> Half the laws

If you forgive the slight exaggeration in my use of "always", then I am half right - in fully half the cases, deanonymization is the first thing they try.

But let's look at those "just regulating parental controls" laws, the California one [1]. What does it do? Does it give parents/the owner the tools needed to limit child access? Does it require vendors to include such tools? No, neither of those. It just establishes how to collect (but not verify) and send age data, so someone else can act on it.

It does nothing to empower parents, but does lay the groundwork to grow an age control ecosystem that can later have verification easily added - all the apps and websites will already support it. Not all "regulation" is the same.

> People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta

Meta is the most privacy-hostile company there is, despite fierce competition for that title, and nearly all their services are behind a login-wall, even read-only access, and they don't let you make an account without a phone number [2,3,4]. I avoid them like the plague, and they already go above and beyond what you would want of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Digital_Age_Assuran...

[2] https://www.local3news.com/local-news/what-the-tech/what-the...

[3] Facebook now treats a phone number like a near-requirement - https://quackr.io/blog/facebook-account-without-phone-number

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/tyrs6c/so_i_had_to...