This is a recent, well-documented change, and unusually for this subject the numbers come from a regulator rather than a forum.
The Online Safety Act's highly-effective-age-assurance duty reached services publishing pornography in January 2025, and the wider protection-of-children duties on 25 July 2025, which is the date most services deployed checks. In its first half-year report Ofcom counted 69 million-plus age checks across the 32 services it sampled, confirmed checks on all of the top ten sites by UK traffic, and found among 8-17s who recalled being asked to prove their age, the proportion meeting an effective check rose from 25% before the deadline to 43% by January 2026.
The same period saw estimated daily UK VPN users roughly double, from about 1.2 million to about 2.2 million, which is the predictable other half of the story. A check that works on the open web does not work on a tunnelled connection, and the law did not change what adults can do.
What the law did not settle is privacy. Age assurance means handing an identity signal to a third party before viewing something most people consider private, and whether the assurance providers are trustworthy custodians is a live question rather than a closed one. For an adult, the practical effect is friction, and friction is not nothing: every extra step between cue and behaviour is a step in which the wave can crest.
Where this comes from
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Sources and how strong they are (2)
- Well establishedThe UK Online Safety Act's duty to use "highly effective age assurance" on services publishing pornography came into force in January 2025, and the wider protection-of-children duties on 25 July 2025, which is when most services actually deployed age checks. Ofcom reported over 69 million age checks across 32 sampled services between July and December 2025, a 23-fold increase on the previous six months; age assurance on all of the UK's top ten pornography services and on 64 of the top 100 as of June 2026; and, among 8-17s who recalled being asked to prove their age, a rise from 25% in July 2025 to 43% in January 2026 in the share meeting a highly effective check. Estimated daily UK VPN users roughly doubled, from about 1.2 million before 25 July 2025 to about 2.2 million.
- Ofcom 2026, Report on the use of age assurance (report prepared under s157 of the Online Safety Act 2023), published 15 July 2026, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/use-of-age-assurance-report-2026
- Mixed evidenceIncreasing the friction of a behaviour - moving the cue further away, reducing availability, breaking the sequence that leads to it - reduces how often it occurs. The direction is consistently found and the effects are moderate, but the evidence is graded low-certainty, comes mostly from short laboratory studies of food, and has never been compared head-to-head with intention-based approaches. What is separately well established is that intentions on their own translate weakly into behaviour.
- Hollands et al. 2019, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews CD012573.pub3, doi:10.1002/14651858.CD012573.pub3, PMID 31482606
- Webb & Sheeran 2006, Psychological Bulletin 132(2):249-268, doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.2.249
- Wood & Neal 2007, Psychological Review 114(4):843-863, doi:10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843
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