Won't somebody think of the children?

Sigh, where do I even start with this one..

OK, so I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while and I’m going to try my best to get it out without turning into a complete mess, bear with me.

There is this pattern that keeps happening in tech legislation. Some government (or group of governments) wants to introduce a law that would, in any normal context, be completely unacceptable. Mass surveillance, scanning private messages, breaking encryption, stuff like, if you said it out loud in a different context, people would immediatly push back on. So what do they do? They say it’s for the children.

And suddenly everyone goes quiet. Because who’s going to argue against protecting kids? That’s the whole point. It’s not a coincidence that this framing gets used over and over again. It works.

Allow me to just list some of the stuff that is being pushed right now or have been recently.

Age verification laws that would require you to upload your ID just to use parts of the internet.
Chat Control in the EU, which would basically require platforms to scan every private message you send, end-to-end encrypted or not, and report anything suspicious to authorities.
Laws requiring VPN providers to keep logs or even banning anonymous VPN use entirely.
Proposals to build backdoors into encryption so law enforcement can get in.
Age verification baked into operating systems at the hardware level.

Every single one of these is framed as “keeping children safe online”. And look, I’m not saying child safety isn’t a real thing. It obviously is. But these laws don’t actually do what they claim to do. And the people writing them know about that.

Age verification doesn’t stop a determined person. It just means everyone else has to hand over their passport to watch a YouTube video. Breaking encryption doesn’t create a “safe” backdoor only good guys can use. It creates a vulnerability that everyone can eventually exploit. Scanning private messages doesn’t just catch bad actors, it creates an infrastructure for reading everyone’s private communication. And once that infrastructure exists, it doesn’t go away when the government changes.

This is the part that I think people don’t fully think through. Even if you trust the current government to use these tools responsibly (and that’s a big if), you are building the technical and legal foundation for every government that comes after it. Surveillance infrastructure doesn’t expire, it only expands.

The thing about Chat Control specifically is that it would effectively end private communication in Europe. End-to-end encryption is the reason your messages are actually private. It’s the reason journalists can talk to sources, abuse survivors can reach out for help, activists can organise, doctors can discuss cases. The moment you mandate scanning of encrypted messages, encryption is broken. There is no version that “only” catches the bad stuff.

And I.., I just find it genuinely frustrating that this stuff keeps getting proposed and people outside of the tech mostly don’t know it’s happening, or outright dont’ care about it at all. It doesn’t make headlines the way other things do. Somewhere there’s a breaking news alert about something that has been breaking for three years straight, and article number 200 on the same ongoing crisis is being written as we speak, and this just quietly moves forward in the background, buried in EU committee documents nobody reads.

The “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” thing drives me crazy as well. Like, okay. Do you close the bathroom door? Do you use a password on your phone? Do you have curtains? Privacy isn’t about doing something wrong. It’s just a basic human thing. You don’t have to justify wanting it.

And to the people who genuinely believe that argument usually haven’t thought it through. Because it’s not really about you and your boring life. It’s about what happens when the infrastructure exists. A government that can read all your messages, track everwhere you go online, verify your identity before letting you use a computer. You can’t tell me this is to “protect children” and catch the bad guys. This is a tool for controlling people, becoming a surveillance state. The Stasi would have killed for this technology. And unlike the Stasi, the NSA actually got it. Snowden showed us that in 2013, and that was without any of these laws in place. Imagine what comes next with them.

The frustrating thing is that most people only start caring about privacy when something bad happens to them personally. A data breach (I’m looking at you, Odido), an account hack, some creep knowing where they live. But by then the habits are set, laws have been passed and the infrastructure is already built. It’s really hard to row backwards on this stuff once it’s in place.

Privacy isn’t a “tech person thing.”. It’s not about having something to hide, it’s the foundation that freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought all depend on. You can’t have those things without private communication. And we’re slowly being asked to give that up, one “child protection” law at a time.

I don’t really have a clean ending for this. I just think people should be paying more attention. If you want to dig in: look up Chat Control, look up the UK Online Safety Act, look what’s happening with VPN legislation in various countries. It’s a lot. It’s not great.

Anyway, that’s the thing I’ve been thinking about. I’ll leave you some sources & references for further reading.

Won't somebody think of the children?

Further reading

Why privacy matters

On specific laws