I'm a constituent, and I'm writing to ask you to vote against S.4407, the CHATBOT Act, which the Commerce Committee reported out in August and which is now headed for the floor.
I get the impulse behind it. Nobody wants kids hurt by chatbots, and parts of the bill are worth keeping — it bans targeted advertising to minors and requires disclosure that someone is talking to an AI. Those aren't the problem.
What the bill builds is. Every family with a teenager would have to complete a "verifiable parental consent" process before that teenager could use a covered AI service. Companies would need a practical way to confirm the adult signing off really is the kid's parent, which means checking identities and standing up age-assurance systems. The bill never says "age verification." It doesn't have to.
Section 5(a)(3) is worse. It requires companies to hand parents a "full record of the conversations and activity" of their child or teen, tools to "monitor, analyze, and understand, at scale" those conversations, and alerts if a teen tries to disable the controls. That's a permanent, centralized archive of teenagers' private chats, readable by anyone who gets the login. EFF warns it's the kind of trove that draws hackers and identity thieves. Teens ask chatbots things they won't ask their parents — about sexuality, abuse at home, depression. A kid in a bad house loses the one place they could ask.
EFF's other point lands too: this freezes one parenting model into federal law. Some parents want total visibility; others think a 16-year-old deserves some privacy. Under-13s don't even get the choice — the bill offers families one path and terminates existing accounts that don't fit it.
Please oppose S.4407. Protecting kids is a real goal; mandating identity checks for every household and building a national archive of children's private conversations is not the way to do it.
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