Child safety campaigner defends Online Safety Act

Baroness Beeban Kidron, a key figure behind the UK’s landmark Online Safety Act, has championed the legislation’s early impact, arguing its success in forcing tech companies to protect children should inspire further action.

In an interview with the FT, her first since age-verification rules were enforced, the crossbench peer hailed the law for prompting changes that the technology industry had “wilfully ignored for at least two or three decades.”

According to Kidron, the act’s success is evident in the implementation of age controls on a wide range of websites, which has made it harder for minors to access adult content. She pointed to a significant drop in UK traffic to adult sites in the weeks following the new rules as a sign of progress.

The legislation has built one of the world’s most ambitious regimes for online child protection. Kidron views the need for a child to use a virtual private network (VPN) to bypass age verification as an improvement, likening it to a child “climbing out the window” rather than having unrestricted access.

She said this is a far better situation than the previous status quo, where it had become “normal to offer pornography in the playground.”

However, Kidron also identified a key failure in the act’s implementation: the handling of privacy. She criticized the regulator Ofcom for being “too close to the tech sector” and not being strict enough on how age-verification providers handle sensitive personal data.

Critics worry that the required submission of photo IDs or facial scans could create a vulnerable “mountain of personal data” for hackers to target. Kidron insisted that age verification does not have to be a “data grab” and urged Ofcom to prioritize privacy more seriously.