The Road to Digital Hell: Age Checks & Social Media Bans with Sharon Polsky | Hide & Speak

Our Take

Sharon Polsky has spent three decades watching governments promise narrow, well-intentioned rules that somehow end up building sprawling identity infrastructure. In this Hide & Speak conversation with Verified Privacy VPN, she walks through age-verification and social media laws — Canada's Bill S-210, Australia's under-16 ban — and asks the question regulators never want to answer: where does your driver's license actually go once you upload it to prove you're old enough to browse the internet?

That question should sound familiar to anyone who follows ALPR deployments. Flock Safety and its peers make the same pitch local governments hear about age-verification mandates: a narrow, reasonable-sounding justification (catch stolen cars, protect kids) that quietly builds a permanent database with almost no transparency about retention, access, or resale. Polsky's point that 'age assurance' systems become templates copied well past their original scope is exactly the pattern we've watched play out with license plate cameras — pitched for one use case, then expanded into blanket tracking with data shared across agencies and, in some cases, private companies.

The throughline is infrastructure, not intent. Once a system exists to verify who you are, where you are, or what you're doing, it gets repurposed — and the public rarely gets a vote on round two. Worth a watch if you want the identity-verification side of this fight; if you want to see the location-tracking side already deployed in your neighborhood, check our camera map and find out what you can do about it at take action.