Please Oppose Age Verification Mandates in Our State

As your constituent, I'm writing to ask you to oppose any age verification legislation here in our state. More than half of U.S. states have now passed age verification laws, and I'm concerned about where this trend is taking us. These laws don't keep kids safer—they push them toward riskier places online. When mainstream platforms require ID to access them, minors don't simply disappear from the internet. They move to unregulated spaces with zero protections, where no responsible adult or company is watching out for them. We end up trading supervised environments for unsupervised ones and calling it safety. Age verification also threatens the privacy and rights of everyone else. These systems collect sensitive personal information—IDs, biometric scans, browsing habits tied to identity—that becomes a target for hackers and government overreach alike. We've already seen data breaches involving such systems elsewhere, and trusting private companies or the state with a database of who visits what websites is a recipe for abuse. There's also a fairness problem. Plenty of law-abiding citizens don't have easy access to the documents these systems demand, and many others won't hand them over to strangers for perfectly understandable privacy reasons. Those people effectively lose access to information, community resources, and civic participation. The internet has become essential infrastructure—utilities, job applications, government services, school communication. Requiring identity documents to participate cuts people off from all of it. The desire to protect children online is legitimate, but this approach backfires. Instead, I'd ask you to support evidence-based measures: digital literacy education, better parental tools, and stronger enforcement against platforms that actually facilitate harm. Please oppose age verification mandates in any form during this session. I'd welcome the chance to discuss this further, and I'll be paying attention to how you vote. Thank you for your time and service.