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

I'm writing to urge you to oppose the SCREEN Act, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), and the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (KIDS Act). These bills are framed as child safety measures, but in practice they amount to sweeping surveillance and content-control mandates that affect every American, not just minors. The SCREEN Act's age-verification requirements would force platforms to collect government IDs or biometric data from all users just to grant basic access to the internet. That's not a safety measure — it's the creation of massive centralized databases that become prime targets for breaches and normalize surveillance as a cost of being online. KOSA's vague "duty of care" standard gives regulators significant leverage to pressure platforms into over-censoring lawful content on topics like mental health, LGBTQ+ issues, and civic discourse, simply to avoid liability. That's a real threat to free expression, dressed up as child protection. The KIDS Act compounds this by expanding data collection and retention requirements under the banner of "compliance," further eroding user privacy to address the behavior of a small minority of bad actors. I don't accept the idea that we have to trade away the privacy and speech rights of the entire internet-using public to make things marginally safer for minors. That tradeoff is neither necessary nor acceptable. There are more targeted alternatives — stronger enforcement of existing privacy laws, transparency requirements, and better parental control tools — that could address these concerns without this level of overreach. I'm asking you to vote against these bills as currently written, or to push for substantial amendments that remove the age-verification mandates and rein in the compliance-driven data collection requirements. Thank you for taking this seriously.