Tag: think of the children

Jess Phillips Resigns, Pushes Phone Scanning Law in UK

Stuffed inside a resignation letter about the UK’s Labour Party’s leadership crisis is a proposal that should alarm anyone who owns a phone.

Jess Phillips, who stepped down as Safeguarding Minister today, spent a significant portion of her parting shot to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, complaining that the government failed to mandate technology on every phone and device in the country that would prevent children from taking explicit images.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Phillips framed this as child protection but what she described is device-level surveillance deployed at national scale.

Her letter stated that “91% of online child sex abuse is self-generated by children groomed, tricked and exploited in to abuse,” and that she presented solutions to Starmer “over a year ago” that would “end the ability for children in the UK to take naked images of themselves.”

She wanted this installed on every device in the country.

The government dragged its feet for twelve months before agreeing to “even threaten to legislate in this space. Not legislate, just threaten.” Phillips called this “the definition of incremental change.”

An announcement planned for March got pushed to June. She’d “given up believing it” would happen.

The resignation falls during a brutal stretch for Starmer. More than 90 Labour MPs have called for him to go after disastrous local elections.

Phillips told Starmer he is “a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things” but that she’d “seen first-hand how that is not enough.” His instinct to avoid confrontation, she argued, had paralyzed the government. “The desire not to have an argument means we rarely make an argument, leaving opportunities for progress stalled and delayed.”

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EU chief turns up heat on social media’s ‘addictive’ design

The European Union is working on new rules to protect children from the addictive designs of social media platforms such as TikTok, Meta and X, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on May 12.

“Sleep deprivation, depression, anxiety, self-harm, addictive behaviour, cyberbullying, grooming, exploitation, suicide. Risks are multiplying fast,” she said in a speech in Copenhagen.

“These risks are the reality of the digital world. They are not accidental. They are the result of business models that treat our children’s attention as a commodity.”

Ms von der Leyen said the commission would specifically target “addictive and harmful design practices” in its Digital Fairness Act (DFA), due to be proposed towards the end of 2026.

The DFA would also set strict limits on the use of artificial intelligence in social media, she said, while advocating a minimum age for social media access.

Ms von der Leyen said the EU must consider setting a minimum age for access to social media, adding that the commission might make a proposal in the summer on the issue following recommendations from a panel of experts.

“The question is not whether young people should have access to social media, the question is whether social media should have access to young people,” she said.

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EU Going To War With VPNs In Bid To “Save The Children”

Western European governments and EU bureaucrats are advancing tighter regulations on VPNs as part of a broader push for “online age verification” and their ‘Chat Control’ agenda.  Privacy advocates and digital rights groups warn that Europe is drifting towards a surveillance and censorship regime similar to internet restrictions and firewalls used by Russia and China.

Last week European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen suggested that Brussels may need to address the use of VPNs to bypass the EU’s upcoming age-verification systems.  Speaking during a press conference on the EU’s new digital age-verification app, Virkkunen acknowledged that users could circumvent the system with VPNs and stated that preventing such circumvention would be among the ‘next steps’ policymakers need to examine.

Her statements were delivered only two weeks after she shared a stage with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who called for a crackdown on web media companies to “protect children” from dangerous content.  The first stage of their agenda is a government created universal age verification app which web companies will be required to integrate.  Von der Leyen asserts that the new restrictions are designed to “defend children’s rights” (how does restricting access protect rights?).

The Orwellian language of the EU is not coincidental.  “Child vulnerability” is a carefully chosen vehicle to manipulate public approval, opening the door to incremental government management of online content and discourse. 

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How a Bill Banning AI Companions for Kids Could Usher in Widespread ID Checks Online

Sen. Josh Hawley’s Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act advanced out of the Senate Judiciary committee last week. “A Trojan horse for universal online ID checks,” is how Jibran Ludwig of Fight for the Future described it.

The bill would require anyone using an AI chatbot to provide proof of identity and ban minors from interacting with many sorts of AI chatbots entirely.

Unlike some social media age verification bills, it would give parents no right to opt out of the rules the federal government sets on their kids’ technology use.

The GUARD Act is co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.), who—like Hawley—has long been a champ at moral panic around technology. (Cue: Bipartisan is just another word for really bad idea…)

And while some on the Senate Judiciary Committee expressed concerns about privacy or how this could actually backfire and harm minors, those senators still voted to advance the bill. It “easily passed in committee,” notes The Hill, despite some senators’ reservations:

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who voted yes, said there are concerns about “potential privacy and security risks” with the age-verification component, suggesting it may need to be “fine-tuned.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who supported various kids online safety bills, said he would vote yes but noted the bill needs “some revisions.”

Cruz was concerned the bill would completely ban all AI chatbots for minors, noting their potential benefits. Hawley clarified the bill does not ban all AI chatbots for minors, but rather it “prevents AI chatbots that engage with minors from pushing sexually explicit material to the minor,” or encouraging self-harm or suicide.

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Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs — law goes into effect, designed to prevent bypassing age checks

Utah’s Online Age Verification Amendments, formally Senate Bill 73, take effect on May 6, making the state the first in the U.S. to explicitly target VPN use as part of age verification legislation.

