Age verification is mass surveillance dressed up as child protection

Cory Doctorow argues that there is no technical way to verify a user’s age online without tracking everyone’s activity in fine-grained detail. So-called age verification mandates therefore amount to compulsory mass surveillance — making it effectively illegal to browse anonymously — which is precisely the outcome the surveillance-advertising industry has always wanted. The campaign is driven by an odd coalition of anti-Big-Tech reformers and culture-war conservatives, both of whom, he contends, end up serving the tech giants they claim to oppose. Tools like camera-based facial age estimation, sold as able to tell a 17-year-old from an 18-year-old, are dismissed as pseudoscientific grift.

The deeper point is that the harms attributed to platforms — algorithmic targeting, funneling kids toward pro-anorexia or extremist content, manipulative recommendation systems — all originate in commercial surveillance in the first place. You cannot protect children from data-driven targeting by collecting even more data about them. Doctorow ties this to decades of US inaction on consumer privacy (the last major federal law dating to 1988) and to the GDPR’s weak enforcement via Ireland, leaving tech firms largely unchecked.

He warns the laws will backfire practically and politically: predictable circumvention via VPNs, followed by proposals to ban VPNs, plus the risk that identity and behavioral data gathered for age checks gets repurposed for price discrimination, lending and hiring decisions, or handed to agencies like ICE. The takeaway is that any genuine effort to reduce online harm to kids should start with privacy and limiting surveillance, not mandates that make anonymity illegal.