Australia are doing.
You can specifically look at people's assumption at violent crime rates charted against actual violent crime rates and see that the gap has never been wider.
Also, 1980 to 2025 is not a "very specific time frame" and it still shows the trend described above. Very large cliff in the 90s we are still nowhere near.
Additionally, being alert does not equal to living in fear.
Hence, I think a total block would be better than a partial block, because that can be framed as legitimately risk mitigation and would be a lot harder to attack.
That said, some pressure would be better than no pressure, so if the alternative is no block, I'd prefer a partial block.
What you're describing here reads very much as cowering in fear to me.
And this kind of fear-mongering with no relation to reality is actively harmful and part of what is seriously damaging the UK as a society.
One of the tests is:
> Are there a significant number of children using the service or is the service likely to attract a significant number of children.
I'd guess that HN would be in scope for the act overall - they provide user-to-user functionality and have a lot of users in the UK. Either they answer no to the questions above, or they answer yes and should have performed a risk assessment where they look at things like what kind of content is allowed, how the site is moderated, how do users contact each other etc etc.
<meta name="OnlineSafetyAct:SiteClassification" content="adult;nudity">
This would allow locally run browser content blockers to automatically detect such sites without blocking them individually, and it would be trivial for site operators to implement. Since it would be mandated by law, sites that refuse to comply could be subject to legal action.
Of course, this would still rely on parents taking the basic step of setting up a content blocker before allowing their children unrestricted internet access.
I wasn't aware that any Reform MPs were in power back in 2023 when the Online Safety Act passed through parliament?
WHITELISTING. It's utterly infuriating the obvious, time tested strategy with all the technological pieces already in place and an easy slot-in for government isn't at the tip of everyone's tongue. Just setup a set of new TLDs, ".kids1", ".kids2", ".kids3" etc, with kids1 being appropriate for anyone ages 0-4 years old, kids2 ages 5-9, kids3 ages 10-14, etc. Or whatever permutation experts and the public say make the most sense. Governments can set the requirements for anyone or any organization who wants to register a domain there to ensure all content is controlled, no user submitted content (or only submissions from registered people/orgs like schools say), no algorithmic engagement usage allowed, no advertising or whatever else is desired. It's also trivial to add that in under country TLDs so every single nation that wants to regulate their own can do so to their own standards. An alternate similar approach would be to have a single ".[ccTLD].kids" domain and then legally required DNS txt info site-wide as well as standardized metadata tags at the top of every single page going into more granular detail about content by category (like if some parents though their kids were ready for a higher age bracket of world news before being ready for a higher bracket of something else).
With age-appropriate content under its own TLDs, all the other technical pieces are easy to slot in as well. It'd be absolutely trivial for OS makers to have parental control mode simply gate a given user into whatever TLDs match the age or content levels set by the parents. It's very easy to imagine a nice GUI at the router level combining TLD-restrictions with VLANs and PPSKs such that a parent can "add a child" and it spits out a separate WiFi password that gates the child into their own age appropriate stuff.
The general internet should be a free for all for adults (or adult level), period. Access at all should imply someone is ready to navigate it. Trying to restrict and sanitize it is evil, wrong, and also just plain fucking stupid since it'll never work well. We can easily make a child internet however.
Starting with less extreme content, such as a how to buy drugs guide, and gradually escalating to provoke a response, would be wiser.
If anything, these articles have made me feel more secure rather than less secure - these numbers are tiny given the size of London.
Sure, maybe don't go around flashing your watch if it's worth tens of thousands of pounds.
I have since had another look. Lee Anderson was in power (as a Conservative), and abstained from https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons/division/1416#notr... – though I'm not sure what this vote was actually on, and this doesn't support my original claim (that Reform MPs voted in favour of the Online Safety Act). Perhaps someone with more understanding of British Parliamentary Procedure could look through the relevant votes and see whether my claim was actually correct.
I'm guessing your solutions involve more police and anti immigration. While more social services and better prospects in life is what actually does something about the problem.
