1. United States
2. Vt.
3. Letter

As a Vermonter who works with technology to serve the users of State of Vermont digital services, I am very concerned about H.R. 8250 . In the name of “protecting children”, we’re going to mandate that an operating system collect sensitive information about every user that touches it? This is a privacy violation waiting to happen. Please oppose H.R. 8250, the Parents Decide Act. I support parents having tools to guide their children’s online lives, but this bill takes the wrong approach. Requiring operating systems to verify the age of every user would create a broad, centralized age-verification mandate for phones, computers, tablets, gaming systems, and other devices people rely on every day. This raises serious privacy, security, accessibility, and civil liberties concerns. People should not have to submit sensitive personal information just to use a device or operating system. Any system that collects or verifies age at the operating-system level creates new risks of data breaches, misuse, exclusion, and surveillance. It could also put app developers in a position to request or receive information they should not need. The bill is also too vague and delegates too much of the actual design to later rulemaking. Congress should not pass a sweeping mandate first and hope the privacy and implementation details work out later. Please protect families, children, adults, and vulnerable users by opposing H.R. 8250. Better child-safety policy should be narrow, privacy-preserving, evidence-based, and voluntary for families, rather than turning every operating system into an identity checkpoint.