Doctorow says age-verification mandates are mass surveillance

Cory Doctorow's latest Pluralistic post is built around a line worth repeating before anyone designs the next 'kid-safe' feature: 'You can't protect kids from online surveillance by spying on them. You just can't.' His argument is that the 'age verification' mandates being sold as a fix for online harms to children are not a fix at all, they extend those same harms onto every adult who uses the internet.

The substantive bit, and the one product teams should sit with, is his claim that the harms parents worry about all run on the same plumbing. As Doctorow puts it, your kids 'can't be targeted by algorithms without the surveillance data that's being used to target them.' If that framing holds, bolting an identity check onto the front door of every site doesn't drain the swamp, it just adds your face and ID to it. He calls what gets sold as age verification 'mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive.'

The second-order argument is where it gets uncomfortable. Doctorow flags reported UK moves toward VPN bans as the predictable next step, because age-gating only works if governments also outlaw the standard escape hatch. And he warns that the same data being used to verify age today 'will be used by ICE tomorrow,' pointing at reporting that US immigration enforcement has been shopping for ad-tech and big-data tools. The post is a polemic, not a legal review, and it doesn't break down which bills mandate what, or weigh the cryptographic age-attestation schemes that try to verify without identifying. Take the cascade as a direction of travel, not a settled forecast.

The honest caveat is that real harms to kids online aren't being denied here, Doctorow's claim is that you can't solve them by widening the surveillance perimeter. For anyone building AI products that touch minors or sensitive identity flows, the practical takeaway is to assume the compliance pipeline you're being asked to plug into is the same one ad-tech intermediaries and immigration enforcement will eventually be reading from, and to design with that in mind.