Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid
Iām on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaurās Guide to Life After AI. Catch me TONIGHT (Jun 23) in TORONTO at Osler Records, and TOMORROW (Jun 24) in NYC at The Strand. After that, itās Philly and Chicago.
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 kidsā¦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 ā 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 ā 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 ā and there's absolutely some kids who are being harmed by their internet use ā 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.
