Can we please stop banning things on the internet? Please?

Utah is banning VPN access for minors. And this follows from a long line of events where states and countries are mandating age-verification on everything. While I understand the sentiment of “would you please think of the children”, just, what are you trying to do to our children?

While the intentions are all good, can we please stop and think how this is done? Like, how do I know I can trust that the people who are handling the data will be safely and securely handle it? For starters, we are hearing about “data-leaks” of selfies and IDs of verification software. Hello? Excuse me? Why do you need me to upload it? Why can’t you run a small local model for me that keeps my data in place? This shouldn’t happen in the first place, but by doing so you lot are exposing our children to all sorts of malicious actors on the Internet. Please, just leave us alone and for the love of god, parent better.

I will write a long-form blog post about it some day. But this is ridiculous.

Last modified on 2026-05-03