What happened
Ofcom's guidance for users says: “As of 25 July 2025, all sites and apps that allow pornography will need to have strong age checks in place.” The methods it lists include facial age estimation, open banking, digital identity services, credit card checks and photo-ID matching.
Ofcom's Online Nation report, published in December 2025, tracked what happened next. Between July and August 2025, UK visitors to three of the largest adult sites fell by 24%, 28% and 31%. Ofcom said the fall “may be due to visitors' unwillingness or inability to complete the age assurance check.”
The same report found that VPN use “more than doubled” after the deadline. A VPN can make a visit appear to come from another country, “thereby enabling UK users to access pornography services without going through age assurance,” as Ofcom put it.
In July 2026, Ofcom's report to Parliament on age assurance went further. Using Similarweb data on 58 adult sites, it found that daily visitors to sites that added checks in July 2025 “fell sharply,” while sites that never added checks stayed “broadly stable.” Of the 17 sites without checks it analysed, 10 saw their traffic rise. It estimated daily UK users of VPN apps at 2.2 million, compared with 1.2 million before 25 July 2025, and noted that its data cannot show why people use them.
Ofcom's conclusion was that age checks are “proving effective at the individual service level when deployed correctly,” but “not yet at an overall sector level, due to user migration to non-age assured sites.”
Research from the United States points the same way. A team at New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics studied search data after US state age-verification laws. Three months after the laws were passed, searches for the main compliant platform fell by 51%, while searches for a non-compliant platform rose by 48.1% and searches for VPN services by 23.6%.
India saw the same thing earlier. In 2018, after an order from the Uttarakhand High Court, the Department of Telecommunications asked internet providers to block 827 adult websites. Reporting on the ban, The Week noted that “websites can easily mirror their sites, or use proxy servers to still get their content across,” and that one site it named had already put up a mirror site for its subscribers.
What it shows
A barrier in front of a site changes behaviour: where checks stood in the way, visits fell sharply. A barrier with side doors gets routed around. People used VPNs, mirror sites, proxies and sites that never added checks.
These laws are about keeping children away from adult content, and adults can pass the checks. Unlure is a block an adult chooses for their own devices. The lesson that carries over is about the side doors.
About Unlure
How Unlure uses this
Unlure is built to close the usual side doors on the device itself. Its VPN and proxy filter blocks the sites people use to get round a filter.
It does not rely on a fixed list. More than 496,000 adult sites are on Unlure's list, and any site not on it is checked with a family filter that is updated every day, so new sites, including copies of blocked ones, can be caught too.
It works underneath every browser and app, incognito included. On a PC, changed settings are put back within a minute. On Android, the maximum lock stops Unlure being uninstalled and locks the phone's VPN and Private DNS settings.
No blocker closes every door. On Windows, an administrator account can still remove Unlure by hand, which is why we suggest using a standard account day to day. Turning protection off on purpose takes three days.
This part describes Unlure. None of the sources on this page studied it.
Sources
- 1.
Ofcom (2025). “Age checks for online safety: what you need to know as a user.” Ofcom, published 26 June 2025.
- 2.
Ofcom (2025). “Online Nation 2025.” Ofcom, published 10 December 2025.
- 3.
Ofcom (2026). “Report on the use of age assurance.” Prepared under section 157 of the Online Safety Act 2023.
- 4.
Lang, D., Listyg, B., Ross, B. V., Vinals Musquera, A. and Sanderson, Z. (2026). “Age Verification and Public Adaptation: A Pre-Registered Synthetic Control Multiverse.” Journal of Law & Empirical Analysis.
- 5.
Thomas, K. S. (2018). “Porn ban in India: 'This site has been blocked'? Not quite.” The Week, 2 November 2018.
A wait between the urge and the way out.
Unlure blocks adult sites on your Windows PC or Android phone. Making it stricter is instant. Turning it off takes three days.