Doctorow: you cannot spy on only the kids, so age checks watch everyone (pluralistic.net)
Cory Doctorow's argument is mechanical, not moral: to verify a user is a child you must identify every user, so age verification is mass surveillance wearing a hall pass. He maps the escalation — checks push kids to VPNs, then governments move to ban VPNs.
The thread tried to engineer its way out with zero-knowledge attestations and device-level parent mode. But a commenter who says he built such systems for the US cut it short: when they say it's for the kids, it was never their idea.
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