For speed, Proton. For port forwarding, AirVPN. Politically, AirVPN: Proton's big boss is a Trumper, sadly.
Not British , but I did subscribe to Private Internet Access a while back. They do seem to have a privacy focus. Third party evaluations (though paid for by themselves) state they don't do any logging. Their CEO seems left leaning (though American, so could be moderate European). I didn't look into the founder.
https://www.theverge.com/news/797051/discord-government-ids-leaked-data-breach Even the legally blind could've seen this one coming. It was always going to be a 'when'/'who's hit first' and not an 'if'.
I don't get half this stuff. I had to verify my age the other day.........by giving them an email address that they sent a "Please confirm by clicking here" email to. How does that honestly help? Can they tell the account has been open longer than 18 years? Why couldn't my kids just use it then? Total waste of time. Parental control and observation should be at the forefront. Or locking down websites at router/phone level (ISPs etc can assist with this for those not savvy).
Doesn't matter about the effectiveness of the Online Safety Act, as long as something was seen to be done by the gubmint. As to phone level, EE are now advertising what sounds like locked down SIMs for kid phones.
Too many parents these days, seem to think looking after their children properly, is not their responsibility.
There does need to be some better ways to manage the risks of “being online”. I saw some really horrible and really nasty **** on the internet when I was in my early/mid teens. But it was a different time then: “being online” was something you had to actively participate in, you had to want to connect to the internet and when you were done… you disconnected. You didn’t have the constant demand for attention from the glass slab in your pocket: the constant inducements to spend money; the constant FOMO-inducing “hey, you should watch this, all your friends are” notifications; the immediate accessibility of video content; ready-made pathways to radicalisation; the AI slop; content algorithms that are explicitly designed to be as manipulative as possible; etc… After I’d stumbled on to some awful and gruesome gif I could disconnect the internet and be done with it, but modern phones, apps, social media, etc, are a constant psychological barrage. I do have some sympathy towards parents. If I’d had kids at, say, 30, they’d now be at roughly the same age I was when I first started using the internet regularly. I consider myself to be pretty tech-savvy, but I find all this stuff to be incredibly draining and I’m increasingly running out of patience with trying to fight back against it. But the Online Safety Act is not the answer. It is an incredibly poorly thought-out piece of legislation. So many people gave so many warnings about the consequences it could have, and they were all ignored. To add insult to injury, those who do criticise or oppose the OSA are branded as being “on the same side” as paedophiles.
@Byron C Amen! I made a similar comment in response to a thread on TwitteX, and I was surprised to find likeminded, level-headed people agreeing with me (a rarity online these days). The OSA is a travesty, in my humble opinion. Parenting in the here-and-now is tremendously difficult particularly because the "internet" (a whole different animal now) has become so integrated into daily life. I, too, remember watching some nasty stuff as a teen, but back then it was a banned VHS tape that was being passed under the tables in the classroom. In the late 90s when the internet really started to change, I was able very easily to access that same content, and so much more, and I remember it as if I had watched it just yesterday. That stuff doesn't leave you. Our policy with our kids is simple: you don't get to freely browse the web, and you don't get anywhere near social media. It may sound simple, but it's really hard to enforce because most other kids have both, which leaves ours feeling left out. But we're convicted of this. Whilst I agree that it can be difficult for parents to cover all bases, I know that that the attitude of some parents is just deplorable, and the OSA won't make one whit of difference to that.
We are a little different with ours. They have access to the internet but conditional to that they have agreed that at any time we can request to see their devices to check the history etc. Refusing to show would imply something to hide so they would have their privileges revoked. If they were to stumble onto something accidentally and let us know, all is good, but trying to hide things is not. We are generally very open with answering pretty much anything they ask. Similarly though we have said no to social media and explained why. Most of their school friends have significantly less restriction/ monitoring ie, none, and that, to me, is asking for issues.
