I'm writing to ask you to oppose S. 4407, the CHATBOT Act. I want to be clear that I care deeply about keeping kids safe online. But this bill misses the mark in ways that would leave everyone less private and less secure — including the young people it's meant to protect.
My biggest concern is what the bill does to ordinary users. The CHATBOT Act doesn't mandate age verification outright, but it creates heavy liability for companies that fail to correctly identify minors. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, the practical result is predictable: companies facing that liability will demand government IDs or deploy facial-scanning age estimation just to stay out of trouble. Gathering that kind of sensitive data creates exactly the privacy and security risks the bill claims to solve. And the more databases of scanned faces and ID documents we create, the bigger the target for breaches.
The bill also goes well beyond typical parental controls. It requires every covered AI provider to build a "family account" system that gives parents a full record of a teenager's conversations, along with tools to monitor those conversations "at scale." That's not an opt-in feature — it's a federally prescribed, one-size-fits-all model of parenting that treats a high school senior the same as a second grader. Parents differ enormously in what independence looks like at different ages, and Congress shouldn't force every family into a single monitoring architecture. Parents of kids under 13 get no option at all; the family account is the only path.
The genuinely harmful practices some companies engage in — manipulative engagement-maximizing design, profiling, and improper data use — are better addressed through targeted transparency requirements and FTC enforcement, not a compliance regime that ends with millions of Americans handing over ID documents to use a chatbot.
Please vote no on the CHATBOT Act. I'd welcome the chance to discuss alternatives that protect young people without putting everyone's privacy at risk.
Sign Petition
