When the Fox Writes the Henhouse Rules: Meta and the Age Verification Scam
Someone on Reddit just did the investigative journalism that apparently none of our major news outlets bothered to do. They traced $2 billion in nonprofit grants and lobbying records across 45 US states and discovered something that’s simultaneously shocking and utterly predictable: the company behind those age verification bills is the same company that profits from collecting your data.
Let me say that again more clearly: Meta, a company whose entire business model revolves around hoovering up personal information, has been actively lobbying for laws that would require even more data collection. And they’ve dressed it up as “protecting the children.”
Look, I’m a parent. I have a teenage daughter, and I worry about her online safety constantly. The internet can be a genuinely toxic place for young people, and I get the impulse to do something. But when the solution being pushed involves handing over government IDs and biometric data to verify your age every time you want to access a website, we need to ask ourselves who actually benefits from this arrangement.
Spoiler alert: it’s not the kids.
The research that was shared (and then mysteriously removed from r/linux, which is concerning in itself) lays out a pretty damning trail. Multiple US states have been passing remarkably similar age verification legislation, and when you follow the money, it all leads back to the same players. The very companies that have repeatedly demonstrated they cannot be trusted with our data are now writing the laws about data collection.
It’s like hiring the tobacco industry to write your smoking cessation program.
What really gets under my skin here is the cynicism of it all. These companies have spent years fighting against meaningful privacy regulations, lobbying against data protection laws, and doing everything possible to avoid accountability for the harms their platforms cause. But suddenly they’re deeply concerned about child safety? Come on.
One commenter pointed out something I think is crucial: Meta doesn’t just profit from data collection – they profit from profiling, targeting, and manipulating people. The data is just the raw material. These age verification laws aren’t really about protecting anyone; they’re about building a more comprehensive surveillance infrastructure that both governments and corporations can exploit.
We’ve already seen this playbook in Australia. Our own government rushed through the Online Safety Act and is now pushing for social media bans for under-16s, complete with age verification requirements. The people cheering this on seem to think it’ll be like showing ID at the bottle shop – a minor inconvenience for a good cause. What they’re not considering is that we’re building a system where every Australian’s online activity can be tied to their real identity, creating a comprehensive profile of who you are, what you read, who you talk to, and what you think.
That’s not a privacy feature. That’s a surveillance state.
The IT worker in me knows exactly how this will play out. These systems will be mandated, they’ll be poorly implemented, they’ll be hacked, and our data will leak. It always does. Then we’ll be told it’s our fault for not being more careful online. Meanwhile, the companies that lobbied for these laws will have expanded their data empires and increased their market dominance, because only the big players can afford to implement these systems.
Small websites, independent creators, non-profit organizations? They’ll be priced out of existence. We’ll end up with an internet that’s even more consolidated in the hands of a few massive corporations than it already is. Which, funnily enough, is exactly what those corporations want.
What makes me genuinely angry is that there are real solutions to online safety that don’t involve mass surveillance. Better moderation. Actual enforcement of existing laws against harassment and exploitation. Meaningful penalties for companies that fail to protect users. Design choices that prioritize safety over engagement. None of these require building a panopticon.
But those solutions would cost the tech giants money and reduce their power. So instead, they’ve convinced politicians that the only way to protect children is to verify everyone’s identity online – conveniently creating a massive new data collection opportunity in the process.
The person who did this research deserves enormous credit for following the money and exposing this scam. Others in the thread were urging people to mirror the GitHub repository containing the findings, to make sure it doesn’t disappear. That’s probably good advice. When powerful interests are involved, inconvenient research has a habit of vanishing.
The broader lesson here is one we keep learning but somehow keep forgetting: when tech companies say they’re doing something for your benefit, check their profit margins. When they suddenly support regulation, look at what they’re regulating. And when the same solution is being pushed simultaneously across multiple jurisdictions, you can bet there’s a coordinated lobbying effort behind it.
We need to be much more skeptical of corporate-backed “solutions” to problems that those same corporations created. We need to demand transparency about who’s writing our laws and who’s funding the campaigns behind them. And we need to push back hard against the normalization of mass surveillance, no matter how much it’s dressed up in the language of safety and protection.
Because once that infrastructure is built, it’s not going away. And it will be used for purposes far beyond whatever noble goal was used to justify it.
The fox has written the henhouse rules, and somehow we’re supposed to believe the chickens are safer for it.