Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance

Motives and Political Context

• Several comments claim “protect the children” bills are industry-driven, funded by age‑verification vendors seeking mandates and contracts.
• Others tie them to broader surveillance agendas (e.g., using porn as a pretext for Project‑2025‑style ID‑based tracking).
• Some see the bills as a textbook example of a real slippery slope: from porn to skin cream, diet pills, dating apps, then potentially to political or historical content.

Where Enforcement Belongs: Browser/Client vs Website/Server

• One camp argues age controls should live on the user’s device/browser: parents set a password‑protected mode; sites simply label content (“this might contain X”).
• Critics push back: who defines the taxonomy; how to categorize mixed sites (Reddit, social media); how to handle foreign sites that mislabel.
• Others suggest mandatory headers like RTA/censor.txt and child-mode browsers that block unlabeled sites, but opponents note this quickly turns into government‑mandated browser code and is trivially bypassed by alternative builds, proxies, or VPNs.

Practicality and Circumvention

• Many argue determined kids will always find workarounds: open‑source browsers, VPNs, proxies, sibling/parent devices, or shared credentials.
• Some even frame this “arms race” as accidentally educational (kids learn to hack/compile), but others stress the real goal is not perfection, just making access harder.

Privacy and Technical Schemes

• Strong skepticism toward uploading government IDs or face scans to porn, skincare, or pill sites; seen as creating durable, abusable logs of intimate behavior.
• Thread discusses digital IDs and crypto schemes: government eIDs, Apple Wallet IDs, zero‑knowledge proofs, verifiable credentials, Privacy Pass, blind signatures.
• Pushback: any system with reliable enforcement requires some authority that can link credentials back to people; that authority (often the state) then has surveillance power. Truly unlinkable tokens are easily shareable and thus ineffective.
• Some note existing non‑intrusive bills only require checkboxes or in‑person ID at delivery, but others see those as “first wedge” steps to justify later, stricter tech.

Analogy to the Physical World and Role of Parents

• Repeated comparisons to bars, porn shops, and rating systems: in meatspace, explicit content is segregated and ID‑gated.
• Counter‑argument: online we do have per‑device policy (browsers, OS), so we can gate kids without universal identity systems.
• Large faction: the Internet should remain uncensored for adults; protection should come from parenting, device‑level controls, and education, not centralized surveillance.
• Others insist the harms of modern porn/social media to minors are real, and doing “nothing” is politically untenable, but they also don’t want to sacrifice privacy.

Alternative Policy Ideas

• Regulate risky products (supplements, harsh skincare) via safety and labeling (FDA‑style) instead of age gates.
• Require age‑restricted online sales to use payment‑address checks or credit cards, shifting detection to parents’ statements.
• Implement standard content‑rating headers and improved child accounts on OSs/browsers; let parents opt into stricter filters.
• Some point out today’s pervasive tracking (analytics, data brokers) already creates a “backdoor to surveillance,” making age‑verification databases especially dangerous add‑ons.