•      "This is child safety as a delivery mechanism for mass identification. The pattern is familiar by now. A genuine harm gets named, a sympathetic victim gets centered, and the solution proposed reshapes the digital lives of three hundred million people who were not the problem. The Parents Decide Act follows that template with unusual precision. It takes the real suffering of real children and uses it to justify building a national identity layer underneath every device sold in the country, administered by two private companies, with the details to be filled in later. The mandate sits in Section 2(a)(1), which obligates providers to “Require any user of the operating system to provide the date of birth of the user” both to set up an account and to use the device at all. Adults included. There is no carve-out for grown users, no opt-out for people who simply want to turn on a phone without handing a date of birth to Apple or Google first. The age check is the entry fee for owning a computer. What happens to that data afterward gets handed off to the Federal Trade Commission to sort out later." Source: Rick Findlay, Contributor of Reclaim The Net

•      "I am contacting you today urging you to oppose H.R. 8250, the Parents Decide Act. While I support the goal of keeping children safe online, this legislation takes the dangerous and wrong approach by introducing severe privacy and regulatory risks. By requiring operating system providers to collect and verify the dates of birth for all users to create accounts or use devices, this bill mandates the mass collection of sensitive personal data. This creates an unprecedented "honeypot" of personal information, increasing the risk of catastrophic data breaches and identity theft. Furthermore, forcing operating systems to build pipelines that share this verification data with third-party app developers is a massive regulatory overreach that creates complex security vulnerabilities. Finally, the wording is so broad that it would apply to every computer system, which is impossible from an engineering perspective. We cannot put verification systems on lightweight or air-gapped systems. We should not have to sacrifice the fundamental data privacy of every American - including children - to address online safety. And we should not be burdening device manufacturers with implementing this ill-thought-out bill. I respectfully ask that you reject H.R. 8250 and instead focus on solutions that empower parents without mandating invasive data collection. I look forward to your response on this critical issue." Source: A verified voter in Hiawatha, IA