As your constituent I urge you to vote down the bill to require operating system (OS) age verification (HR8250). This bill is not yet written, but there is no version of it that will not be an attack on American freedom, privacy, innovation and self-determination. 1. If you want to protect kids you could require that OS makers above a certain size build in an OS level parental mode that the parent can fully customize based on their family's particular needs and values which would not be undermined by updates. 2. Kids are the vast minority of OS users. To require age verification doesn't benefit kids so much as it hurts everyone else. The impact will be disproportionately off target for that reason. 3. Age verification is not about protection but surveillance. Why does the OS maker need this information? Why are they the ones who need it? This rule will make no sense from an information security perspective: there is no need-to-know for this party. 4. There is huge potential for this information to be abused. Once it exists, make no mistake, it with be leveraged as a surveillance tool. 5. It doesn't begin to answer the next questions: if a user is a minor, what content or features will be off limits? Who will determine which sites for example are blacklisted and which are, say, educational? Is this really a federal decision? These decisions must be made by those concerned, not by large corporations or by the state. 6. This bill, however it gets written, is anti-innovation, anti-freedom and anti-privacy. Indie OS makers - from small companies to open source to hobbyists - shouldn't have to figure out how to comply with a federal surveillance campaign in order to invent and improve upon new systems. Parents should be free to set their own limits. Users must have the right to own their systems, reject unwanted features, and rest assured their computer is not reporting on them. These are the issues that should be protected by law. 7. This bill will also be anti-safety. Domestic violence survivors need the ability to use the Internet anonymously, in a way that cannot be traced back to them. Sometimes their lives and their kids' lives depend on this. Often, lifesaving interventions take place at libraries and other public computers, where access to resources can be made private and safe. Again I urge you to look past the rhetoric of children's safety and see this initiative for what it is: an effort to consolidate power through surveillance, and erode the freedom, privacy, right to self-determination, and innovation environment of the American people. There are better ways to address the concept being raised. This bill is not it. This bill is an attack on our people. I call on you now; do not support it.
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