EFF launches Age Verification Hub

This keeps coming up and we keep having the same debates about what Age Verification isn't.

For the folks in the back row:

Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance

Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance

Age Verification isn't about Kids or Censorship, It's about Surveillance

Without even reaching for my tinfoil hat, the strategy at work here is clear [0 1 2]. If we have to know that you're not a minor, then we also have to know who you are so we can make any techniques to obfuscate that illegal. By turning this from "keep an eye on your kids" to "prove you're not a kid" they've created the conditions to make privacy itself illegal.

VPNs are next. Then PGP. Then anything else that makes it hard for them to know who you are, what you say, and who you say it to.

Please, please don't fall into the trap and start discussing whether or not this is going to be effective to protect kids. It isn't, and that isn't the point.

0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...

1 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-usage...

2 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/57714...

How do you know this?

I see this argument repeated over and over on HN, with 0 evidence for it. Any "evidence" people cite is usually of the "politicians are evil, so this should be obvious by definition" kind, sometimes of the "they tried x in the past, so surely some unrelated y they're trying to pass in the future is also about x" kind.

I haven't seen a single leak, a single admission from somebody trying to pass a law like this, that surveillance is actually the goal here. There are far too many politicians trying to pass laws like these, in very different countries across the world, for some kind of giant global conspiracy to stay undetected.

Plain ignorance seems far easier to believe.