KIDS Act's Age-Verification Trap Ensnares All Users, Not Just Minors

Buried in the KIDS Act is a liability standard that makes it safer for platforms to age-check every single user rather than risk a lawsuit.

Congress is set to vote within a week on this sprawling package: KOSA, the SAFE BOTS Act, the SCREEN Act, and a pile of reporting requirements. Supporters say it protects minors. Reading the actual text tells a different story - one where the privacy and free expression of every internet user take the hit.

The 'Should Have Known' Trap

KOSA's disclaimer says it doesn't require age verification. Then the same section imposes duties whenever a platform "knows or should have known" a user is under 13 (child) or between 13 and 16 (teen). That's a negligence standard. A court decides later whether you should have guessed a user's age. No platform will gamble on getting that right without evidence.

So companies will collect proof. Driver's licenses. Passports. Facial age-estimation systems that scan your face. These systems already misestimate children's ages - the very population the bill claims to protect. They fail more often for people of color, people with disabilities, and trans and nonbinary users. The disclaimer doesn't erase that legal risk. Smaller services and startups can't afford the litigation. They'll default to the most restrictive age checks for everyone.

Lawful Speech Caught in the Net

The new KOSA drops the old "duty of care" language. In its place: a requirement for platforms to maintain policies addressing specific categories of content. Some are clearly illegal - true threats, sexual exploitation. Others cover lawful speech: discussions about "sale or use" of narcotics, tobacco, cannabis, gambling, alcohol. Financial fraud.

Remember how real conversations work. A 15-year-old asking about a parent's gambling addiction. Teens discussing recovery from substance abuse. Harm-reduction communities. All lawful. All now subject to platform moderation policies crafted to avoid legal blowback. Platforms will scrub that speech or lock it behind age-gated walls. We've seen this before: when legal risk rises, speech gets removed.

Encrypted Messaging Under the Gun

KOSA includes language saying it shouldn't override strong encryption. That carve-out is incomplete. It doesn't apply to the separate requirement that platforms "address" a list of harms to minors. How exactly does a platform address harms inside encrypted messages it can't read? The bill never answers. The result: pressure to weaken encryption or limit features like disappearing messages.

Disappearing messages are a privacy feature, not a loophole. They let online conversations resemble real-world ones - ephemeral by default. The KIDS Act treats them as a design risk. And again, all these provisions depend on knowing who's a minor. The endpoint is a less private internet, for everyone.

If this package passes, expect every major platform to start asking for your driver's license - not to protect kids, but to shield themselves from the courts.

Source: The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online
Domain: eff.org