Category: Online Safety

We’ve written about the Online Safety Act and the requirement for sites to carry out age verification for some times of content. This was communicated as preventing kids accessing adult content, as well as how use of VPNs has skyrocketed since as users are refusing to use age verification services that risk their privacy. There’s […]

Ofcom has this morning announced it has launched investigations into 34 adult content websites which it believes are failing to comply with the age verification requirements of Section 12 of the Online Safety Act which took effect last week. As of Friday, the rules require such adult content websites to use ‘highly effective age assurance’ […]

We’ve been rather critical of the way the Online Safety Act enforces are restrictions due to their privacy impact on users and the ease by which they can be bypassed which may provide very limited benefits with potentially significant costs. Research commissioned by EE shows that just over half of parents feel they have the […]

A key part of the Online Safety Act took effect on Friday, requiring certain websites (such as those with adult content) to carry out reliable age verification checks before allowing access to users. This has resulted in a kind of cookie-consent type banner appearing before loading pages, requiring the user to prove they are over […]

The deadline to offering age verification checks to protect children from pornography and other content considered harmful online is just hours away, coming into effect on Friday 25th July. Not every website online will need to use age verification generally it is confined to sites and services that allow pornography or places that allow dissemination […]

Scam phone calls are still common place and one way scammers are gaining trust is to imitate a UK mobile phone, as it appears we are more willing to answer those calls. Ofcom is proposing changes to how people in the UK are protected from the imitation of a UK mobile number. This follows up […]

For the past couple of years, we’ve produced a Guide to Online Scams helping you to stay safe online, and more importantly keep family and friends safe. There are so many ways in which scammers, criminals often based in other countries, are seeking to steal money (or your identity). You can get a PDF copy here. […]

Last year we published the latest edition of our Comprehensive Guide to Online Scams helping you to stay safe online (full pdf). This includes an Overpayment/Refund scam (page 14) What happens — You get an e-mail about a renewal service for Norton Lifelock, but you don’t quite remember it? Or you get an e-mail from […]