An Open Letter

To: Sen. Cantwell, Rep. Smith, Sen. Murray

From: A verified voter in Seattle, WA

July 25

I’m writing to urge you to vote no on KOSA, the so-called Kids Online Safety Act. This bill claims to be intended to protect minors online, but it will do much more harm than good. Senator Blackburn, the author, has stated that she introduced it to protect minors from transgender. The Heritage Foundation is openly planning to leverage KOSA to restrict online information about sexual and reproductive health and LGBTQ+ issues. Youth need access to accurate information about their health and bodies, not partisan censorship that would certainly be a major outcome of this bill passing. KOSA would also be a privacy nightmare! There’s no way for a platform to know which users are minors without identifying absolutely everyone who uses it. I don’t want to hand over my ID or scan my face or provide my biometric data to websites (or whatever private contractors they hire) every time I get online! Not only is it intrusive, it also puts everyone’s personally identifying information at risk of being leaked. I don’t want random websites to be forced to keep databases of my biometric data when not even banks can prevent harmful data breaches. I understand you want to keep youth safe and that’s an admirable goal, but this bill is poison and won’t accomplish that. Please vote no.

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