Safety for Kids or Surveillance by Design?
- Andy Srivastava
- Sep 2
- 3 min read
Within the past few months, all across the world, we are seeing a rise in laws aimed at protecting children online. From the UK’s ‘Online Safety Act’ to the USA’s ‘Kids Online Safety Act’ to Australia banning social media for kids under the age of 16, we are seeing the digital landscape shift dramatically.
I remember taking a class all about online safety when I was a kid. While I don’t remember all of the details the major lessons that stuck with me were about protecting your privacy. The internet was supposed to be a place of anonymity. We were told not to give out our real name, our location, our birthday or any identifiable information because you never knew who was on the other side of the screen, and now we’re being expected to upload our IDs to every website we want to visit.
Being forced to upload your ID to use a website means everything you do on that site can be traced back to you.
But the truth is these laws are not actually about protecting kids online. It’s about surveillance and censorship. Being forced to upload your ID to use a website means everything you do on that site can be traced back to you. Governments arbitrarily deciding what is and isn’t safe for kids to see means that vital resources for vulnerable minorities, specifically LGBTQ+ children will no longer be accessible. According to the Washington Post, over 2000 LGBTQ+ activists joined together to write a letter opposing KOSA saying it “would give the presiding administration the ability to censor LGBTQ+ content online simply by claiming it can harm children by making them ‘anxious’ or ‘depressed’”.
Censorship is never a one-and-done kind of thing. It constantly expands to censor more and more things. Steam and Itch.io were forced to remove NSFW games from their platform due to pressure from credit card companies (and since when is it a credit card company’s business what we spend our money on), and already we are seeing swaths of SFW LGBTQ+ games getting wiped off the platform as well, which is just another example of how vaguely worded censorship can quickly expand.
When you decide one thing, like porn, is acceptable to censor, governments will start labelling all the things they don’t want people to see as that thing. If you want the art you like to exist, you must accept that art you don’t like or art that makes you uncomfortable must also exist.
Censorship concerns aside; it is a huge privacy risk to have to upload your government ID to access websites. Big websites like YouTube, Facebook, and X have the resources to better secure the uploaded IDs, but that is not true of all the sites affected by these laws. It’s not a matter of if but a matter of when there is a data leak. Already in the UK, since passing the OSA, they are carrying out upwards of 5 million online age checks a day across over 100,000 companies. That is a massive amount of data to keep secure, and a leak could be incredibly dangerous. Companies linking your personal data to your browsing history can also be dangerous to people whose online anonymity keeps them safe like journalists, whistleblowers, and victims of stalking or domestic violence.
Companies linking your personal data to your browsing history can also be dangerous to people whose online anonymity keeps them safe like journalists, whistleblowers, and victims of stalking or domestic violence.
With how connected the entire world is, keeping kids safe online is important, but blanket ID and censorships laws are not the way to go about it. Teaching kids how to protect themselves online, giving them the resources to do so, and monitoring their online activity is, in my opinion, a much better way to go about keeping them safe.
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