In this day and age websites have always tried to be helpful. They show prices in your currency, highlight your local news, or suggest content based on where you are. That’s not inherently bad in theory, it’s personalisation. But when connection location becomes the gatekeeper, we risk building digital experiences that can crumble in an instant under sweeping national changes.
On July 25, 2025, the UK’s Online Safety Act took effect, enforcing strict age-verification for anyone trying to access certain content. You’re now verifying your identity to see this content, maybe your face, maybe your credit card. The goal was to keep kids safe. The fallout was… predictable: Proton VPN saw an 1,800 % surge in UK sign-ups, NordVPN saw around 1,000%, and VPN apps flooded the UK App Store charts.
When local is no longer local
The lesson here is simple: when people are under pressure be it from regulations, risk to privacy, or surveillance they find the easiest way to slip the leash. And that means:
- Localised currency: Not if you’re routing through another country.
- Regional news: Wont work if your IP says you’re half way around the world to where you actually are.
- Local media: Ads now appear in different languages showing products that are not relevant to you. Video suggestions are now in different languages etc.
Becoming mainstream
The UK’s Online Safety Act has done something few privacy campaigns could: it’s made everyday people acutely aware of just how much an insecure connection reveals about them. What was once the territory of the privacy conscious, those who already knew their IP address was a digital fingerprint has now gone mainstream. VPNs are no longer remaining a niche tools for the tech savvy, they’re becoming a default safeguard for anyone unwilling to hand over personal details just to browse. This shift is pushing the masses into masked networks by necessity rather than choice, and in the process people are waking up to the reality that online privacy and security aren’t luxury concerns. Sweeping government mandates are effectively forcing the public to learn, very quickly, what the privacy community has been saying for years: the internet was never as anonymous as it felt.
The UK’s numbers are incredible. But they’re also a signal: People value privacy, and when their comfort is crossed, they vote with their clicks. IP-based experiences are becoming dangerously irrelevant in that reality.
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