One battle was won just as another is raging. Meta lobbyists are pressing politicians around the world to pass tremendously privacy-invading and likely unconstitutional identity verification laws, forcing all citizens to upload personal identifying documents or biometrics to a huge variety of corporations in order to access services whose purpose is fundamentally about speech. Advocates for this are saying everyone’s private info won’t be stored and therefore can’t leak, but there are many cases where this isn’t so. Amateur developers who make mistakes are one reason - and if 10,000’s of services have to verify identities then some won’t be up to expected standards. Customer support channels are another case; if an automated process fails and customers email support agents then those documents are stored on additional servers, such as the Discord contractor’s servers that were hacked. Then there are dodgy corporations whose lawyers come up with clever theories allowing them to repurpose and broker data. And finally, there are lawsuits and regulatory investigations that require retaining documents for long periods of time. There are much better solutions that are not driven by vast power grabs by government and corporations: give parents the ability to manage their kids’ device accounts and make decisions about what features they can access. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Disney, Valve, Epic, and many others have done exactly this. The best advocacy in this area is actually Apple’s. But it’s being ignored. It’s a tragedy of their own making that Apple has lost so much public trust by crying wolf with pretextual safety and security claims calculated to protect their App Store monopoly. Now that there is a looming privacy crisis and Apple has a truly good-faith solution based on parental controls, politicians are ignoring it to pursue the Meta lobbyists’ approach. Though the US has consistently overturned invasions into First Amendment rights, the campaign will probably succeed in most other countries, resulting in the digital world being a more corporatized, governmentized, and surveilled place.