Pluralistic: Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid (23 Jun 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid: First they came for the VPNs.

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Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid (permalink)

The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ype6c6DdHQY

It's a weird coalition of anti-Big Tech campaigners (who are rightly angry at the platforms' callous disregard for user welfare) and Heritage Foundation-backed culture warriors (who think that if their kids aren't exposed to LGBTQ content they won't come out as queer). While there's plenty these groups disagree about, they share one consensus: there should be a "minimum age" for certain kinds of internet use.

The problem is, there's no such thing as "age verification" for the internet. What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry's commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. This nightmare is the surveillance advertising industry's fondest dream, a world where it's literally illegal to avoid their tracking, all in the name of saving kids…from them!

So it's not just a weird alliance of anti-Big Tech crusaders and the conspiratorial right that's pushing for age verification – they are unwitting allies of the very tech industry they think they're fighting. Those tech industry insiders are fully aware that an "age verification" mandate is really a way for the government to teach every child how to use a VPN. They're also fully aware that the next move is to ban VPNs:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2217934/vpn-ban-table-july-labour

Tech bosses are the ones sitting on our shoulders saying, "Go ahead, swallow that fly – it'll be fine. And if you do have to swallow a spider afterward, well, that'll surely be the end of it":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/19/shes-dead-of-course/#consensus-hallucination

Behind them is a long line of caliper-wielding grifters who claim they can use your phone's camera to distinguish a child who is 17 years, 364 days old from an adult who's just turned 18:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/facial-age-estimation

It's beyond farce. After all, whatever harms you believe the internet is inflicting on kids – and there's absolutely some kids who are being harmed by their internet use – those harms all start with surveillance. Your kids can't be targeted by algorithms without the surveillance data that's being used to target them. They can't be funneled into pro-anorexia content or extreme misogyny forums without that funnel being primed by commercial spying.

Why do tech companies spy on your kids? The same reason your dog licks its balls: because they can, and no one stops them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/10/ice-tech/#foreseeable-outcomes

America hasn't updated its consumer privacy laws since 1988 (when Congress banned the disclosure of your VHS rentals). The EU has the GDPR, but it also has Ireland, the country where all GDPR cases against Big Tech go to die, because any tax haven inevitably becomes a crime haven:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

Other countries have privacy laws to varying degrees, but are grossly outmatched by US tech giants, who have fused with the Trump regime, to the extent that Trump will impose penalties on your country if you attempt to regulate his tech companies – he'll even have your top officials cut off from the internet in retaliation:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next

Any attempt to save kids from online harms should start with saving kids from online surveillance, but that's the opposite of what we're doing today. After decades of failing to pass and enforce privacy controls for the internet, those...