Last week, UAE President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan issued a new federal law that bans the use of VPNs for any sort of digital crime, which includes obscuring your IP address and accessing blocked services.
The law said: “Whoever uses a fraudulent computer network protocol address (IP address) by using a false address or a third-party address by any other means for the purpose of committing a crime or preventing its discovery, shall be punished by temporary imprisonment and a fine of no less than Dh500,000 and not exceeding Dh2,000,000 or either of these two penalties.”
This comes after the country has started clamping down on online piracy: last month, a man in Abu Dhabi was jailed for stealing and illegally uploading a raft of television series and films from TV platform OSN.
Previously, the law was restricted to prosecuting people who used VPNs as part of an internet crime, but California-based VPN and privacy advocate Private Internet Access says that the law has now changed to enable police in the UAE to go after anyone who uses VPNs to access blocked services, which is considered to be fraudulent use of an IP address.
VPN, or virtual private network, allow internet users to connect to a private network online, providing them with privacy and hiding their location. A VPN can be used to bypass region restrictions—such as gaining access to British TV channels or services such as Netflix US all the way from the UAE.
VPNs are used in China to access blocked social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
