1. United States
2. Ind.
3. Letter

Dear Representative, I write to urge you to vote no on H.R. 8250, the Parents Decide Act. The bill’s stated intent — protecting minors online — is legitimate. Its execution is not. The legislation is structurally overbroad. It mandates age verification at the operating system level for all users, not just minors. This means every adult in the country must submit identifying information to an OS provider simply to use their own device. There is no limiting principle that confines this to its stated purpose. The data-sharing provision creates a surveillance infrastructure. The bill explicitly requires OS providers to develop systems allowing app developers to access age-verification data collected at the OS level. This creates a formalized pipeline for personal data — including birthdates and identity verification records — to flow from device providers to third parties. The bill provides no meaningful constraints on what that data may be retained for, shared further, or used to infer. Enforcement details are deferred entirely to the FTC. Critical implementation questions — what counts as adequate verification, what data may be collected, how long it may be retained — are left to future rulemaking. Passing vague statutory authority and calling it child protection is not legislating; it is delegating the hard decisions while locking in the surveillance architecture. The compliance burden falls on everyone, not bad actors. Legitimate users, including adults, low-income households sharing devices, elderly users, and people in sensitive situations, bear the cost and risk of a mandatory identity verification regime designed to address the behavior of a narrow set of platforms and developers. A more targeted remedy exists. If Congress is serious about child safety online, repealing or substantially reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would accomplish far more. Section 230 currently shields billion-dollar platforms from liability for the content they host and algorithmically amplify. Removing that shield would compel platforms to actively monitor and police their own ecosystems — which is where the harm to children actually occurs. That is a direct, proportionate intervention. Mandating OS-level identity verification of every American adult is not.