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House Committee Passes Child “Safety” Bills That Pushes National Age Verification Surveillance
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A House committee voted Thursday to advance three child safety bills, bundling them toward the floor in a package that passed.
The votes were close: 28-24 for the KIDS Act, 26-23 for the App Store Accountability Act. Sammy’s Law also cleared the committee. The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) never got a House vote, but the Senate Commerce Committee passed its version unanimously.
The KIDS Act, sponsored by Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), rolls several laws into one. It includes a version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) stripped of the “duty of care” provision that defined the Senate’s bipartisan take on the bill. That provision required platforms to actively mitigate risks to minors. The House version drops it.
Several Democrats voted the package, though largely for the wrong reasons. Their concern was that the bills would block states from passing stronger online protections for young users. KOSA has been introduced in various forms for years without ever passing.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) argued the KIDS Act uses child safety as cover for something else entirely. “What Big Tech lobbyists want is a national surveillance program where they can harvest the private and personal data of every American with zero actual protections for people,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez is right in the sense that the broader project is effectively creating a surveillance network where users of each platform would be de-anonymized on sign-up and their usage tied to a real-world ID. However, it’s largely a project of governments that are pushing for this. Some Big Tech players are actually against it.
Ocasio-Cortez called out Discord specifically, which delayed age verification plans after user backlash over privacy and security concerns, and over its partnership with third-party verification platform Persona.
“[Discord] tried to roll out this idea of a data verification or an age verification technique, but they did it in this way that was also very emblematic of what we’re against here today,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “What’s more shocking is that Discord made the decision to move forward with this after they had been hacked, and at least 70,000 users had their data stolen.”
Discord acknowledged last year that a number of government ID images were exposed in a hack affecting a third-party customer service provider it has since dropped.
The package includes age verification requirements for app store downloads, purchases, and access to adult content online. The KIDS Act also restricts platform design features that “result in compulsive usage” and requires AI chatbot makers to tell minors they’re talking to a machine, not a person.
The App Store Accountability Act adds age gating at the app store level, aiming to stop minors from downloading age-restricted content before they ever reach a platform. Sammy’s Law would require large social media companies to let parents manage their child’s account and interactions through a third-party tool.
Age verification at the app store level has become a proxy war between competing tech interests. Meta supports it because it shifts the compliance burden away from their platforms. Apple and Google are lobbying against it. The same fight has played out in Utah and Louisiana.
The child safety framing is the excuse here. These bills create a substantial data collection infrastructure in the name of protecting minors. Age verification at scale means platforms, app stores, or third-party services collecting identity documents from millions of users, storing them, and eventually losing them to breaches.
Discord’s experience is the predictable outcome of building these systems. The question of who holds that data, under what legal protections, and what happens when it leaks is less prominent in the debate than the bill sponsors would prefer. Vague mandates to prevent design features that cause “compulsive usage” and regulators’ broad authority to define what counts.
Infinite scroll. Notification badges. Recommendation algorithms. All of these could fit the definition, applied selectively or expansively depending on who’s doing the applying.
If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.
The post House Committee Passes Child “Safety” Bills That Pushes National Age Verification Surveillance appeared first on Reclaim The Net.
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