Online age verification champions are a bit like horror movie villains. Once Michael Myers gets inside a house, he’s not going to stop with just one or seven kills. He’s going to keep killing until you push him out a window, run him over with a car, and throw his body in a lake (and even then, he’ll be back again someday). Likewise, once authorities learn that the public and the courts will stand for one form of age verification—say, asking porn platforms to verify user identities—they’re suddenly off on a surveillance spree that won’t stop until the whole internet is covered. Age verification for app stores! Age verification for social media! Age verification for… eBay?
Yes, eBay. Where your shut-in uncle buys old beanie babies and you occasionally turn for used books. Where enterprising teens might make a little cash selling their parents’ old jeans.
British regulators apparently want us to believe that eBay is a hotbed of “grooming” by child predators.
Eroding Online Privacy
Online clothes marketplaces like those on eBay, Depop, Facebook Marketplace, and Vinted are in the crosshairs of age-verification-obsessed U.K. regulators, who say—sans any serious evidence—that predators are using them to message minors, The Times reports. U.K. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy is now “looking seriously” at including these marketplaces in the list of platforms that must ban people under age 16 from using them.
As with plans to ban minors from social media, this is disturbing on multiple levels.
First, it’s unfair to teenagers. Fourteen or 15 hardly seems too young to search for vintage fashion or used books with a parent’s blessing. And trying to ban 14-year-olds from visiting a physical store just because they could potentially encounter an adult with ill intentions there would never fly; why would it be OK online?
It’s also unfair to adults, who would have to prove they’re adults in order to use any online marketplaces. Perhaps that doesn’t seem like a huge deal in itself. But it’s one more way that authorities are chipping away at anonymity online. It’s one more way they’re setting out to erect an internet-wide surveillance system.
It’s one more way they’re saying you have no right to online privacy.
It’s also one more way that authorities are putting people at risk of having their information and identities compromised. Each new platform that has to collect data on your identity and age provides one more opportunity for identity thieves and other criminal actors to target you.
And it won’t stop at eBay and Vinted, just like it was never going to stop at Pornhub and OnlyFans, or at Instagram and TikTok.
“We need to take a comprehensive approach to protecting children from harm online,” a “government source familiar with the internal discussions” told the Times. “That means if platforms have a messaging function that allows people to speak to strangers, we need to seriously consider them needing highly effective age requirements.”
Dubious Premises
“The Children’s Society said that young users were being ‘asked for indecent photos in exchange for money’ and gifts on these sites,” reports the Telegraph.
I’m not saying that has never happened, but come on. We’re really supposed to believe that eBay—where it’s hard to tell any personal details about any user—is some sort of hotbed of sex criminals preying on teens? I’m skeptical. (Especially since authorities aren’t offering even anecdotal evidence, let alone anything systematic.)
Perhaps the worry isn’t supposed to be that it happens often, but that it could happen at all. But if we accept that rationale, no online platform with an interactive component is safe from the same treatment. The mere fact that a criminal could communicate through the platform would be enough to demand ID checks, to ban encrypted communications, and so on. Heck, why not ban teens from using computers at all and force everyone who uses a digital device to submit a facial scan?
And it’s not like predators are driving around in a white van and somehow forcing direct messages on children who then have no option but to do what they say. Instead of banning teens from any platform where a message could be sent, wouldn’t it make more sense to teach teens to not only ignore any such messages but to report them? Have law enforcement authorities dedicate more time to this problem, if it really exists? That could actually help stop predators, rather than burdening minors and everyone else.
But no—the solution, somehow, is always that we must protect teens from harm by banning them from basically the whole internet. That’s either safetyism run absolutely amok or a sinister ploy to erode online privacy generally. (I suspect both, in different degrees.)
In this case, the “child safety” pretext seems especially thin, given that U.K. authorities are simultaneously complaining that online retailers are helping people evade taxes and tariffs. Wouldn’t it be convenient for them if they had some easy way to confirm the identity of every single seller on a peer-to-peer marketplace?
In the News
Joe Redner, ‘strip club king’ and advocate for individual liberties, dies at 86. “Joe Redner, the so-called strip club king of Tampa, who became an outspoken champion of a woman’s right to bare it all for paying customers—and, as the years went by, a vocal defender of free speech, gay rights and reproductive freedom—died on Oct. 16 at his home in Tampa,” reports The New York Times. Redner’s clubs were targeted by both religious conservative protesters and by local authorities.
