1. United States
2. N.Y.
3. Letter

I'm writing to ask you to vote against H.R. 6488, the RESET Act, and the GUARDIAN Act substitute that replaced it in the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on September 1. I understand the goal here. Nobody wants kids handed over to feeds engineered to keep them scrolling, and parents deserve real tools. But this bill gets there by making platforms figure out who's a minor, which in practice means checking everybody. The original version banned under-16 accounts outright; the substitute trades that for parental consent before a platform can process a teenager's data, and terminates the account if consent is withdrawn. Different mechanism, same pressure: companies have to determine ages, and the cheapest way to do that usually means collecting IDs or other identifying data from all of us. That's the part I can't get behind. Courts have blocked state age-verification laws in case after case, and even the Supreme Court's Paxton ruling was narrow enough that it doesn't authorize this kind of checking for ordinary apps and websites. EFF and the ACLU have both argued these systems fail on their own terms: the data they collect becomes a target, and the people most likely to get locked out are those without a current driver's license or a bank account. Anonymity online has a long record of protecting people who need it — whistleblowers, abuse survivors, teenagers working through things they can't ask about at home. There are better paths. Comprehensive privacy legislation that protects everyone, regardless of age, would accomplish more than an age gate ever will. So would funding actual support for parents and schools instead of outsourcing enforcement to platforms. I'd rather you spend your time on that. Please oppose H.R. 6488 as amended.