1. United States
2. N.Y.
3. Letter

I'm writing to ask you to vote against the App Store Accountability Act, S.1586 and H.R.3149. The bill is being sold as a way to protect kids online, but it goes much further than that. It would require Apple and Google to verify the age of everyone who opens an app store account, adults included, and to confirm that a parent is 18 or older before a minor can download anything. Since the app store is the one gate every piece of software has to pass through, that means nobody downloads an app without proving who they are first. Two private companies end up acting as the ID desk for the entire phone. Groups that work on privacy and civil liberties, including EFF, the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Internet Society, have all flagged serious problems with this approach. To actually verify someone's age, you have to collect sensitive personal information, usually a government ID or a facial scan, and parental verification likely means birth certificates or similar records. That builds enormous databases of families' private information, all sitting in one place and waiting to be breached. There's a free speech problem too. Courts have long recognized that forcing people to hand over identifying information before they can access online content discourages them from using it at all. Adults looking for health information, political organizing tools, or anything else they'd rather keep private would think twice. And concentrating that much identity data in a handful of companies creates an obvious target for hackers and identity thieves. Several states have tried versions of this and run into legal trouble, with courts blocking some of them over these exact concerns. Child safety is a real goal, but it shouldn't come at the cost of everyone else's privacy and security. Please oppose this bill.