What we want for our children
We want them alive, healthy, and capable. We want them free to express themselves, personally, professionally, creatively, without outside constraints. We want them to develop skills, agency, and connection to reality. We want them to grow up with their privacy intact until they are old enough to decide for themselves what to share and with whom.
What we know to be true
- Children develop best when families make their own decisions. No one knows a child the way a parent does.
- Privacy enables freedom. Without privacy, expression becomes self-censorship. A child who knows they are being watched does not develop the same way as a child who has space to make mistakes, form opinions, and figure out who they are.
- Limiting negatives limits positives. You cannot constrain the harmful without constraining the beautiful. The same systems that expose children to risk also connect them to knowledge, community, and help.
- Skills persist because the individual owns them. Rules only work when enforced. Teach a child to think critically about what they see online, and they carry that skill everywhere. Set a rule, and it expires the moment enforcement stops.
- The family precedes the state. Parental authority is not granted by government. It is inherent. Government may support families. It may not replace them.
- Legitimate authority rests on consent. Systems that operate on the people they affect, without their knowledge or agreement, are not protection. They are control.
- Every database of personal information ever built has been used beyond its original purpose. The question is never whether. It is when.
- Protection serves the interests of whoever provides it. The further protection gets from the people it is supposed to protect, the less aligned the incentives become. Growth becomes the goal. Protection becomes the justification.
- Cultural change, education, and community are the primary drivers of lasting behavior change. Legislation is one tool among many, and rarely the most effective one.
- What you build for good purposes will be used by whoever holds power next. The database you create to protect children today will be available to the administration you fear tomorrow.
- Regulation is never free. Its costs, to liberty, to communities, to the citizens who fund it, are real. They are rarely measured. And they are never refunded.
History teaches us
These are not hypothetical concerns. Every principle above has been tested, and the results are consistent.
The Census and the Camps
Data collected for one purpose will be used for another. Promises of protection can be revoked.
In 1940, the U.S. Census Bureau collected detailed information on every American, including race, national origin, and home address. The form carried a printed confidentiality promise. Two years later, after Pearl Harbor, Congress buried the repeal in a wartime powers act. The Census Bureau proactively provided block-level targeting data to the military. It also handed over individual names and addresses to the Secret Service, which had asked for them because one hospitalized man, seventeen months earlier, had muttered a threat against the President. 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them citizens, none of them charged with a crime, were forced into internment camps. The data did not change. The policy changed. And the people who answered honestly became the instruments of their own identification.
The PATRIOT Act
Temporary powers become permanent. Systems that cannot demonstrate success are incentivized to grow.
Forty-five days after September 11, Congress passed a 342-page surveillance law with less scrutiny than a highway bill. It included sunset provisions. Temporary, they said. The provisions were renewed for 19 years. The NSA collected 434 million call records in a single year under just one of its authorities. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the bulk collection program had not identified a single instance where it made a concrete difference in a counterterrorism investigation. Meanwhile, the DEA used NSA intelligence to build drug cases against American citizens, then fabricated parallel evidence chains to hide the surveillance origins in court. The tool built to find terrorists was used to prosecute drug dealers. The system grew. It could not demonstrate that the growth made anyone safer.
COPPA
Laws that punish identification incentivize ignorance. What platforms don't know about, they don't build for.
In 1998, Congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act to protect kids' data online. The law required parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. Its "actual knowledge" standard meant obligations only triggered when a platform knew a user was a child. The rational business response was not to protect children. It was to avoid knowing they were children. Platform after platform set a minimum age of 13, provided no verification, and maintained plausible deniability. YouTube marketed itself to toy companies as the top destination for kids ages 6-11 while claiming to be a general-audience platform. But the damage went beyond data collection. When platforms avoid identifying children, they have no reason to build kid-safe products. Acknowledging young users creates liability, so companies only build adult products, with addictive algorithms and open chat systems, and children use them anyway. Twenty-eight years later, the law designed to protect children created the incentive structure that left them unprotected.
SESTA/FOSTA
The tools that enable harm also enable safety. Remove one, you remove the other.
In 2018, Congress passed a law to fight sex trafficking online. The Senate voted 97 to 2. The Department of Justice had already seized the law's primary target, Backpage, five days before the bill was signed, using existing statutes. In three years, prosecutors used SESTA/FOSTA exactly once. But the collateral damage was immediate. Platforms that sex workers used to screen clients and share safety information went dark. More than a third of sex workers surveyed reported increased violence. The law achieved the opposite of every stated goal. Fewer prosecutions, more violence, less visibility for law enforcement. The tools that enabled harm also enabled safety. When Congress removed the bad, it removed the good with it.
Tobacco
Cultural change drove the decline. Legislation was one tool among many, and not the most effective.
Smoking rates in America fell from 42% to 11% over sixty years. No single law did it. Georgetown University's SimSmoke model quantified what actually drove the decline: the Surgeon General's report and media campaigns accounted for 24-26% of the reduction. Excise taxes accounted for another 24%. Indoor smoking bans contributed 5.5%. Cessation programs and health warnings contributed 1-5% each. The single most effective youth program, the truth campaign, worked by treating teenagers as intelligent people capable of seeing through manipulation. The data is clear: information and incentives did the heavy lifting.
The point is not the incidents. It is the pattern. Every system was built with good intentions, and every one was used in ways its creators never predicted. Good intentions do not prevent misuse. They justify it.
What follows from this
If these truths hold, and if this history is what it appears to be, then certain things follow.
- Safety enables freedom. It is not the goal itself. Trading children's freedom for safety destroys what you were trying to protect.
- Education is the primary tool. Community is the support structure. Leading by example is the method. This is what the evidence shows works. Not legislation alone. Not technology alone. People teaching people.
- Children's privacy belongs to them. Parents are stewards, not owners. Government is further removed still.
- Solutions should be localized before centralized. Families before communities. Communities before institutions. Institutions before governments. Solve problems at the level closest to the people affected.
- Government is a lever for accountability, not a source of solutions. It can hold corporations accountable for harm. It cannot raise your children.
- Government's role is to referee, not parent. Enforce contracts. Adjudicate disputes. Protect against force and fraud. Stay out of family decisions.
The question
Policies change. Data does not. Once collected, it exists. It will be available to every future government, every future policy, every future purpose that has not been invented yet.