Overview
- The Senate Commerce Committee is preparing to mark up a package of bills that includes the Kids Online Safety Act, which would change how platforms handle accounts and data for users under 17.
- The Senate version of KOSA sets a broad duty of care that would require platforms to mitigate many alleged harms to minors when designing features and services.
- Because platforms must know who is a minor to meet that duty, the bill creates pressure to adopt age-verification or age-estimation systems such as ID checks, facial analysis, or financial-data checks.
- Those age-verification methods require collecting and storing sensitive personal data, which would create new target-rich databases that can be breached, misused, or sought by governments.
- Advocacy groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation urge the committee to reject KOSA and instead pursue comprehensive privacy legislation because the bill’s liability and state enforcement tools could incentivize preemptive removals of lawful content and shift control over youths’ online access away from families.