Signed by Governor Spencer Cox on March 19, the controversial law establishes that a user is considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically located there, regardless of whether they use a VPN or proxy to mask their IP address. It also prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.

NordVPN has called the law an “unresolvable compliance paradox” and a “liability trap,” arguing that it holds websites responsible for identifying users whose tools are specifically designed to be unidentifiable. The EFF warned that the legal risk could push sites to either ban all known VPN IPs or mandate age verification for every visitor globally.

The law is also technically flawed, given that it assumes that a web provider can reliably detect VPN traffic and determine a user’s true physical location — they can’t. IP reputation databases such as MaxMind and IP2Proxy can flag traffic from known datacenter IP ranges, but commercial VPN providers rotate addresses constantly, and residential VPN endpoints are largely indistinguishable from standard home connections. Autonomous System Number analysis can catch traffic originating from datacenter networks, but can’t identify a personal WireGuard tunnel running on a cloud VPS, for example, which routes through the same infrastructure as ordinary web hosting.

The only detection method that reliably identifies VPN protocol signatures is deep packet inspection, which analyzes traffic at the network level, not system- or app-level. China’s Great Firewall and Russia’s TSPU system deploy DPI via ISPs, but a website operator can’t because it requires access to network infrastructure that sits between the user and the server, not on the server itself.

Meanwhile, setting up a personal WireGuard instance on any major cloud provider takes minutes, meaning the law will be more likely to negatively impact non-technical users who rely on commercial VPN services for legitimate privacy: journalists, people living under authoritarian regimes, political dissidents, and abuse survivors, among others.

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Senate Panel Backs GUARD Act, AI Age Verification Bill

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 22-0 on Thursday to advance the GUARD Act, a bill that would require AI chatbot companies to verify the age of every American who wants to use them.

The legislation, sponsored by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, sailed through committee with a tweet from its author celebrating the outcome.

“My bill to stop AI from telling kids to kill themselves just passed out of committee UNANIMOUSLY,” Hawley wrote on X. “No amount of profit justifies the DESTRUCTION of our children. Time to bring this bill to the Senate floor.”

As usual, the framing is about children but the result is age verification/digital ID for everyone.

Under the bill’s text, a “reasonable age verification measure” cannot mean a checkbox or a self-entered birth date. It cannot rely on whether a user shares an IP address or hardware identifier with someone already verified as an adult.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

What it can mean, the legislation makes clear, is a government ID upload, a facial scan, or a financial record tied to your legal name. Every user of every covered chatbot would need to hand one of those over before being allowed in.

The bill defines an “artificial intelligence chatbot” as any service that “produces new expressive content or responses not fully predetermined by the developer or operator” and “accepts open-ended natural-language or multimodal user input.”

That language reaches well beyond the companion apps the press conference focused on. It covers service bots, search assistants powered by AI, homework helpers, and the general-purpose tools millions of adults already use without proving who they are.

Hawley described the legislation as a “targeted, tailored effort,” telling the committee, “We’re often told that this new dawning age of artificial intelligence is going to be a great age that will strengthen families and workers. I would just say that’s a choice, not an inevitability.”

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Roblox Loses 12M Daily Users After Age ID Check Rollout

Roblox is paying for its surveillance push on users. The platform shed 12 million daily active users between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, dropping from 144 million globally to 132 million, with the company pinning a meaningful share of the decline on its mandatory age-verification rollout.

Revenue still climbed to $1.4 billion and year-over-year DAU growth came in at 35 percent but the sequential numbers tell the story Roblox tried to bury under positive financial framing.

The fall is steeper when measured from the peak. Roblox hit 152 million daily active users in Q3 2025, meaning roughly 20 million people have stopped showing up daily since the company began demanding facial scans and identity checks to access basic chat features. The trajectory inverted almost exactly when the age checks rolled out globally in January.

Roblox’s own language gives the game away. The company says Q1 growth was “tempered by greater-than-expected headwinds” from the age-check rollout, which “slowed new user acquisition.”

Translated out of investor-speak, fewer people want to hand over biometric data or government ID to a gaming platform than Roblox’s models predicted and existing users who haven’t verified are pulling back from a service that now treats them as second-class accounts.

The verification mechanism deserves a closer look than corporate filings tend to give it. Roblox runs facial age estimation, a system that scans users’ faces to guess how old they are and supplements that with identity verification documents.

Facial scanning of a user base that skews young, with a substantial portion under 13, means the company is processing biometric data from millions of children. Roblox says this is for safety. The system being constructed is a database of face scans tied to platform identities, retained on terms the company has not publicly defined.

Earlier this month, Roblox widened the restrictions to gate game access by age bracket and it has signaled more changes ahead. The company plans to “implement additional improvements designed to facilitate age-appropriate access to content and product features” over coming quarters, and has openly said its safety push will lower Roblox’s “expectations for topline growth in 2026.”

Full-year revenue guidance dropped to 20 to 25 percent growth, down from 22 to 26 percent. Bookings guidance was cut by nearly $1 billion. Wall Street responded by knocking the stock down a whopping 20 percent.

