Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

I love how the comments miss that the problem these laws address deserve addressing, but from the producers side: making safe products for the public. This specific solution is fashioned after tobacco and alcohol regulation, which was never primarily about parental supervision, it's about what can be sold and how. And in public health we'd want everyone moving away from both not just kids. The boneheadness of age verification is that unlike tobacco and alcohol, where the best we can do is restrict access, online harm can actually be fixed at the root by regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place.

Just my opinion but…

I’m all for helping people in the situations that aren’t of their own creation, so using the excuse “what are they supposed to do” doesn’t really fit for me? The first option is to use a condom if they are in a bad financial situation. It’s been amazing how every time I’ve used one, I haven’t had a child.

When did we stop making people responsible for their choices? I’m not against assistance, I’m against the idea that it is my responsibility to give up rights and freedoms because made poor personal choices and now society is once again a surrogate to yet another child of irresponsible parents. If you aren’t able to parent, don’t have children. Don’t care what your situation is that rule stays the same.

And of course, someone will jump in with “but maybe” and “what if the situation changed”. Again…I’m not against helping parents who fall on hard times to get back on their feet — society SHOULD be there to help with assistance and programs, even help with getting your kids watched. And all of that exists. I’m against expecting every individual of society to not only help bear the costs, fund and administrate these programs, provide countless charities, etc…

But now the suggestions is also somehow that we are required to be the surrogate parent to every one of their offspring by giving up our rights to create an entire society of a padded playground?

No, I think that’s the line for me.

Parents can give up all their own rights they want and live in their padded kingdoms, but that ends at your doorstep when you walk out to the space you share with every other person…including digitally. You can build the physical and virtual walls around your padded kingdom as high and thick as you want to keep your children shielded from the world.

I don't know the parent's policy position, but it seems like they didn't express one, and you've just assumed they support deanonymization?

But unfortunately, a VPN won't protect you from captive portals. So not entirely sure what your comment adds to the discussion other than being unnecessarily rude.

For other readers who may be too young to remember, improper privacy controls (unenforced HTTPS, poor encryption in the form of WEP, easy MitM attacks, etc) meant that public/untrusted WiFi was a legitimate security risk as things like passwords, bank details, etc were very easy to steal as they were sent unencrypted over the air. This is fortunately much less true these days with the advent of better protections across the entire stack (HTTPS everywhere, WPA*, etc) but unscrupulous VPN merchants still use this outdated argument to try to sell their products to less technically-savvy customers.

What these technologies (and VPNs) _do not_ prevent is the legitimate (and consensual) capture of user data by captive portal software (email, phone, etc), which is typically submitted by a user wishing to connect to a public network. This is what the parent comment is mentioning. Different risk profiles, obviously.