1. United States
2. Iowa
3. Letter

I am contacting you today urging you to oppose H.R. 8250, the Parents Decide Act. While I support the goal of keeping children safe online, this legislation takes the dangerous and wrong approach by introducing severe privacy and regulatory risks. By requiring operating system providers to collect and verify the dates of birth for all users to create accounts or use devices, this bill mandates the mass collection of sensitive personal data. This creates an unprecedented "honeypot" of personal information, increasing the risk of catastrophic data breaches and identity theft. Furthermore, forcing operating systems to build pipelines that share this verification data with third-party app developers is a massive regulatory overreach that creates complex security vulnerabilities. Finally, the wording is so broad that it would apply to every computer system, which is impossible from an engineering perspective. We cannot put verification systems on lightweight or air-gapped systems. We should not have to sacrifice the fundamental data privacy of every American - including children -to address online safety. And we should not be burdening device manufacturers with implementing this ill-thought-out bill. I respectfully ask that you reject H.R. 8250 and instead focus on solutions that empower parents without mandating invasive data collection. I look forward to your response on this critical issue.