Governments worldwide are increasingly regulating digital platforms to reduce online harms, particularly those affecting children. However, access restrictions can alter user behaviour and introduce new privacy and security risks. The UK Online Safety Act (OSA), passed in October 2023, illustrates this trend: it extends age-assurance and safety requirements to social media, search, and pornography services, and rolled out in phases. Ofcom's illegal content enforcement duties came into force in March 2025, and mandatory age verification for adult content took effect in July 2025. This phased rollout enables real-time observation of behavioural responses to regulation. To address this, we analyse Reddit discourse across VPN and UK Politics communities and conduct a privacy-policy risk analysis of 69 unique VPN services. We find that each of these three milestones produced significant stepwise increases in VPN-related discussion on Reddit: among UK-based users, posts and comments explicitly about VPN use in a regulatory or privacy context rose by +100%, +217%, and +415% respectively. UK Politics communities showed even larger effects, with OSA-related political discourse rising by +213%, +545%, and +464%, respectively, among UK-based users. UK VPN search interest on Google rose by +89% at the age-verification deadline. Users primarily framed this response around privacy, surveillance, and distrust of age-verification intermediaries rather than simple access-seeking. Demand increased across low, medium, and high-risk VPNs, but the proportional distribution remained broadly stable. These findings suggest that online safety regulation can create secondary privacy costs even when it does not disproportionately shift attention toward higher-risk providers.

翻译：全球各国政府正日益加强对数字平台的监管，以减少在线危害，尤其是对儿童的影响。然而，访问限制可能改变用户行为，并引入新的隐私和安全风险。2023年10月通过的英国《在线安全法》体现了这一趋势：该法案将年龄保证和安全要求扩展到社交媒体、搜索引擎及色情服务，并分阶段实施。英国通信管理局打击非法内容执法职责于2025年3月生效，而成人内容强制年龄验证于2025年7月生效。这种分阶段实施使得能够实时观察用户对监管的行为反应。为此，我们分析了Reddit上VPN与英国政治社区的讨论，并对69个独特VPN服务进行了隐私政策风险分析。我们发现，这三项重要里程碑均导致Reddit上与VPN相关讨论显著逐步增加：在英国用户中，明确涉及监管或隐私背景下VPN使用的发帖和评论分别增长了+100%、+217%和+415%。英国政治社区的影响更为显著，在英国用户中，与OSA相关的政治讨论分别增长了+213%、+545%和+464%。在年龄验证截止日期，英国谷歌对VPN的搜索兴趣增长了+89%。用户主要将这一反应归结为对隐私、监控以及年龄验证中介机构的不信任，而非单纯的访问需求。低、中、高风险VPN的需求均有所增加，但比例分布总体保持稳定。这些发现表明，在线安全监管即使不会不成比例地将注意力转向高风险提供商，也可能产生二次隐私成本。