Oppose S. 5090, the Digital Age Assurance Act of 2026

Vote against S. 5090, the Digital Age Assurance Act of 2026. This bill would bake an age-declaration checkpoint into every phone and computer sold in America, forcing all users — adults included — to register their age bracket with their operating system just to use their own device. That is a surveillance architecture built for the entire population to sort a minority of minors. The privacy protections in the bill are a facade. Section 3(d) mandates age verification when a provider receives "clear and convincing information" that a user's real age differs from their self-declared bracket — but never specifies how that verification must happen. Section 10's promise that no government ID or biometric is required is immediately qualified by Sections 3, 4, and 5, which contain every operative requirement in the bill. The exception swallows the assurance. In practice, liability exposure of up to $7,500 per affected child will push companies straight toward document uploads and face scans. The constitutional problems are serious. Anonymous speech and anonymous reading are both protected. Every user under 17 must link their account to a parent or guardian with no trusted-adult alternative — meaning a teenager in an abusive home has no path that doesn't run through the person they need distance from. Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011) is not friendly to using parental authority as a general instrument of speech control. This bill deserves a no vote.