If age restriction technology is now being introduced to prevent kids *viewing* "inappropriate" websites, then why are gambling websites being given a free pass?
The answer is to follow the money:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=gambling%20industry%20lobb...
Assuming there are 9 million people in London, that means that 1/45,000 Londoners experience a phone theft on a given day.
We can then (very crudely) estimate the probability that a Londoner has their phone stolen over a ten year period:
1 - ((1-45000)/45000)^(365*10) = 0.08
I'm obviously not suggesting that the calculation above be taken too seriously. But it shows that 200 phones being stolen a day in a city of 9 million people is consistent with phone theft being a significant but not overwhelming problem.
(The adult population of London is around 7 million, and kids are obviously also victims of phone theft, so you won't get a radically different answer if you look at the population over a certain age.)
Trying to find an international version leads me to ICVS and this[0] publication which likewise ranks London at the very top. By that data, the UK ranks average at per-capita crime but is second at the same people being victimized more than once, which I take points towards that the majority of the country is likely relatively normal, but a handful of cities have very concentrated crime rates that are raising statistics.
Do you have any other sources to show or do you just like pointing out that all of them are bad if they don't agree with you?
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282573613_Criminal_...
Let this be a salutary warning to HN readers that a huge amount of baseless nonsense gets written about crime in London.
and "official figures" are an untrustworthy source of data
pray tell us just what could possibly be a trustworthy source of data??
"Go outside and look for yourself" that's people's experiences
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I think you mean:
1 - ((45000-1)/45000)^(365*10) = 0.08
That's just gentrification of those areas. Others became in the process.
If you look it up, you can see these snatching, it is recorded by CCTVs.
The issue is there, they were just there at a time where these people who are snatching weren't there. 18 phone snatching per day on one street, but not at all hours, and not on all streets. It varies. But yeah, we want people's experiences. Maybe some of these people on HN did not experience it. Perhaps they could ask their friends and the friends of their friends.
Let this be a salutary warning to HN readers that people get needlessly pissy when you question them about the backgrounds of their experiences.
(And also, where on Earth did you get the idea that academics in London can afford to live in the nice districts, or that most HNers are academics?)
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "WebPage",
"contentRating": "18+",
"isFamilyFriendly": false,
"audience": {
"@type": "PeopleAudience",
"suggestedMinAge": 18,
"requiredMinAge": 18
},
}
You can make a backdoor that only the good guys can access--it's not even hard thanks to public key cryptography. The problems are:
(1) The good guys might be sloppy in how they handle you data, so they might leak or or they themselves might get hacked.
(2) The good guys might later become the bad guys.
The closest thing we have is tobacco and alcohol. But that's still very far off.
Its true children can't buy alcohol, but they can't buy Internet access either. But, they can drink alcohol, and they can view the internet.
There's nothing stopping a parent from just giving little Timmy wine. All bets are off once you show ID at the corner store and go home.
Similarly, all bets are off after you show ID and proof of residence to your Teleco and they install Internet connection. ... Until now.
This is an entirely novel and never before seen type of law and type of reasoning. It may seem, on the surface, reasonable or done before. But if you think about it, it's not.
This isn't your typical brand of "think of the children".
- According to the Office for National Statistics, many crimes recorded against people increased between the years ending June 2015 and March 2025, including violence against the person (40%), possession of offensive weapons (23%), sexual offences (75%) and theft from the person (207%).
- The number of serious offences involving a knife or sharp object recorded in the year ending March 2024 in England and Wales was 54% higher than the figure for 2016.
- More than twice as many knife crime offences were recorded in Essex in the 12 months to March 2024, than the figure for 2016.
- Greater Manchester Police has recorded 1,345 knife-enabled robberies in the past 12 months, up from 1,288 recorded between July 2023 and June 2024.
- Rape Crisis has described a "staggering" 15% rise in the number of rapes and attempted rapes recorded in Scotland last year as "alarming". Official statistics published on Tuesday, show sexual crimes increased by 3% overall to the second highest level since 1971. The figures show the number of sexual crimes reported last year was 14,892, up from 14,484 in 2023-24 - a 45% increase in the last decade. Rape and attempted rape reports increased from 2,522 in 2023-24 to 2,897 in 2024-25, up 60% for the same figures 10 years ago.
