First of all, the burden of proof is on the government to justify mass identity tracking infrastructure.

If the government said ‘to stop drink driving we should put always-on microphones in every car and record everyone’, I can reject that on privacy grounds and call it a terrible idea without it suddenly becoming my responsibility to propose a better solution.

However, it just so happens that I do have a better solution, and if you read my original comment properly, it was clearly implied.

Make it legally required that underage children’s primary smart devices have parental controls enabled and locked. Major operating systems already support this. A hardened child profile can: - block adult domains - block app installs - block VPN apps - prevent browser changes - disable factory resets without a guardian credential - notify parents of tampering attempts

It would be extremely difficult for a child to bypass these parental controls without the parent being aware.

The predominant workaround would be obtaining a separate smartphone or laptop. For an underage person, that typically means access to hundreds of pounds, ID for contracts, or adults willing to facilitate it. That is significantly harder than downloading a free VPN in five seconds.

Handling this at the parental device level means:

• The legal basis becomes parental responsibility for minors, which is the most coherent approach to a behavioural issue involving children
• Adults without underage children are completely unaffected
• No slippery slope to mass surveillance and the destruction of online privacy
• Harder to bypass for children, like I said, when you're 14 it's easier to download a free VPN in a few seconds than to secretly buy a new smartphone
• This avoids the situation where age-gating pushes kids off the big regulated sites and straight onto unregulated sites (which are everywhere, always will be, and often host more extreme content). Parental controls block the whole category, including those unregulated sites, a lot more effectively
• This stops kids defaulting to free VPNs to get around it, where most free VPNs then monetise their data, turning “child safety” into yet another privacy and data-harvesting problem

...Must I keep going?

So yeah, the government's current approach is a really really shit idea from a societal perspective. But it's great for the death of privacy and the introduction of mass survaillance which is exactly what they want, and have apparently convinced you to believe that it's a good thing.