I'm guessing you are thinking about things like addictive social media and the efforts to keep kids from overusing it, and the idea is if there were strong privacy laws it would be harder or impossible to implement the most addictive features of those sites?

However harms based on sites having lots of personal data on their users are only part of what many people are concerned about. There are various categories of apps and sites that are legally required to not sell to/serve children. There are also things that are not illegal but the majority of research finds is bad for young children, so apps and sites may want to keep young children out unless a parent approves. Privacy laws don't help with any of that.

Privacy laws don't prevent foreign entities from influencing elections and making children addicted.

And age verification prevents influencing elections, how?

Cambridge Analytica? The addictions are from these free platforms which do so to harvest your data

This is a reach. Children can't vote. If that was a real concern you would be banning adults from social media.

> if you wanted to prevent harm from the internet you would start with proper privacy laws

Explain how a privacy that protects you and me will somehow not protect a pedophile. How does that work?

I am FOR privacy. I don't think it can be done.

I do not want to have any information at all stored anywhere, encrypted, decentralized or otherwise. Nada. Its just text. I want to just be a number in everyone database. I want to be able to spawn millions of numbers that will never be related to each other. My ideal privacy world is a world where bots thrive.

Just go to face to face discussion if you care so much about who you are talking to.

> Explain how a privacy that protects you and me will somehow not protect a pedophile.

I think that it will, and that's okay. The US Bill of Rights necessarily protects criminals as well as innocents. "The optimal amount of [crime] is non-zero." (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...)