- Police in England and Wales have recorded the highest number of rapes and sexual offences in 20 years. Forces recorded 194,683 sexual offences in 2021-22, including 70,330 rapes, the highest number since records began in 2002/03. The number of sex offences recorded by forces in England and Wales has more than doubled in the past seven years, from 88,576 in 2014/15 to 194,683 in 2021-22. Rape offences have nearly doubled in the past six years, from 36,320 in 2015-16 to 70,330 in the year to March.
- Personal theft up 22% in England and Wales, ONS says. Personal thefts recorded by police in England and Wales were up 22% in 2024 from the previous year, according to official figures. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows police recorded 152,416 thefts from the person offences last year, the highest since the current data methods began in 2003.
- It estimated that there were 9.6 million incidents of what is described as "headline crime" in 2024 - which includes theft, robbery, criminal damage, fraud, computer misuse, and violence with or without injury.
- The latest CSEW survey reported that at the end of 2024: People's experiences of theft had gone up by 13% - including a 50% rise in theft from the person offences, such as mobile phone theft. Theft from outside a dwelling - such as courier packages being taken from people's doorsteps - went up by 19% Fraud incidents, including bank and credit account fraud, were up by 33% to around 4.1 million incidents - with around 3 million incidents involving a loss and 2.1 million victims fully reimbursed in these cases
- More than 700,000 vehicles were broken into last year - often with the help of high-tech electronic devices, including so-called signal jammers, which are thought to play a part in four out of 10 vehicle thefts nationwide.
- Shoplifting hits record high in England and Wales There were 530,643 reported shoplifting offences in the year to March, a 20% increase from the previous year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
- Pharmacies report surge in shoplifting and aggression Around nine in 10 pharmacies have reported an increase in shoplifting and aggression towards staff in the past year. A survey of 500 pharmacies by the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) also found 87% had experienced at least one instance of intimidating behaviour towards workers, while 22% said they had seen staff physically assaulted.
But homicide rate (per 100K) dropped gradually after rising for 30 years to its record high in 2003, so, yay I guess!
People's experiences are, as yet, an inaccessible source of data.
People's claims about their experiences are an often untrustworthy source of data.
> pray tell us just what could possibly be a trustworthy source of data??
The absence of an trustworthy, accessible source of data does not make untrustworthy or inaccessible sources of data trustworthy or accessible.
> "Go outside and look for yourself" that's people's experiences
No, its not "people's experiences", but its also not a broad, general, representative source of data.
It's not going to be perfect, but it gives a very solid snapshot of peoples experience with crime without the massive distortion we know we get from looking at similar sized samples asked what they think crime levels are.
So? Sample size only addresses sampling error, not nonsampling error, for nonsampling error its exactly as bad as the dinkiest little poll on the same topic (and for sampling error, it's not much better; polls are the sizes they typically are because it doesn't actually take a very large scale to be fairly reliable when you only consider sampling error, and, again, adding more size doesn't help at all against nonsampling error.)
You'll also note that the paper itself then provides data from additional capitals that it's conveniently not included in the main list. Several of those additional cities ranking above London. In other words, it's a sample that even the paper demonstrates isn't remotely comprehensive.
I don't need to provide any other sources - you're the one that made a claim that was based in "data" that was entirely worthless, and this new data still isn't even close to backing up the original claim.
Do you think this tells us anything other than perception? Which several people have already pointed out we know are out of whack with actual survey of peoples actual experience with crime?
It's clear there are many phone thefts. It's also clear people believe the extent of crime is far higher than it is. It seems like a perfect thing for a company like Curry's to profit from.
You then mention CSEW for one year, ignoring that the overall long term trend is down from a high in 1994-95.
CSEW consistently captures a far higher rate of crime than police reports because it doesn't rely on police reporting changes, or peoples willingness to report.
In other words: Your wall of text is irrelevant.
