To: Lord Strasburger
Protect Children Without Turning Phones Into Surveillance Devices.
Why this petition exists.
Recent amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill would require monitoring capability to be built directly into smartphones and could force people to prove their identity to access privacy and communication tools. While protecting children is essential, embedding surveillance capability into personal devices by law crosses a serious civil-liberty line.
What we want to achieve.
We’re calling on Parliament to remove or rewrite these amendments so child protection is achieved without mandating phone monitoring, identity-linked access, or surveillance-by-design. Safeguarding must be targeted, proportionate, and openly debated - not quietly built into everyone’s devices.
Recent amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill would require monitoring capability to be built directly into smartphones and could force people to prove their identity to access privacy and communication tools. While protecting children is essential, embedding surveillance capability into personal devices by law crosses a serious civil-liberty line.
What we want to achieve.
We’re calling on Parliament to remove or rewrite these amendments so child protection is achieved without mandating phone monitoring, identity-linked access, or surveillance-by-design. Safeguarding must be targeted, proportionate, and openly debated - not quietly built into everyone’s devices.
Why is this important?
What is the cause for concern?
Recent amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill risk going far beyond the vital goal of safeguarding children and instead normalising the creation of permanent surveillance capability within personal devices used in the United Kingdom.
Amendments tabled in December 2025 would:
mandate tamper-proof system software on smartphones and tablets supplied in the UK, enabling on-device scanning of content to prevent CSAM; and
require highly effective age-assurance for access to VPN services, meaning individuals would be required to prove their identity in order to use privacy-preserving tools.
Protecting children is a shared and non-negotiable objective. However, these proposals would require surveillance and identity-linking capability to be built directly into consumer technology by law. Once such capability exists, its future expansion becomes a matter of political decision rather than technical feasibility, creating a serious and lasting risk of scope creep far beyond the original intent.
The concern is not the existence of VPN services themselves. The concern is that accessing privacy and security tools would require users to surrender their identity, fundamentally altering the relationship between individuals, technology providers, and the state.
This undermines anonymity, weakens digital security, and creates permanent records of lawful private behaviour.
Of particular concern is that these measures are being advanced within a children’s welfare bill, rather than through the Online Safety Act framework, where changes of this scale and technical impact would reasonably be expected to undergo full public, technical, and civil-liberty scrutiny. Introducing device-level inspection and identity-binding powers in this way limits transparent debate and democratic accountability.
The United Kingdom has long upheld the principle of policing by consent.
Mandating inspection-by-design and identity-linked access to personal technology replaces that principle with enforcement through architecture, where compliance is unavoidable, invisible, and no longer meaningfully contestable. This represents a fundamental shift in how authority is exercised in a democratic society.
This petition does not oppose child protection.
It calls for safeguarding measures that are targeted, proportionate, transparent, and subject to proper parliamentary scrutiny, without embedding permanent surveillance or identity-tracking infrastructure into private devices and everyday digital tools.
We are calling on:
🔹 Lord Strasburger, a long-standing and respected critic of surveillance creep and technology-based overreach, to oppose any amendment that mandates on-device scanning or identity-linked access to privacy tools under the guise of child protection.
🔹 MPs and peers across all parties who have previously defended privacy, civil liberties, and the principle of policing by consent, to publicly challenge these proposals and ensure they are removed or fundamentally rewritten.
We call on Parliament to:
Remove or fundamentally amend any provision that mandates on-device scanning or surveillance-capable software;
reject measures that require individuals to identify themselves in order to access lawful privacy and security tools; and
ensure child-safety policy does not create permanent, expandable surveillance or identity-tracking infrastructure by default.
Protect children — without turning personal devices or privacy tools into mechanisms of surveillance.
Recent amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill risk going far beyond the vital goal of safeguarding children and instead normalising the creation of permanent surveillance capability within personal devices used in the United Kingdom.
Amendments tabled in December 2025 would:
mandate tamper-proof system software on smartphones and tablets supplied in the UK, enabling on-device scanning of content to prevent CSAM; and
require highly effective age-assurance for access to VPN services, meaning individuals would be required to prove their identity in order to use privacy-preserving tools.
Protecting children is a shared and non-negotiable objective. However, these proposals would require surveillance and identity-linking capability to be built directly into consumer technology by law. Once such capability exists, its future expansion becomes a matter of political decision rather than technical feasibility, creating a serious and lasting risk of scope creep far beyond the original intent.
The concern is not the existence of VPN services themselves. The concern is that accessing privacy and security tools would require users to surrender their identity, fundamentally altering the relationship between individuals, technology providers, and the state.
This undermines anonymity, weakens digital security, and creates permanent records of lawful private behaviour.
Of particular concern is that these measures are being advanced within a children’s welfare bill, rather than through the Online Safety Act framework, where changes of this scale and technical impact would reasonably be expected to undergo full public, technical, and civil-liberty scrutiny. Introducing device-level inspection and identity-binding powers in this way limits transparent debate and democratic accountability.
The United Kingdom has long upheld the principle of policing by consent.
Mandating inspection-by-design and identity-linked access to personal technology replaces that principle with enforcement through architecture, where compliance is unavoidable, invisible, and no longer meaningfully contestable. This represents a fundamental shift in how authority is exercised in a democratic society.
This petition does not oppose child protection.
It calls for safeguarding measures that are targeted, proportionate, transparent, and subject to proper parliamentary scrutiny, without embedding permanent surveillance or identity-tracking infrastructure into private devices and everyday digital tools.
We are calling on:
🔹 Lord Strasburger, a long-standing and respected critic of surveillance creep and technology-based overreach, to oppose any amendment that mandates on-device scanning or identity-linked access to privacy tools under the guise of child protection.
🔹 MPs and peers across all parties who have previously defended privacy, civil liberties, and the principle of policing by consent, to publicly challenge these proposals and ensure they are removed or fundamentally rewritten.
We call on Parliament to:
Remove or fundamentally amend any provision that mandates on-device scanning or surveillance-capable software;
reject measures that require individuals to identify themselves in order to access lawful privacy and security tools; and
ensure child-safety policy does not create permanent, expandable surveillance or identity-tracking infrastructure by default.
Protect children — without turning personal devices or privacy tools into mechanisms of surveillance.
