“Think of the children” is a compelling phrase — hard to argue with until you ask which children, whose rights, and at what cost. Across several U.S. states, lawmakers are advancing proposals to curb online harms for minors by restricting access to virtual private networks, or VPNs. What begins as a familiar plea to protect young people quickly collides with hard technical realities, civil‑liberties tradeoffs, and unintended consequences that could extend far beyond the classroom.
At the center of the current controversy is a class of bills epitomized by Wisconsin’s A.B. 105 / S.B. 130, an age‑verification measure that would require websites distributing material that could be deemed “sexual content” to both implement age checks and block users connected through VPNs. Advocates present the policy as a blunt instrument to prevent minors from evading state protections; critics warn it could cripple privacy tools, chill speech, and create new security hazards.
VPNs are dual‑use technologies: they conceal a user’s IP address and encrypt traffic between a device and a VPN server. For many ordinary users, that means safer access to public Wi‑Fi and a modest increase in privacy. For journalists, activists, human‑rights defenders, and people in repressive environments, VPNs can be essential lifelines. They also present real consumer‑safety issues — especially among free VPN apps whose business models and engineering choices may expose users to surveillance and fraud. Independent research and security analyses have repeatedly shown that poorly implemented or monetized VPN services can leak identifiers, capture telemetry, and even act as man‑in‑the‑middle pivots that expose session cookies and authentication tokens, turning a protective layer into a point of compromise .
Why would lawmakers target VPNs at all? The rationale is straightforward: age verification and access controls are difficult to enforce when users can mask their IP addresses or appear to originate from another jurisdiction. Legislators sympathetic to these measures argue they are updating the regulatory toolkit for the internet age. But the technical and societal tradeoffs are substantial.
- Security and substitution effects. Banning or blocking VPN traffic doesn’t remove demand. Users who already rely on VPNs for privacy or circumvention will seek alternatives, such as encrypted proxies, Tor, or misconfigured VPN services — or they may adopt clandestine solutions that are harder to regulate and potentially less secure. Moreover, forcing websites to deploy intrusive age‑verification regimes can centralize sensitive biometric or identity data in ways that amplify risk if those systems are breached.
- Harm to vulnerable populations. Groups most at risk — journalists, human‑rights workers, domestic‑abuse survivors, and minorities — rely on anonymity tools. Removing straightforward access to reputable VPNs may push them toward low‑quality, ad‑supported offerings, which studies show are more likely to collect and leak data, exposing precisely the users who can least afford exposure .
- Freedom of expression and overbreadth. Proposals that define “harmful to minors” broadly risk ensnaring educational material, medical resources, and frank discussions of sexuality and reproductive health. When content definitions expand, so do the sites that must implement onerous verification and blocking, chilling legitimate speech and research.
- Technical feasibility and collateral damage. Blocking VPNs at scale is difficult and error‑prone. Many commercial services use dynamic IP ranges, shared infrastructure, or encrypted protocols designed precisely to avoid simple blocking. Aggressive blocking can produce false positives that deny service to legitimate enterprise traffic, remote employees, and emergency responders.
Technologists caution that poorly conceived regulation often substitutes brittle, surveillance‑heavy systems for nuanced problem‑solving. Security researchers have cataloged why many free VPN apps fall short: economic pressure to monetize, rushed development cycles that increase coding mistakes, and a lack of independent audits. Those systemic issues make some VPN offerings dangerous in practice, and principal remedies include transparency, stronger app‑store vetting, and regulatory approaches targeted at deceptive practices rather than blanket bans on a technology category .
Policymakers face a difficult balance. On one hand, states have a legitimate interest in protecting minors from genuinely exploitative content and criminal actors. On the other, broad restrictions on privacy tooling can create enforcement regimes at odds with constitutional protections for speech and association, and can also undercut cybersecurity and consumer safety.
Consider the perspectives involved:
- From the lawmaker’s view: Age verification is a tactile policy deliverable that can be framed as protecting children. Politically, it’s resonant and defensible. But the complexity of internet architecture and the ease of technical workarounds make enforcement costly and imprecise.
- From the technologist’s view: Targeting VPNs misunderstands the layered nature of network privacy and security. Better solutions often focus on improving content moderation tools, funding parental education, and reinforcing law enforcement capabilities against criminal content distribution rather than disabling privacy infrastructure.
- From the user’s view: Many ordinary people use VPNs for benign reasons: working remotely, securing banking on public Wi‑Fi, or preserving privacy in data‑extracting commercial ecosystems. A ban risks penalizing millions for the misbehavior of a few vendors or users.
- From the adversary’s view: Authoritarian actors and criminal enterprises exploit gaps in moderation and cross‑border enforcement; constraining legitimate privacy tools in liberal jurisdictions does not stop their activity and may lower the cost of surveillance for abusive regimes.
There are pragmatic policy alternatives that address the harms without throwing away the privacy toolkit. Regulators can tighten consumer protections aimed at deceptive VPN vendors, require transparency and third‑party audits for services that claim privacy guarantees, and incentivize app stores and network providers to enforce stronger security standards. Investments in media literacy, parental controls that are optional and consent‑based, and better resourced child‑safety units in law enforcement may yield better outcomes than blunt technical bans. The essential distinction is between dealing with bad actors and dismantling a category of technology that serves many legitimate and often vital purposes.
If the goal is to protect children, lawmakers must reckon with the downstream effects: degraded privacy for everyone, increased risk to vulnerable populations, and the centralization of identity data in systems that themselves can fail or be abused. Thoughtful policy requires proportionality, technical know‑how, and an appreciation of the law of unintended consequences.
So where does that leave us? The impulse to act on behalf of children is admirable; the temptation to pursue simple technical bans is not. Policymakers can — and should — confront predatory services, improve transparency, and protect minors, but they should avoid measures that throw away privacy tools or amplify security risks in the name of safety. After all, protecting children should not mean exposing everyone else.
Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/banning-vpns.html
