Category: Online Safety

Ofcom has published draft industry Guidance as part of a consultation to set out the steps they expect online providers of relevant services to take in order to help bereaved parents get the answers they need about their use of their services. The Online Safety Act puts forward requirements on tech firms about how they […]

Last week, Ofcom announced a £1m fine on AVS Group Ltd, which runs a number of porn websites, for failing to implement robust age checks on users accessing the site. The existing measures were of the vein, “Are you 18?” with a check box asking you to confirm. The company has now begun to implement […]

AVS Group Ltd has been fined £1,000,000 and a further £50,000 for failing to respond. If AVS Group Ltd websites continue to operate without robust age verification and fail to respond to Ofcom requests, the fine will increase by £1,300 a day. The fine has been levied because the 18 sites run by AVS Group […]

Ofcom is pursuing its investigation into a suicide forum it previously paused as the forum implemented IP-based blocking for UK users. On 1 July 2025, the forum implemented a block to restrict users with UK IP addresses from accessing the service. Ofcom has been actively monitoring these restrictions to check they are maintained consistently and […]

A new Telecommunications Charter is set to be signed today at the iconic BT Tower in London, which will hopefully dramatically reduce the amount of scam calls everyone receives, and for those that do get through, make it obvious what number the caller is using. Many scam callers use number spoofing to imitate a UK […]

Ofcom is seeking feedback on more rules around how providers handle spam messages sent to mobiles. The aim being to both make it harder for the spammers to operate but also to force all mobile operators to do more to root out spammers who are active. If you get sent spam SMS messages today you […]

Regulator Ofcom has this morning provided an update of its enforcement activity under the controversial Online Safety Act. In total it has begun 21 investigations (into 69 web sites and apps) and 5 enforcement programmes. The update covers 11 of these investigations. File-sharing services Ofcom launched an enforcement programme in March 2025 against file-sharing services […]

We’ve written about the Age Checks in the Online Safety Act and how VPN sign-ups boomed after the introduction of age checks on websites with content which shouldn’t be accessible to children. We even suggested that privacy-aware users over 18 may wish to consider using a VPN to avoid risking their personal identity data being […]

At least 22 porn sites run by five different companies are now under investigation by Ofcom as to whether the sites are in compliance with the Online Safety Act. The investigations centre around whether sites are compliant with their duty to stop children encountering pornographic content, with age assurance being used to only allow over-18s […]

According to the Telegraph (via Yahoo! News), lawyers in the U.S. are intending to summon the UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom to a U.S. court to answer over its attempts to ‘censor Americans’. “A legal complaint, filed in Washington, DC, by Ron Coleman, a New York-based lawyer, aims to bar Ofcom from attempting to enforce the […]