Look at the CSEW data, and the trends all the way back to its start in 1982.
Doesn't mean there aren't problems, and hotspots, or specific crimes that have different trends, but overall we're near a historical low.
That was what, N = 4?
So are you saying what I posted has no merit?
> According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales 2024, an estimated 78,000 people had phones or bags snatched from them on the street in the year ending March 2024.[1]
> This is equivalent to 200 'snatch thefts' a day and is a 153% increase on the number of incidents in the year ending March 2023. London is regarded as the “epicentre” of phone thefts with £50 million worth of phones reported stolen in London in 2024.[1]
This is coming from your own Government, for crying out loud.
And 1-10 people saying "oh it's perfectly safe" does not mean anything. It is an actual issue, and you may not believe me until it happens to you, or someone you know, which is kind of typical, so I get it.
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-...
If they’re not willing to listen to actual Londoners then the discussion is unlikely to be productive.
Also, since there were zero "No" votes from Tories, it could be that the party whip imposed conditions on Tory MPs.
Those are not far off, they are harmful drugs as well (despite being somewhat normalised).
The goal is not about stopping parent from giving child something, the goal is to minimise exposure and ability to get access to it as much as possible.
But we all know you’ll double down because you aren’t interested in any truth that goes against your narrative, prove me wrong.
And I consumed many people's "unsafe" experiences, similar to YOUR "safe" experiences.
As I said, N = ~4 saying "it's safe" means fuck all, just like N = ~4 saying the opposite.
So... you appear to be another person who invalidates and completely disregards other people's experiences (and your own Government's publishing) in favor of yours, because somehow yours is more valid. It is not.
You need to stop painting London as a safe place, because that it is not. Maybe it is on the routes you take in your car, but in general, no, not really. Hell, even Budapest is safer than London.
> Hungary's national crime rate in 2021 was approximately 0.77 crimes per 100 residents. This figure represents a significant decline from 0.82 in 2020, indicating a 5.86% decrease . Specific data for Budapest is limited, but the city's overall crime index is reported at 33.99 out of 100, which is considered low.[1]
> In contrast, London's crime rate is significantly higher. The annual crime rate in the London region is approximately 30.1 crimes per 1,000 people, which is about 86% of the national average for England and Wales . Violent crime constitutes 22.6% of all reported crimes in London . Notably, Westminster, a central borough in London, recorded a staggering 432.3 crimes per 1,000 residents, largely due to its high daytime population from tourism.[2]
So, by the available numbers, Budapest has about 0.77 crimes per 100 people, while London has 3.01 per 100. That makes London's crime rate ~3.9x higher, meaning Budapest is roughly 74% safer per capita.
[1] https://diaklakas.hu/en/blog/public-safety-budapest/
[2] https://www.plumplot.co.uk/London-violent-crime-statistics.h...
There are safer cities than London and there are more dangerous ones. London is pretty middle of the pack, if you look at European or American cities of comparable size. Even the stats that you yourself link to show that London is one of the safer parts of the UK.
They are extremely far off, and you chose to ignore why.
Its not because of harm or normalization. Its because what people are proposing here is fundamentally different than ID checking for cigs.
If I buy a pack, I can go home and immediately give them to a kid. If I wanted.
The store clerk does not follow me home. The ID checking happened at point of sale, and after that, all bets are off.
We actually already have this type of ID checking in place for the internet and have since the beginning.
To buy Internet, I must present ID and proof of residence. Once the internet is sold to me, all bets are off. It is my responsibility to not give it to my kid, in the same way it's my responsibility to put the vodka in the locked liquor cabinet.
What you're proposing is the equivalent of the store clerk following you home and staying in your house, watching you smoke the cigarettes to make sure you don't give it to any children.
The difference is that parents, rightfully, don't give out cigs like candy. But they DO give out internet access like candy.
That's because parents are stupid, not because the laws are broken. We don't extreme privacy violations, we just need people to get their head out of their ass.
And, anyone who claims kids need an Internet connection is lying through their teeth. No, they don't. For anything. I promise. No exceptions.
