Are VPNs blinding brands? The Online Safety Act could harm audience profiling
Legislation designed to make the internet safer is complicating how brands understand their audiences: this calls on comms teams to sharpen and diversify their insights
In July, updates to the Online Safety Act came into force, which saw a host of new age-checking rules introduced across apps and websites.
While some have labelled these changes as supporting the UK to descend into “a borderline dystopian state”, for the majority it can be hard to fault the positive intention behind the legislation.
Ofcom found that 8-14-year-olds in the UK spend just under three hours a day online and a study by the Children’s Commissioner reported that half of 13-year-olds had seen “hardcore, misogynistic” material on social media sites. It is clear the internet can be a dangerous and unruly place for many.
The changes, including age verification checks, updated web filters and financial penalties, are supposed protect children and teenagers from being exposed to or accessing age inappropriate, illegal and other potentially harmful content.
However, the legislation has seen an unintended – but perhaps, expected – consequence for those wishing to bypass the more stringent rules, which is the surge in the use of virtual private networks (VPNs).
VPNs: a headache for PR
For communications professionals wishing to understand the distribution of their online audiences, this presents a headache.
This is because VPNs distort users’ IP addresses (ie your unique ID when you access the internet from a particular device and internet network) by allowing people to reroute their connection through servers in different countries.
This means audiences may appear to be accessing content from overseas even when they are not. For example, someone based in Manchester may report on a web dashboard as being in Madrid or Melbourne if they surf the web via a VPN.
If VPNs can falsify a user’s location, this makes comms metrics around website traffic, audience segmentation and campaign impact less reliable.
For a profession that works hard to position itself to the C-suite as a strategic management function through robust evaluation, are our efforts being eroded?
It isn’t a great look when we can’t tell whether our websites, podcasts or apps are seeing more international traffic or just more domestic users simply accessing our content via a VPN.
If we have blind spots on where our audiences really are, it’s trickier to effectively measure the reach of our campaigns and tailor our content or marketing plans accordingly.
For strategic decisions around market prioritisation and reputation management, which can depend on this level of insight, the consequences could be massive.
Digital footprints
While VPNs have existed since the mid-1990s, they have become more mainstream in recent years and certainly since the updates to the act were rolled out.
In the first month of the new age-verification rules being in place, BBC News reported that half of the top 10 app downloads from Apple in the UK were for VPNs, with one provider saying it had seen a 1800% (!) spike.
A recent YouGov study suggests that VPN users are most commonly male and aged between 16 and 44. Downloads tend to be driven by a desire for privacy and access to certain content that may be geographically restricted.
While some brands (such as news sites, travel, retail, and media platforms) are likely to be more affected than others, any organisation with a digital footprint should take note.
Even the NHS Confederation, which as the NHS’s membership body has a very UK-entrenched audience, saw a 50% increase in active users supposedly from Germany and the USA last summer. Although the organisation does not appear to have published or done anything directly relevant to users in these countries in that period, several factors could explain the increase, including AI-driven tools or bots. However, it is interesting that these countries are among the most popular server locations for VPNs.
What can the PR profession do?
Regardless, the rise in the use of VPNs isn’t just a momentary change – it taps into bigger concerns held by the public about their privacy, who has access to their data and what could be done with it, as we are seeing in some of the reaction to the government’s plans to introduce digital ID cards.
Communications teams should consider:
- Looking beyond geography: As VPN use can make location-based data more untrustworthy, teams should bolster the range of other metrics at their fingertips so that they can understand user interest, such as time on page, heat maps, repeat visits, and traffic sources. Also, they should blend their web analytics with broader comms performance indicators, such as relationships with stakeholders, client or customer feedback, social media reach, and media coverage.
- Using more verified data: “First party” data, like web log-ins and email subscriptions, can play a key role in understanding what content is of interest and then how to target communications more effectively. Also, teams should consider adding more “calls to action”, such as sign-ups to bulletins and event registrations, to track conversions.
- Engaging their internal stakeholders: If geography is an important component of company or brand strategy, the C-suite should be told about the legislation’s implications, including disclaimers in evaluation reports, where needed, and by regularly monitoring trends.
- Building trust with customers: As VPN use is driven by data privacy concerns, teams should consider what their brand can do to reassure and explain to their audiences what, if anything, their personal data will be used for and respect their anonymity where needed.
The rise in VPNs signals a tension between the need to make the internet safer and people’s concerns about data protection. As users identify ways to circumvent the new rules by mainstreaming these privacy tools, communications teams must adapt how they track and understand their audiences so that they can use these insights to steer corporate decision-making.
Paul Cooney is assistant director of communications of the NHS Confederation and deputy director of HealthCommsPlus. He is also a CIPR Corporate Affiliate member.
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