Nevertheless, the individual practice of piggybacking (the illicit use of a Wi-Fi connection to access another subscriber's Internet service) was demonstrated to be a contravention of the act by R v Straszkiewicz in 2005.

Section 125 of the act has been criticised for its vagueness, resulting in the possibility that many users of portable Wi-Fi enabled devices are inadvertently breaching it.

[8] Section 127 (1) of the act makes it an offence to send a message that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character over a public electronic communications network.

[10] The section has been used controversially to prosecute users of social media in cases such as the Twitter Joke Trial and Facebook comments concerning the murder of April Jones.

Individuals who post messages as part of a separate crime, such as a plan to import drugs, would face prosecution for that offence, as is currently the case.

In 2022, a serving police officer and a former constable each received 12-week prison sentences for sending racist, misogynistic, ableist, and homophobic messages to a WhatsApp group.

[19] Andrew Tettenborn, a British legal academic, has argued that this criminalises speech which would not be illegal if spoken aloud in private conversation.