The Cornfield: An Excuse for Mass Surveillance
Be careful what you say, the maize has ears
I, like many others, discovered corn around the age of 13, an important time in a boy’s life filled with wild ideas and promise of great life-altering change. During late 2006 I would notice a switch up in the sorts of humour and discussions that filled the mouths of my fellow students. From thirsty humour to hungry looks, our school was a feasting ground for naughty banter.
While boys-only schools are typically abundant in ruckus, the discovery of corn and its locations were still kept to smaller conversations, or the “if you know you know” hints, usually taking place in the locker rooms. Some would learn sooner, others later, about buttering their cobs.
Around this time, the early 2000s, you had to go about getting your corn from the shop, or traded through a friend, as opposed to these days when you can get what you want off the web. It was an adventure, scurrying off to the corn field to lose yourself amongst the stalks in search of novelty and excitement.
At this age, being exposed to corn is something, unfortunately, of an inevitability, given that boys talk and make fun of the nutritional recommendations that schools impose. Inquisitive minds seeking to understand and explore, are lost within the tall stalks of the corn field. Without proper education and navigation, finding your way in and out, or rather around, is more challenging than is originally thought.
Thankfully for me, it would be at least some time before I went looking for the cornfield myself. Rather, it was still pictures that were either downloaded to my cellphone—with a screen so small I might as well have used my imagination—or shown to me by a friend. Sweet corn would really make you drool.
During the years that followed, I spent a lot of time on my own, and in those unsupervised moments, I would scurry off to the cornfield. Typically there weren’t too many hurdles to make this happen, learning a few routines helped dramatically, and otherwise ensuring that I had the right access point and prepaid cash to ‘buy' my way in.
You could say that it was something of an oxymoronic social venture—many in attendance, but never in communication; I always did go alone. The corn hub is frequented by college students, a staggering amount of step siblings helping one another get unstuck, or otherwise just random people exploring and doing their thing. You most certainly should make the argument that an under 18 year old should not be in the cornfield to begin with, or consuming corn in any manner at all—and you’d find no argument with me on that. At the very least, corn hubs have heavier restrictions on making corn.
The fact of the matter remains, that even though the corn fields (and hubs) have fences, aren’t listed anywhere public, or advertised where young teens are likely to go, they somehow always end up exposed. And the irony here is, that when you tell them, “Hey! Don’t eat corn”, the number one thing they want to do is eat that sweet sweet corn.
I would argue that the onus is on the farmer to plant in a sustainable and respectful manner, such that only those who are allowed to consume corn may have access. There should be better education on the ramifications of consuming corn in a way that doesn’t dispute or discourage curiosity, but rather brings forth healthy exploration that is appropriate, because let’s face it, the baseline activity is part of growing up.
You could build a wall around it, store it all in silos, and restrict every ounce of exposure to those who pay for it, and that could be a solution—this is in part how the industry works—yet for some reason, not all it. It also deals with the age problem, somewhat, but that’s a credit card steal away from not working either (more on this later).
As for my two cents on the educational sentiment: corn is tasty, and is available in many forms. It’s great in a salad, grilled out on a braai, or even floating in ramen; it’s enjoyed by couples together, popping a kernel or two during a movie, and in the privacy of one’s own home, a well cooked cob all buttered up, can be a messy mouthful and finger-licking experience. But from the standpoint of nutrition, the body doesn’t derive any useful nutrients from it, and much like an artificial sugar, just gets shat back out.
These are the important things to remember as the function of a diet, or rather ‘lifestyle’, is to provide your body with the essential nutrients it needs to survive. Consumption of corn alone will rob your body of these, and lead you on a mission towards malnutrition. Instead, aiming for a curated selection of meats, fish, veggies, starches, and fruit, will help you attain (and maintain), a well balanced lifestyle.
And when the majority of folks in a given environment follow this sort of logic, the effects are known to those around them. Both family and friends, especially those raising kids will tell you, healthy habits are formed as a direct result of proper education and implementation. As a society, things are in need of change, more so than any one measure, masked as an overall protection mechanism.
Let’s pull out of the metaphor. The reason this piece exists is because I want to highlight some of the changes to online activity, pertaining to the restrictive laws coming into effect in a number of countries, namely the UK, Australia, USA, Norway, and Indonesia, regarding age-verification software for social media and other ‘age-appropriate’, or more explicitly mentioned, pornographic, websites.
While I stand by the decision to keep minors away from viewing graphic content, and also protecting them from the ‘brain rot’ of doom scrolling, masking the full process of ‘mass surveillance’ behind a verification process doesn’t sit right with me. Suddenly access to anything for anyone has to be verified through the use of third-parties and government issued identification.
Dare I mention the kinds of leaks and data breaches that happened recently that point to this being a colossal disaster of a decision?
