1. United States
2. Ill.
3. Letter

Please vote no on H.R. 8250, the Parents Decide Act. This bill is framed as a child safety measure, but what it actually does is impose sweeping surveillance infrastructure on every American who uses a personal device. SEC. 2(a)(1)(B) would require age verification just to use an operating system — not a website, not an app, but the device itself. That's a mandatory hardware lockout that forces every American to hand sensitive identification data to Apple, Google, or Microsoft just to power on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. This bill does not protect children. It builds centralized surveillance infrastructure at the OS level. The security implications alone should kill this bill. SEC. 2(a)(3) requires OS providers to create a verification API accessible to all app developers — thousands of third parties, many with no meaningful data protection standards. That's not a safety feature; it's a breach waiting to happen. State-level age verification laws have already produced ID database hacks. A federal mandate at the operating system layer would be catastrophically worse. The bill is six pages long and delegates every critical question — what "verify" means, how data is stored, who can subpoena it — to the FTC within 180 days. History is clear on what happens when Congress writes "we'll figure out privacy later": lobbyists fill the gap, and the surveillance-friendly version wins. A serious child safety bill would fund mental health resources, regulate algorithmic systems that target kids, and hold platforms accountable for harmful design. This isn't that. Please oppose H.R. 8250.