What is the point of the mass surveillance in the first place? Control. Over what? Over human futures. Who will be hit worst by the mass surveillance regime?
Those growing up under it.For starters, an independent self-education will become impossible. Millions more young people would be forced to choose between becoming fluent in whatever maddening proprietary nonsenses their schools are paid to teach them - or ostracism and starvation. They would never know the validity that disintermediated computation lends to one's interior thought process. Many more people would grow into the world of ubiquitous multilevel gaslighting instead of the world of free thought. And that would be those children's life now.
Here's a bit of a doomsday scenario, you can pepper with it your dialogues with people thinking of the children too hard, and you may find their reactions enlightening.
As enmeshed as personal computing and mass media already are with personal life, it can take an organized e***s-minded outfit scant generations to literally devolve your children into a servile underclass. Simply by making access to computation a tightly controlled privilege, and using that to amplify social inequality. (While their own kids get to play out the fantasies dreamt up for them by the colonial laureates of yore, i.e. be immortal trillionaire wizard aristocrats who can work "magic" because they get to learn actual sciences and not just some ever-changing APIs to them. Which would probably fall apart in a few generations making a huge mess of things, potentially permanently bringing down the global supply chain by mass incompetence - but how could they care?)
This is a global legislative assault against the greatest novel liberty humanity has gained from technology for generations: the Internet is literally a means for anyone to project their disembodied thoughts at a distance! Whatever force is even capable of attacking that, it would not be playing for chump change. Nor is it likely to be the unimaginative sort of entity (unless, perhaps, these laws are part of an AGI bootstrapping itself throughout society?) which is why I'm being only slightly anxious about spitballing concrete patterns of defeat in view of it.
And even if we do not end up on the branch of reality where social inequality gets written into the genome and the bloody e***ists win - forcing minors to identify themselves online is sure to facilitate the global cultural conveyor belt that winds through Willy Wonka's Consent Factory Island and beyond.
Plenty of "think of the children" arguments either way if that's how they're playing it. It's a reflexive, non-rational argument, from the same firmware update as "your mom is sacred" (i.e. good luck being child or partner of abuser who had kids to become untouchable). So yeah, do think of the children. Think of their futures. You cowards.