Oh oh but what about homework???.
Put a goddamn computer in your living room like it's 1997, don't tell your spoiled brat the internet password, and problem solved. Its that easy. No 1984 required.
Oh oh but what about phones??? Little Timmy is gonna die on the 14 second walk from the bus to my front door!!
Go to Walmart, but a prepaid cricket phone, and give it to them. There, I solved your problem and saved you 900 dollars.
> using their own anecdotal experiences over data in order to confirm your own pre conceived notions
I am not doing this, at all, in fact, you are dead wrong. You think I am not aware of any of these fallacies / biases? I am self-aware enough.
Address this, tired of repeating myself: >>44905149 .
> I consumed https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-...
Official sources.
> And I consumed many people's "unsafe" experiences, similar to YOUR "safe" experiences.
I am considering both sides here.
> As I said, N = ~4 saying "it's safe" means fuck all, just like N = ~4 saying the opposite.
This should alone should strengthen the claim that I am considering both sides, and it means jack shit.
> So... you appear to be another person who invalidates and completely disregards other people's experiences (and your own Government's publishing) in favor of yours, because somehow yours is more valid. It is not.
---
Next time please do it without any personal attacks, that does not favor your case (wait, do you actually have any?) that is already standing on weak legs. If you have no case apart from personal attacks, then yeah, I am in the wrong here, with regarding to you.
If you are not interested in actually doing your research, do not even bother, I am tired of the old story that "but muh experiences matter more!!11!". They DO NOT. Your experiences are not the universal truth, and it goes both ways.
https://www.onlondon.co.uk/dave-hill-lets-get-the-london-kni...
(Note that the identification of Westminster as a knife-crime hotspot in the second chart is misleading, as this is an area of central London with lots of tourists and workers, thus inflating the number of crimes per the relatively small number of residents.)
Knife crime is a serious problem, but it’s not something that I worry about at all in my day to day life in London. It would be no more rational for me to do so (in fact, less rational) than it would be for a New Yorker to worry about being shot.
What I still don’t understand about this thread is why someone who doesn’t live in London has repeatedly being telling people who do live in London to “go out and see for themselves”. You seem very attached to a narrative about London found in certain sections of right wing online media, and unless you’re not telling us something, this can’t be because you have any personal interest in life in London. I feel like there’s some kind of agenda here, but I don’t care to speculate exactly what it is.
People can reasonably interpret crime statistics differently based on their personal experiences and risk tolerance. Your experience feeling safe in London is valid, just as the experiences of those who feel unsafe are valid. The data I cited simply provides broader context beyond individual anecdotes.
Crime statistics are publicly available precisely so they can inform public discussion, regardless of who's discussing them. If you think the sources I cited are inaccurate or the comparison is flawed, I'm happy to discuss that.
This is consistent with my personal experience and that of others who've posted here. You have not posted any data indicating otherwise.
>the discussion should be about whether those numbers are accurate and what they show, not about where I live or my motivation
You must understand that if you dismissively tell people to "go out and see for yourself", and then it turns out that you don't even live in London, people are going to wonder how you ended up holding such strong opinions on crime in London.
People are actually reporting knife crime and rapes and burglaries and shop lifting to the police in record numbers, but the CSEW survey doesn't reflect this, so all is fine!
After all what's more trustworthy? Some bureucrats asking census-like questions to some sample of the population to cook some numbers, or actual women reporting rape and victims reporting knife crimes to the police?
> In other words: Your wall of text is irrelevant
Live happily in your alternate reality.
False. I have. See below.
> The Crime Survey data shows that crime in London, and the rest of the UK, has generally decreased over the past ten years
Your own source contradicts your claim.
The latest ONS "Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2025" bulletin-the most recent data available shows headline crime rose to 9.4 million incidents, a 7% increase from the previous year (8.8 million). This is the opposite of the decrease you're claiming.
---
The crimes affecting daily safety have surged:
- Fraud: +31% (4.2 million incidents-highest since records began in 2017)
- Shoplifting: +20% (530,643 offences-highest since 2003)
- Theft from person: +15% (151,220 offences-also record highs)
---
You're conflating timeframes.