The verification numbers themselves point to a two-tier platform taking shape. Through the end of Q1, 51 percent of global daily active users had completed age checks, with US adoption running at 65 percent.

The other half of the user base is interacting with a degraded version of Roblox where communication is restricted, certain games are off-limits and the path back to full functionality runs through a face scan or an ID upload. It’s a tollgate and the toll is biometric data.

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Meta raises specter of shutting down service to New Mexico in legal clash over child safety

Meta is raising the prospect of shutting down its social media services in New Mexico in response to a push by state prosecutors for fundamental changes to the company’s platforms, including Instagram, to protect the mental health and safety of children.

The possibility emerged amid legal gamesmanship in the runup to a bench trial next week on allegations that Meta poses a public nuisance. It’s the second phase of a case that already resulted in $375 million in civil penalties on a jury’s determination that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

Prosecutors are asking the court to order a series of changes to child accounts on social media aimed at reining in addictive features, improving age verification and preventing child sexual exploitation through default privacy settings and closer oversight.

Meta executives have emphasized that the company continuously improves child safety and addresses compulsive social media use. The company says its being singled out among hundreds of apps that teens use.

In a court filing unsealed Thursday, Meta said it was unfeasible for the company to meet a proposed requirement for 99% accuracy in verifying that child users are at least 13 years old, among other demands.

“As a practical matter, this requirement effectively requires Meta to shut down its services — for all users in the state — or else comply with impossible obligations,” Meta said in the filing.

Such a shutdown across a population of 2.1 million residents in New Mexico could silence personal communication on Meta’s immensely popular platforms, which also include Facebook and WhatsApp, and also impact their use for commercial advertising.

By withdrawing from New Mexico, Meta would satisfy any concerns about harm to children, but the message could appear intentionally hostile and might lead to unintended consequences, said Eric Goldman, codirector of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law in California.

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Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban Fails: 73% Ignore It

Australia’s under-16 social media ban has been in force for four months and the headline finding from a new working paper out of the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute is that around three-quarters of the teenagers it targets are ignoring it.

The paper, “Why Bans Fail: Tipping Points and Australia’s Social Media Ban,” surveyed 746 Australian teenagers between March and April 2026. Among 14- and 15-year-olds covered by the ban, only about 27% are complying. The other 73% are still using Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Threads, or Kick, the ten platforms the law designates off-limits to anyone under 16.

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 took effect on 10 December 2025, making Australia the first country to outlaw teenage social media accounts at the federal level.

More than a dozen other countries and numerous US states are now considering versions of the same approach. The Australian model places enforcement entirely on the platforms, which face penalties of up to A$49.5 million for failing to take “reasonable steps” to keep under-16s off their services. Teenagers themselves face no legal sanction.

The teenagers know this. According to the survey, only 22% of banned teens believe they personally face any consequence for using a banned platform.

47% correctly understand that the consequences fall on the companies. Awareness of the ban is near-universal at 86%. The teens aren’t confused about what the law says. They’ve simply concluded, accurately, that the law isn’t aimed at them.

Getting around the restrictions takes minimal effort. 75% of banned teens describe circumvention as easy or very easy.

The most common workarounds are the obvious ones: lying about age on verification prompts (57%), entering false birthdates at sign-up (44%), borrowing a parent’s or older sibling’s account (42%), and routing through a VPN (30%). 64% of 14- and 15-year-olds in the survey have not had their accounts removed at all. The platforms haven’t found them. A quarter of non-compliers report that a parent, older sibling, or other adult helped them sign up for a new account after a previous one was deactivated.

The researchers also asked teenagers a more interesting question. What share of your peers would need to stop using social media before you stopped? The average answer was 69%. Some teens placed the threshold even higher. The result holds across every way the question was framed, whether the reference group was age peers, classmates, the wider school, or “a typical person your age.” The numbers came out between 62% and 69% in every variant.

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Senate Panel Backs GUARD Act, AI Age Verification Bill

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 22-0 on Thursday to advance the GUARD Act, a bill that would require AI chatbot companies to verify the age of every American who wants to use them.

The legislation, sponsored by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, sailed through committee with a tweet from its author celebrating the outcome.

“My bill to stop AI from telling kids to kill themselves just passed out of committee UNANIMOUSLY,” Hawley wrote on X. “No amount of profit justifies the DESTRUCTION of our children. Time to bring this bill to the Senate floor.”

As usual, the framing is about children but the result is age verification/digital ID for everyone.

Under the bill’s text, a “reasonable age verification measure” cannot mean a checkbox or a self-entered birth date. It cannot rely on whether a user shares an IP address or hardware identifier with someone already verified as an adult.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

What it can mean, the legislation makes clear, is a government ID upload, a facial scan, or a financial record tied to your legal name. Every user of every covered chatbot would need to hand one of those over before being allowed in.

The bill defines an “artificial intelligence chatbot” as any service that “produces new expressive content or responses not fully predetermined by the developer or operator” and “accepts open-ended natural-language or multimodal user input.”

That language reaches well beyond the companion apps the press conference focused on. It covers customer service bots, search assistants powered by AI, homework helpers, and the general-purpose tools millions of adults already use without proving who they are.

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