Protecting children is a real problem, the internet right now is doing massive damage to everyone (not only children but for some reason we don't protect adults). Opportunists are seeing the opportunity to paperclip mass surveillance onto actual child protection efforts.
We can fight this by supporting child protection mechanisms that don't act as mass surveillance, such as the one in California that merely reports whether root said the user is a child, and fighting ones that do, such as the one in New York that checks your ID.