Reddit fined £14m by Information Commisioner’s Office over age verification checks

I was thinking about this, and shouldn’t google also be in hot water? you can google porn and go to images and it’s all shown, no age verification required.

Edit: Im not saying I agree with this law, just pointing out how dumb the implementation of it has been.

Edit of the edit: Even more so if it is the case search engines are exempt since thats what we all use to find this stuff, if you can just google porn and find those images with that much ease, what really is the point in making individual sites check ages of visitors.

Final edit aimed at the comments saying this isn’t about the OSA, this is a quote from the article the bbc have just posted ”In July 2025, Reddit [started verifying the age of users](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4ep1znk4zo) in order to comply with the requirements of the Online Safety Act (OSA).

But the ICO said the platform relied on asking users to declare their age when opening an account – a technique it said was “easy to bypass”.

The regulator added companies operating online services likely to be accessed by children had a responsibility to protect them, including by making sure the way children’s data was collected and used did not expose them to risks.

“To do this, they need to be confident they know the age of their users and have appropriate, effective age assurance measures in place,” said Mr Edwards.

“Reddit failed to meet these expectations.””

Maybe the fact that a company as big as Reddit failed is a sign that these regulations set a standard that is impossible to meet. I had to do an age verification selfie when the law went into effect, but apparently that wasn’t good enough?

At this rate, I’m worried we’re going to see more sites pull out of the UK entirely.

How are they calculating them fines ? By early revenue Reddit makes or is just some random numbers ?

Usually I’m against tech companies, but they should band together and collectively leave the UK market over this puritanical nonsense

These fuckers are intending to completely destroy and sterilise the internet for UK citizens.

I got age checked via a video selfie soon after joining, the main problem is how poorly this was all implemented. Youtubes guesses your age via the videos you watch without requiring ID yet they’re fine with that

That stupid law has required me to run a VPN permanently just to visit my regular, everyday websites that are in no way porn… and that’s not enough for Starmer?

They should just age verify the people signing up to mobile phone and internet deals.

Oh wait they do? Problem sorted

Why is no one bothering to read the article? It says Reddit isn’t checking its users are aged 13 and over, and are thus illegally processing the private information of children under 13.

This has nothing to do with porn.

This is all about censorship- not about protecting children- if it was, no child in the UK would go hungry or cold or live in poverty- or indeed no WMD would be sold to countries that slaughter children by the tens if thousands- yeah that one.

Plus they would have done a deep dive into all those connected with Epstein years ago. And remember, Sir Jim’ll was never prosecuted despite all the evidence.

This is all about control and mass surveillance on US.

Politicians and the Elite of course are totally exempt.

This act does NOTHING to protect children; mass surveillance once again under the extremely transparent guise of ‘protect the children’.

There is only one way to protect the children and that is good parenting; that is what the government should be investing time and money in to, initiative and awareness and then, colour me crazy, but maybe fine parents for allowing children access to these website that are unsuitable? But no that would target the root cause of the issue and wouldn’t allow the government to become big brother. People need to be kicking off about this way more.

The reason why the OSA targeted age verification is because they legally can’t control what adults can see due to free speech laws defined in the HRA.

If the law went in under the premise of targeting adults, it would have been challenged under a Supreme Court ruling.

This does happen, contrary to what people might think. Just recently, the Government scheme for deportations to Rwanda was seen as in violation of the HRA.

For children, however, the government has a statutory duty of care. This is the same reason they can take kids away from abusive parents or force kids to go to school. Therefore, the law can target children.

Because the government has to legally state that the safe guards on these platforms only apply to children, they need platforms to have more than a simple checkbox to verify someone is a child.

That is why they mandated more stringent age assurance methods.

It was due to a judiciary review. It wasn’t because they want to track you, it was to hold platforms liable for content they show to kids.

The reason why a 95% accuracy is accepted is the same reason why a 16 year old can occasionally pass for an 18 year old when they go into the shops for alcohol or cigarettes.

When the government wanted to role their own Digital ID verification system that would have also used zero-trust principles, people complained and we never got it. So now we’ve ended up in an objectively worse situation.

The whole discussion has been co-opted by people who don’t understand the process to how laws are made. There’s a reason the law was done this way, and that was to make it enforceable.

Do people really think laws can just be slapped down without any secondary thought? How do you think laws are successfully defended in the hundreds of court cases every day?

I’d like reddit to just block the UK.

If enough big sites block the UK, everyone will just use a VPN and life will go on as normal.

Isn’t American law the same on this? People under 13 have to have their data handled in a particularly minimising way and/or have parental consent under COPPA?

The ICO deciding to take action against sites that can’t prove they’re treating 12 year olds differently might be new, and part of the wider online child protection agenda, but this fine doesn’t stem from the recent legislative developments – and countries do have a legitimate interest in (for instance) regulating advertising to young and pre-teen children, and protecting data about how they use websites to be part of larger datasets used for advertising.

Does this mean Reddit is going to go the way of Imgur IE no UK access