Submission + - Searches for VPN soar in Florida after porn ban (newsweek.com)
smooth wombat writes: On March 25, 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed into law HB 3, legislation which bans most children from having social media accounts and requires adult web sites to implement age verification on any person, not just minors, who visit their site. On January 1, 2025 the law went into effect and as happened before, PornHub and other adult sites blocked access to people in Florida. As a result, searches for VPN have skyrocketed.
Google trends data published on January 2 showed a sharp rise in "vpn" searches beginning on December 31 2024 and continuing into the new year. VPNs allow computer users to disguise their locations and thus get around location-specific website blocks.
While it doesn't give individual search figures, Google gave the value of 100 to vpn inquiries on January 2, compared to the level of 91 on January 1, 55 on December 31 and 37 on December 30.
Searches for individual VPN providers as well as "Internet pornography" and "computer virus" were also categorized as "breakout" for Florida over the period by Google.
Google trends data published on January 2 showed a sharp rise in "vpn" searches beginning on December 31 2024 and continuing into the new year. VPNs allow computer users to disguise their locations and thus get around location-specific website blocks.
While it doesn't give individual search figures, Google gave the value of 100 to vpn inquiries on January 2, compared to the level of 91 on January 1, 55 on December 31 and 37 on December 30.
Searches for individual VPN providers as well as "Internet pornography" and "computer virus" were also categorized as "breakout" for Florida over the period by Google.