Yes, the 10-year trend shows overall decreases, but the ONS explicitly states there have been "increases across some crime types in the latest reporting period." The current trend shows London getting less safe, not more.
These aren't abstract statistics - fraud, shoplifting, and theft from the person are exactly the crimes that make London feel unsafe day-to-day. While homicides (-6%) fell slightly, that's a low-volume crime compared to millions of property offences hitting residents.
---
So... your own data source proves crime is rising in the categories that matter most for everyday safety.
---
PS. with regarding to:
> and then it turns out that you don't even live in London, people are going to wonder how you ended up holding such strong opinions on crime in London.
We have the internet. I can communicate with Londoners, visit regularly, read local London news sources, follow Metropolitan Police crime statistics, and so forth. The list is quite long.
By your logic, crime researchers, policy analysts, journalists, and statisticians could only study cities where they personally reside.
Your attempt to dismiss the data by questioning my location rather than addressing the statistics themselves suggests you're more interested in ad hominem attacks than substantive discussion.
You'll find this note about the increase in 'headline crime' in 2025 vs 2024:
>the latest rise in CSEW headline crime was because of a 31% increase in fraud (to around 4.2 million incidents); this is the highest estimated number of incidents since fraud was first collected on the CSEW in YE March 2017
Surely you can't argue that fraud makes people feel unsafe when walking the streets. Fraud is a serious problem and the increase in fraud is concerning, but it's not a personal safety issue.
If you think about it, there are a lot of different categories of crime, numbers are bound to fluctuate, and so some of the categories will naturally show increases between one year and the next (just as others will show decreases). You can easily cherry pick one or two individual categories to paint whatever picture you want. I could equally point out that knife offenses, firearm offenses and robbery have gone down compared to 2024. Really, as many posters have pointed out, it makes more sense to look at longer-term trends rather than reading too much into year-on-year increases or decreases in specific crime categories.
The overall picture is that London is neither unusually safe nor unusually unsafe for a large European or American city. This has been the case for decades.
>I can communicate with Londoners
Well, can you? You're communicating with one now, but you seem quite determined to convince me not to believe either the official statistics or my own experiences.
Let's remove fraud entirely since you're right it doesn't affect street safety.
Theft from the person - which absolutely does - increased 15% to 151,220 offences (highest since records began).
Shoplifting hit 530,643 offences (also highest since records began). These are the crimes people encounter walking around London.
Since you're a Londoner, the Met data is key: London saw a 54% shoplifting increase vs 20% nationally, and 41% increase in theft from person while the rest of England saw it decrease by 14%. London isn't following national patterns - it's bucking them badly.
On cherry-picking: Homicides fell by 32 incidents across 9 million Londoners. Meanwhile, London alone saw over 30,000 additional shoplifting incidents. The volume difference matters.
The ONS explicitly states there have been "increases across some crime types in the latest reporting period." The current trajectory on street-level property crime is objectively concerning, regardless of longer-term trends.
Your personal experience is valid, but the data suggests it may not reflect what's happening across London more broadly. The statistics and your lived experience can both be true simultaneously.
---
Just to reiterate: these aren't abstract statistics - fraud, shoplifting, and theft from the person are exactly the crimes that make London feel unsafe day-to-day. Your own data source proves crime is rising in the categories that matter most for everyday safety.
"I hunt phone thieves professionally – I was still targeted on Oxford Street Former detective turned private investigator warns some London areas have become ‘lawless’" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/15/phone-thieves-ox...
"Some 78,000 people had phones or bags snatched from them on the street in the year ending March 2024, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
That is equivalent to 200 “snatch thefts” a day and is a 153 per cent increase on the number of incidents in the year ending March 2023.
London is seen as the “epicentre” of phone thefts with £50 million worth of handsets reported stolen in the capital in 2024.
In a blitz on the “scourge of mobile phone theft” in February, Met officers arrested 230 people in just a week and recovered 1,000 handsets by targeting hotspots such as Westminster and the West End."