Oppose the KIDS Act: A Surveillance Bill Disguised as Child Safety

I urge you to oppose the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act), recently advanced by House leadership. While child safety online is important, this legislation threatens privacy and creates a surveillance framework that undermines fundamental freedoms. The KIDS Act's core problem is structural. The bill defines "know" to mean companies "should have known" if a user is a minor—without clearly defining how that determination must occur. This creates legal liability that will pressure platforms to collect vastly more personal data on all users, not just children. Although the bill states age verification "is not required," platforms facing potential lawsuits will have no practical choice but to gather extensive personal information and deploy age-estimation technologies to avoid liability. This is mass surveillance by design. The bill also strips away online anonymity. Many internet users—vulnerable populations, activists, and ordinary citizens—rely on anonymous participation to protect their safety and privacy. The KIDS Act will fragment this protection across multiple state laws, creating a patchwork where companies must implement increasingly invasive data collection and identity verification depending on jurisdiction. The legislation also fails to adequately protect encryption. While it states encryption cannot be compromised "directly," indirect regulatory pressure will push companies to weaken encryption to monitor user behavior and verify ages. Strong encryption is essential to protecting all users' privacy. I understand the goal of protecting children online, but this approach sacrifices the privacy and anonymity that all internet users—especially vulnerable ones—depend on. I ask you to oppose the KIDS Act and instead support privacy-protective alternatives that don't require mass surveillance infrastructure.