New proposals to ban children from using VPNs and social media require age verification systems that will necessarily expose adult users' data. Privacy advocates warn that protecting kids by surveilling everyone is a cure worse than the disease—and creates honeypots of identity data for hackers and governments alike.
Every time we try to "protect the children" online, we end up building surveillance infrastructure that affects everyone. Age verification sounds reasonable until you think through the implementation—and then it's a privacy nightmare.
What's Being Proposed
According to New Scientist, multiple jurisdictions are considering or implementing laws requiring:
• Age verification to access social media platforms • Bans on minors using VPNs (to prevent circumventing geo-restrictions) • Government-issued ID verification for certain online services • Device-level controls that enforce age restrictions
The stated goal is protecting children from harmful content, predators, and addictive platform design. The unstated consequence is universal identity verification for internet access.
The Technical Reality
Here's the problem: there's no good way to verify age online without also verifying identity.
You can't prove someone is over 18 without knowing who they are. That requires:
• Government-issued ID scanning • Biometric verification (facial recognition, age estimation) • Credit card verification (which links identity to activity) • Third-party age verification services (which aggregate user data)
Every approach creates a centralized database of "who is accessing what service"—exactly the kind of surveillance infrastructure privacy advocates have spent decades fighting against.
Who Gets Hurt
The people most harmed by mandatory age verification aren't children—they're adults who rely on anonymity:
• Abuse survivors using social media to connect with support networks without exposing identity to abusers • LGBTQ+ individuals in hostile environments who need anonymous spaces • Political dissidents organizing against authoritarian governments • Whistleblowers reporting corporate or government wrongdoing • Anyone who values privacy and doesn't want their identity linked to every online service
Age verification doesn't just affect kids. It eliminates anonymous participation for everyone.
The Security Nightmare
Even if you're fine with giving platforms your ID, consider what happens next:
• Platforms become honeypots of verified identity data—attractive targets for hackers • Data breaches expose not just usernames, but government IDs linked to social media activity • Authoritarian governments can demand access to age verification databases to identify dissidents • Third-party verification services become single points of failure and surveillance
We've seen this movie before. Every centralized identity database eventually gets breached, abused, or co-opted for purposes beyond its original intent.
The VPN Ban Absurdity
Banning kids from using VPNs is particularly dystopian. VPNs aren't just for circumventing geo-restrictions—they're basic privacy tools that:
• Encrypt internet traffic on untrusted networks • Protect against ISP surveillance • Enable access to blocked information • Provide basic operational security
Teaching kids that privacy tools are forbidden sends exactly the wrong message. And enforcing VPN bans requires deep packet inspection of all internet traffic—another massive surveillance expansion.
There Are Better Approaches
Protecting kids online is a real problem. But age verification isn't the solution—it's security theater that sacrifices everyone's privacy.
Better approaches:
• Platform design changes: default privacy settings, algorithmic transparency, better content moderation • Parental tools: give parents control without requiring universal surveillance • Education: teach digital literacy instead of building surveillance systems • Corporate accountability: regulate addictive design patterns and data collection practices
These are harder than age verification. They require nuance, investment, and ongoing work. But they don't require building a surveillance state.
My Take
I understand the impulse to protect kids. But every "protect the children" proposal should trigger immediate skepticism—because historically, they're trojan horses for surveillance infrastructure.
Age verification sounds reasonable until you think about implementation. Then it's a privacy disaster that hurts the vulnerable adults who most need anonymous online spaces.
The technology exists to build universal identity verification. The question is whether we're going to let "protecting children" be the excuse to deploy it.
I hope we're smarter than that. But recent legislative trends suggest we're not.