Let me give you a few examples accurate at the time of writing… ‘Tea’, the safety dating app, where women can vet and discuss men, had 72,000 images leaked, of which 13,000 were estimated to be photo identification—small numbers, you might say. So let’s try something bigger, TransUnion, a consumer credit reporting agency, hacked, revealing the personal data of 4.4 million US individuals. Do you still need a bigger number? KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines were hacked revealing information on 6 million passengers. All within July-August 2025, and that’s a very very non-exhaustive list.
If that still doesn’t have your attention as to why this a fucking stupid idea, here’s one more: reported by Cybernews, 30 datasets were found containing 16 billion credentials (yes, that’s with a B) for sites such as Facebook, Meta, and Google, harvested from malware.
I digress, I wanted to talk about the following ‘new’ online child protection acts put into place in the following countries:
Online Safety Act, for under 18s in the UK
Online Safety Act, for under 15s in Norway
Online Safety Act, for under 16s in Australia
Online Safety Act, for under 18s in Indonesia
Kids Safety Act, for under 17s in the US
I’ve linked each should you want to read them through in their entirety. For a shortened version, I can recommend David Bombal’s cybersecurity YouTube channel, where he goes into more detail about the ramifications of these, it’s really interesting, so watch his videos here and here.
What’s happening as I understand it, is that the governments are cracking down on online safety the only way they “know” how, which is to add red tape and unnecessary verification everywhere (through third-parties I might add). This is seen by a wider group of people as an invasion of privacy, having a virtual ‘police man’ in the corner of their living room “just in case” they do something unlawful.
It also goes along that rhetoric of “you needn’t be afraid if you have nothing to hide”, which is often used in debates as an argument in favour of surveillance; a way of enforcing order by essentially stating that if you’re innocent, then you have nothing to worry about.
What’s happening here is that privacy is being reframed as suspicious, rather than as the right that every individual has. What started out with “good” intentions is moving in a direction that’s beyond the original scope, such that now kids are finding ways to circumvent the verification locks.
Hold the phone. Let me catch you up. The week that the UK Online Safety Act when live (25 July 2025), VPNs saw a surge in downloads, with a whopping 1,400% for ProtonVPN, and 1,000% for NordVPN as a way for internet users to retain their ‘normal’ level of internet privacy, that was otherwise not (as) necessary the week before. Since then, Members of Parliament in the UK are considering a ban on VPNs for users under 18 to force compliance.
This won’t work.
And I’m going to tell you why.
Jumping back to 2006, where the hallways of my high school were bustling. The bell had just rung and it was time for our first break, only 30 minutes in duration, but plenty to wolf down my homemade sandwich (Thanks Mom!), grab my friends, and run off to the library. Oh what a nerd I was… but not for the books!
No, I was never that kind of nerd. Instead, we were off to play computer games! The weather the fine, we could have gone outside, but no, rather getting around IT’s lock system was far more enjoyable for ensuring that we could access those fast dopamine-injecting Mini Clip games.
I don’t know what system they had running, but it was such that if you so dared to search for a titty online, a giant padlock would appear on your screen. Sometimes, the IT folks would toy with you first, taking control of your mouse remotely to close whatever was present in your browser, before dropping that heavy “guilty” padlock on your screen, where the only way round it was to approach IT directly and face whatever consequences they had outlined for you.
This was my introduction to ‘mass’ surveillance. Everything that we did on the school computers was monitored and the URLs (website links) were subjected to a rigorous list of blacklist filters—if you tried to access something you weren’t supposed to, you would hit a virtual wall, their first line of defence.
My friends and I—as well as several of our peers, older and younger—entered into an ongoing game of cat and mouse, where we would try and find new loop holes, and IT would rapidly patch them out. Kids love this sort of shit, and at the dawn of the internet, there were only a few ways to go about this before you needed to get your hands dirty.
We used to use websites called ‘proxies’ whereby the URL at the top of the page would display one thing, and the actual website you were viewing would show another. Some sites were faster, others more dodgy; some were blocked at first access, while others were available in the morning, and blocked in the afternoon. Re-fucking-lentless.
Fun fact: this even stems onto piracy websites these days, e.g. The Pirate Bay, where their URLs continually changed to escape their capture. This was also the case for the proxy websites, IT would block one, only for another to show up with the same ‘main’ address, just with a different slug (i.e., .com, .nl, .io, etc.), round and round we go!
Back then when things weren’t so ‘established’ at least in South Africa, methods like this were used to watch YouTube, LimeWire, or other music or game related websites. Pretty sure porn was accessed too, but I didn’t dare do that at school.
VPNs have been around since the mid-1990s in various shapes and forms, I just didn’t know about them at school; after 2006, there was also ‘Tor’, a completely uncensored browser and network that routes your internet traffic through a daisy-chain of other IPs. Each of these were created with the intention of putting privacy first, something that should be maintained, particularly in a world where everyone is tracking and stealing each others’ data to sell it for a price. When, and why, did this become the norm??
