In India, the government linked people's food rations, pensions, and even hospital access to a digital ID system."
"The problem? Criminal networks learned how to hack and manipulate biometric data. When fingerprints didn't match, or when hackers swapped someone's identity, people were locked out of survival."
"Entire families were denied food. In just one state, at least two dozen people starved to death after being cut off from rations."
"This is the real danger of digital ID. It's not about safety or protecting children. It's about control."
"Once everything you need to live—food, money, medicine—is tied to a single ID, all it takes is an error, or a criminal, to cut you off."
Protecting children online is a pretext for total digital surveillance
Protecting kids is a weak pretext for total digital surveillance. What’s worse, the EU’s monitoring exempted its own politicians from scrutiny. Their privacy matters, but not yours.
Last month, we lamented California’s Frontier AI Act of 2025. The Act favours compliance over risk management, while shielding bureaucrats and lawmakers from responsibility. Mostly, it imposes top-down regulatory norms, instead of letting civil society and industry experts experiment and develop ethical standards from the bottom up.
Perhaps we could dismiss the Act as just another example of California’s interventionist penchant. But some American politicians and regulators are already calling for the Act to be a “template for harmonising federal and state oversight.” The other source for that template would be the European Union (“EU”), so it’s worth keeping an eye on the regulations spewed out of Brussels.
The EU is already way ahead of California in imposing troubling, top-down regulation. Indeed, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024 follows the EU’s overall precautionary principle. As the EU Parliament’s internal think tank explains, “the precautionary principle enables decision-makers to adopt precautionary measures when scientific evidence about an environmental or human health hazard is uncertain and the stakes are high.”
The precautionary principle gives immense power to the EU when it comes to regulating in the face of uncertainty – rather than allowing for experimentation with the guardrails of fines and tort law (as in the US). It stifles ethical learning and innovation. Because of the precautionary principle and associated regulation, the EU economy suffers from greater market concentration, higher regulatory compliance costs and diminished innovation – compared to an environment that allows for experimentation and sensible risk management. It is small wonder that only four of the world’s top 50 tech companies are European.
From Stifled Innovation to Stifled Privacy
Along with the precautionary principle, the second driving force behind EU regulation is the advancement of rights – but cherry-picking from the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights of rights that often conflict with others. For example, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) of 2016 was imposed with the idea of protecting a fundamental right to personal data protection (this is technically separate from the right to privacy, and gives the EU much more power to intervene – but that is the stuff of academic journals). The GDPR ended up curtailing the right to economic freedom.