I’m Alan Chapell. Over the past 20+ years, I’ve been outside privacy counsel to hundreds of digital media companies. I write a monthly syndicated report called The Chapell Regulatory Insider, and I’m also a regulatory analyst for The Monopoly Report.

I’ve been in court the past couple of weeks. Nope, I’m not involved (at least not directly) in any of the CIPA litigation that’s slowly eating its way through the ads space. And I’m not here reporting on the Google antitrust case. There hasn’t been much to report in months when it comes to Google’s adtech antitrust case.

Where have you gone, Mrs. Brinkema?

I’ve just finished up grand jury service in NYC. No, not a “regular” jury that determines whether someone is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, or whether some dive bar in the West Village is liable because one of its patrons tripped on the bar’s uneven stairs.

A grand jury’s role is to determine whether there is legally sufficient evidence and reasonable cause to formally charge someone with a crime and send their case to trial. In that way, the grand jury is designed to act as a community check on government power. (You may have read about a number of grand juries serving that exact role recently.)

My last jury service was right before 9-11. But there’s one thing that really jumped out at me between my last jury service in 2001 and my service as a grand juror in 2026.

I’ll give you two guesses as to what that is…

I may come off as a bit naive in writing this, but I’m shocked (shocked!) by the pervasiveness of cameras in NYC. I guess I was aware on some level, but nothing drives home the degree of surveillance taking place than spending two weeks watching video after video of my fellow New Yorkers grumpily going about their days.

All you folks in the suburbs complaining about that Amazon / Ring camera Super Bowl ad? Please. Hold our beer. Cuz if you’re in the City, and you are:

Well, chances are, there’s a video record of you somewhere that can be retrieved with relative ease.

Don’t want you to think this was written by Claude AI, but…

Let that sink in.

That’s only part of the story. Facial recognition technology is starting to take over.

I recently conducted a poll on LinkedIn that asked well over 100 of you whether you use Clear or Global Entry. Keep in mind: My LinkedIn community is heavily weighted toward privacy professionals. Nonetheless, over 90% of you indicated that you use Clear, Global Entry, or both. I’m not judging; I use them as well.

As you may know, it wasn’t too long ago that Clear began rolling out its facial recognition software at airport security checkpoints to enable a "friction-free" verification. When they write “friction-free,” they mean that it is now significantly easier for their software to identify people in seconds.

What happens when you combine all these cameras with the ability to identify your face in a crowd? Well, before you know it, we’re in that surveillance state that advocates have been warning us against since the mid-’90s.

In that light, what’s the last thing the internet needs right now?

Yep, you guessed it…

Just this week, the United Kingdom announced a social media ban for children under 16. In a nutshell, UK policymakers saw that Australia’s relatively milquetoast social media ban has been largely ineffective to date. And in their wisdom, the UK opted to double down, apparently concluding that the real issue was that the age verification measures used by the Aussies weren’t quite stringent enough.

I’m not here to dismiss the concerns about protecting children, but I am here to tell you this: Ensuring that nobody gets to use the internet anonymously is not the solution if:

I rail against Big Tech as much as anyone in digital media. Overall, I don’t think those companies are doing nearly enough to protect children (or adults, for that matter).

Nonetheless, I am amazed by the number of people whose opinions I respect who think that the UK, Australia, or any of the age verification solutions being pushed is onto a good idea.

In July 2004, the ACLU released one of the best pieces of advocacy I’ve ever seen. The ACLU “Scary Pizza” video is a dramatization depicting a pizza parlor employee leveraging a private-public surveillance database to refuse a customer's order based on the customer’s purchasing history, credit card limits, and health records.

Check out the ACLU pizza video here. I’ll wait…

Over the years, I’ve used the ACLU video as my litmus test to see how close our society has moved to a surveillance state. If you ask me, we’re already closer to that world than many of us would care to admit.

If we’re looking to get closer to a world where the government controls what we see and judges us by who we associate with, age verification is a good place to start.

The one thing I can say with confidence? Age verification almost certainly won’t protect children.

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If there’s an area that you want to see covered on these pages, if you agree or disagree with something I’ve written, if you want to tell me you dig my music, or if you just want to yell at me, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or in the comments below.

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