Kids are smart. They will find a way around your blockade, which is exactly why this is also not the way to do it.
To build on that point I read an article the other day where these two worlds collided—gaming and cybersecurity, or rather lightweight ‘hacking’ I suppose. Some lad figured out that the video game Death Stranding, had a photo mode where you could use the in-game character’s face as a bypass for the verification software in both Reddit and Discord. I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw the headline. How far we’re come!
Indeed do something about the free-reign of graphic content, however it needs to be done in such a way that doesn’t infringe on privacy that each human has the right to. If an adult wants to go gooning through the cornfield, that’s their prerogative (within the bounds of morality) and shouldn’t have the need to submit government official ID in order to do so. Least of all to unknown third-parties based abroad, with different approaches to data handling than the websites in question.
So that you’re aware, these are the kinds of websites that are being affected:
User-to-user providers—sharing of images, videos, messages or comments, so in short, basically all social media, gaming platforms, and dating apps.
Search engines—Google, Bing, and so on.
Regulated porn sites—which I can only assume would be the big well-known names (which arguably adds to the problem as it will push people to use unregulated sites instead).
I’ll just focus on the gaming for a second. Valve, one of the biggest gaming-platforms, has implemented extra rules for UK gamers, in accordance with the Online Safety Act, such that players, in order to view mature content, will need to verify with a credit card.
At face value, this isn’t inherently bad, until you consider that only 65% of UK adults own a credit card, a fraction of which could be gamers, so not a lucrative method for Valve (although not in question), or a suitable one for adult gamers just looking to play games without wanting to own a credit card in the first place. I heard some other complaints stating that even if your Steam account is older than 18 years (Steam launched September 2003), you were still required to verify your age. What nonsense. For the majority of kids anyway, the games they’re interested in have nothing to do with mature content, e.g. Roblox, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Fortnite etc.
Speaking of games like Roblox, and Minecraft, if the government is serious about protecting kids on and offline, perhaps they can do something about groomers, sexual exploitation, and abusers? Games like these, designed for creativity and ‘all’ audiences, are played by kids under 13, some of which are as young as 9, where they can be exposed to a slew of bad actors with only dishonest intentions. Can’t imagine having to be 18 now, with a credit card attached just to play Minecraft. And I bet if that were the case, kids would just ask to have their parents’ credit cards attached.
Just more to add to the dumpster fire.
Accessibility to mature content is easier than ever and kids are being exposed at insanely young ages. It’s a problem that I think we can all agree on and it boils down to more than just what a government is saying about it. There needs to be a societal shift that pushes in a direction of safety through application, rather than through fear and control.
By the look of things, this is only going to get worse. VPNs will probably be blocked for kids in the UK, and instead of compliance, as the government hopes to achieve, they will be met with resistance. Unregulated adult sites will have higher attendances, more personal data will be in leaks and data breaches affecting millions, and those who seek to go around walls will find new and creative—arguably more dangerous—ways to do so.
This is not the way to do it. Not for the kids, and not for the adults either. One’s privacy should not be weaponised against them for the sake of authoritarianism.
As a society, not exclusive to the UK, parents and educational institutions should do a better job of teaching about sex in a way that’s healthy; governments, police units, and other enforcement agencies both on and offline should be prioritising the protection of kids by hunting those who prey on them. And of course, platforms that display content of the sort should have much better filtering (or even better, gating) systems that prevent open access.
Do I have a better solution? I have a few easy to implement ideas, maybe start there:
Control on a device level—don’t give kids smart phones or free rein on computers.
Parental guidance—strict rules on a home network or device to prevent access.
Increased moderation—stricter mods to help regulate interactions.
Digital literacy—protect kids by teaching them to spot manipulative behaviour.
These seem like a fart against thunder in addressing the problems that pertain to online safety as the platforms have the majority of control in setting what’s accessible. Parents can do what they can, and when it comes to the average Joe and their privacy, we need someone a lot more tech-savvy than I to bring forth a real solution.
Something like what I found going down the rabbit hole of cryptography and blockchain; it seems both Google and Concordium boast their own versions of Zero-Knowledge Proof Technology, that enables age verification without revealing personal, sensitive information… to the extent of my understanding. I’m sure there’s others on the forefront of it too. It certainly sounds much better than giving away my personal data to untrusted mandatory third-parties, while retaining the privacy that I, like everyone else is, entitled to.
And hopefully this way, with a proper solution at hand, online activity can be safe and privacy-first for adults and children alike, rather than the ad-ridden, data-harvesting, malware-laden, nightmare that it is today. 🌽
Thanks for reading my latest article, I hope you found it insightful. If you’re feeling generous and want to show your support for my work, you can you can buy me a coffee!
Till next time,
~M.