Samuel Woodhams writing in Exclusive: Ofcom is monitoring VPNs following Online Safety Act. Here’s how (TechRadar, Nov 2025)
The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, has told TechRadar that it’s using an unnamed third-party tool to monitor VPN use in the UK.
“We use a leading third-party provider, which is widely used in the industry, to gather information on VPN usage. The provider combines multiple data sources to train its models and generate usage estimates. The data we access and use in our analyses is fully aggregated at the app level, and no personally identifiable or user-level information is ever included.”
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So depressing.
The Online Safety Act is a censorship device, and it cannot function if people can easily bypass it.
They will first go after private VPN usage soon, and go after end-to-end encryption.
And this is why accusing Reform UK of fascism doesn’t work anymore.
These proposals are far more authoritarian than anything Reform have proposed.
It's outrageous, but I'm not sure how much good it will do them. The suffocating miasma of censorship in the UK seems to be so extensive now that VPN users must number in the millions, maybe tens of millions. What can they really do with the information when there are so many people to keep track of?
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