To make you censor yourself so they don't have to. Same deal with the porn one. There was a piece by Alec Muffet not so long ago discussing the consultation process for age verification. All those involved knew that the headline group (teenagers) the law was supposed to protect were by far the most likely to circumvent the measures, so any such system is essentially not fit for its stated purpose.

Even if the intent is to play well with the authoritarian and/or socially conservative portions of the electorate, the effect will still be self censorship.

My SO and I both have to undergo enhanced disclosure and barring service checks on a regular basis for our jobs, one of which is in education. The UK Department of Education just effectively prevented Milo from speaking at his old school 'because extremism'. So how should I be feeling right now about following links from Reddit or other forums discussing US electoral politics that might lead to Breitbart? What if there's another situation like Sad Puppies vs the Hugos and I'm trying to get a picture of what's going on and I click on a link to find a Vox Day equivalent? Did I just endanger one of our prospects for future employment? Hard to say. Will using a VPN service get us tagged as 'something to hide' and affect our eligibility to work with children and vulnerable adults? Don't know. Worth betting someone's career on?

I can't work out the purpose. It feels scary and Orwellian but I don't know why they want to collect all this data. Who benefits?

In a totalitarian regime it makes sense because you can use it to prevent political opposition. But in this case, it's a democratic government that can easily be voted out. It doesn't help anyone cling to power.

Maybe I'm over-thinking, but I can't work out the point.

>it's a democratic government that can easily be voted out.

The group of individuals handling this data are more than likely to be bureaucratically appointed rather than democratically elected.

>It doesn't help anyone cling to power.

On the contrary, it is human nature to do so.

> The group of individuals handling this data are more than likely to be bureaucratically appointed rather than democratically elected.

Exactly what I was going to reply. There is no need for any conspiracy theories to acknowledge that in almost any democratic states of these days "states within a state" exist when it comes to surveilance and intelligence services. While political function owners come and go with each election, those organisations seem to be more structural conservative following agendas which reach beyond any legislative period.

The point is the legislations are written by people who are often technologically inept and from a political culture of placing their own opinions above the advice of the experts.

You also see the same nonsensical policies on other topics like global warming, gun control (in the US), the war on drugs, and weird alternative treatments available on the NHS.

A publicity stunt so, come the next election, said government can leverage what the masses might see as a good/harmless idea. The minority of people who know better won't be statistically significant when it comes to the polls.

Democracies can fail, for example the recent rise of Erdogan. Asshats in power want democracy to fail because when it does they will be the ones in power.

Even if only for tactical reasons, it's better to treat this as a well-intentioned mistake, and not as a vast conspiracy to round up dissenters etc.

Taking that point of view, the argument is that there's a subset of criminals that are stupid, or make mistakes. For people who've bought into the "nothing-to-hide" mindset, even a tiny chance to catch a few criminals is enough, because there's precisely zero on the other side.

So the task is: a clearly articulated argument for why privacy is important. I'm not saying someone should leak all the porn-URLs visited from Parliament, but it wouldn't hurt. Although some PG13 reasons may be even more helpful with the conservative crowd: "Prime witness in mafia trial killed after location revealed in log leak"...

The "rounding up dissenters" argument should still be in there – as "we're creating tools that a less benevolent government could exploit." C.f.: Trump/muslims, the Dutch (Danish?) burning their register of Jews

They're not looking for actual terrorists or criminals. They're looking for people like Occupy Wall Street protesters, who actually pose a threat (ie. redistribution of wealth) to those in power. Then as soon as they do something like pirate a movie, they can be thrown in jail (ie politically neutered).