Mr. Redner also faced a steady campaign by city politicians, who tried to use zoning regulations and public-nuisance laws to shut him down.
But whenever challenged, he stood his ground. If he knew the police were coming, he made sure to be on the premises so he would be arrested alongside his dancers and patrons. (He claimed to have been thrown in jail 150 times.)…
Mr. Redner also fought back in court. He paid his dancers’ and patrons’ legal fees, and his business partner was a bail bondsman, which meant his people could move through the system quickly and be back at the club within a few hours.
Redner also fought for freedoms that went beyond his business interests. He sued over a law banning government agencies from voicing support for a gay pride event, and over marijuana prohibition.
“I’m a freedom type of guy,” he told The Daily Beast in 2012. “I think people should do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone or intrude on anybody else.”
School district suits against social media companies tossed: “Four school districts can’t sue Meta, Google, TikTok and Snap in state court for creating a ‘mental health crisis,’ after a California court of appeals affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of their cases,” reports Courthouse News.
The districts argued they also suffered noneconomic harms, including “frustration of educational mission” and “lost staff time.” But the court found those insufficient to support negligence claims.
[District Court Judge Carolyn] Kuhl ruled that the districts could not sue for public nuisance because the claimed harms affected individual students rather than all students. The appellate court agreed, noting that public nuisance typically concerns “property rights or public health and safety,” not abstract concepts like “the right to education.”
The judges reasoned that a public health nuisance claim would require showing social media affected all students equally. Instead, the districts said some students used social media compulsively or developed anxiety and depression.
On Substack
Recursive self improvement—in which AI development is turned over to AI—is a major goal of major AI companies. “This week, we got significant new information about the state of the race toward RSI,” writes Kelsey Piper at The Argument:
Well, sort of: We got a report from the third-party AI research nonprofit METR on this topic, but much of its contents are redacted at the request of Anthropic because they’re “commercially sensitive.”
But what we do know about the report is this: Anthropic says that it expects RSI very soon. METR estimates, with substantial uncertainty, that on well-specified tasks, progress that used to take a full year now happens in roughly six months. Anthropic and METR see no signs that anything will slow this process down. Crucially, this isn’t just a matter of spending more money, but by the increased ability of AI itself to hasten research.
But we have to take their word for it, because almost all the evidence of this in the report was redacted.
Piper suggests that Congress should get to look at an unredacted version of the report. “If billions of dollars in investment are about to result in humanity losing all control of an extremely powerful technology, that’s a legitimate matter of public concern, and our elected representatives are entitled to use all means at their disposal to investigate it.”
Read This Thread
There’s growing concern that retailers will use personal data to jack prices up on individual consumers. This strategy is technically feasible but we don’t see it in the real world. I explain why in my latest @ReasonFdn
(1/4) https://t.co/Srn7CQG6D8
— Max Gulker (@maxg_econ) November 2, 2026
More Sex & Tech
• “X was a more closed market than anyone imagined, least of all the people most addicted,” writes Helen Roy in a piece about the conservative influencer bubble bursting. “In a closed market, there is no real price discovery. Influencers trapped in the circlejerk boosted each other in what amounted to wash trading, creating the look of demand where there was mostly volume.”
• “Many scholars in the teens-tech-mental health space are repeatedly accused of fabricating research or being corporate shills when our research is politically inconvenient. I know that I have been. Repeatedly. And it sucks,” writes danah boyd.
• Anytime “45 attorneys general back” anything, you know it’s bound to be a bad idea. Last week, they sent a letter to U.S. House and Senate leaders asking them to express support for the Kids Online Safety Act.
• “European regulators and NGOs are pushing their domestic speech laws and surveillance onto the American internet. But there’s a way to fight back,” reports Zach Weissmueller in a new Reason video.
• A new academic paper looks at how OnlyFans customers perceive themselves:
within the masculine common sense our interviewees report, buying sex is a legible transaction while buying attention is a failure of masculinity. The hierarchy is consequential, because attention is what the platform actually sells; subscribers therefore cannot name the component of the service they most pay for, and protect the transaction by a wilful ignorance of how the intimacy they buy is produced,
• Livestreaming versus cable news.
• The new U.K. porn law isn’t about sex, it’s about surveillance, suggests Council Estate Media. The law—which this newsletter covered last week—bans production and possession of porn made by consenting adults if it features sex acts that the government has decided are bad.
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