What is Kids Online Safety Act?

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is driven by legitimate concern for children's wellbeing online — but its implementation could create surveillance infrastructure that affects everyone's privacy.

What It Proposes

• Duty of care: Platforms must prevent and mitigate harms to minors
• Age verification: Platforms must verify user ages (requiring ID or biometric checks)
• Default privacy for minors: Strongest privacy settings by default for users under 17
• Parental tools: Parents can supervise children's online activity
• FTC enforcement: Government agency determines what content is "harmful"

The Privacy Dilemma

Age Verification Requires Identity Verification

To treat minors differently, platforms must know who is a minor. This requires:

• Government ID upload — Giving your ID to every social media platform
• Biometric age estimation — Facial scanning to guess your age
• Third-party verification — New companies that become central repositories of identity data
• Credit card verification — Only adults have credit cards (imperfect, discriminatory)

Every method creates privacy risks for both children AND adults. You can't verify a child's age without also verifying adults' identities.

Content Filtering Requires Content Surveillance

To prevent minors from seeing "harmful" content, platforms must:

• Scan and classify all content
• Monitor what each user views
• Make algorithmic decisions about what's "harmful"
• Build infrastructure that can filter content based on government-defined criteria

Who Defines "Harmful"?

• The bill allows the FTC (or state attorneys general) to define "harmful to minors"
• Different administrations could define "harmful" very differently
• LGBTQ+ content, reproductive health information, political speech — all potentially classified as "harmful" depending on who's in power
• Once the censorship infrastructure exists, expanding its scope is easy

Bipartisan Support, Bipartisan Concerns

• Supporters: Parents' groups, child safety advocates, many senators (bipartisan)
• Opponents: EFF, ACLU, Fight for the Future, LGBTQ+ organizations, free speech advocates
• Both sides care about children — the disagreement is about whether the proposed mechanisms work and what collateral damage they cause

Alternative Approaches

• Stronger COPPA enforcement — Existing children's privacy law is poorly enforced
• Platform design requirements — Ban addictive design patterns (infinite scroll, autoplay) for all users
• Data minimization mandates — Platforms can't exploit children's data if they can't collect it
• Privacy education — Teach children and parents about privacy (see: Privacy for Families)
• Age-appropriate design codes — UK's Children's Code approach, focusing on design rather than age gates

What You Can Do

1. Understand the tradeoffs — Child safety is important, but so is privacy for everyone
2. Contact representatives with specific concerns about age verification and content filtering
3. Support privacy-first child safety approaches (design codes, COPPA enforcement)
4. Don't give children unsupervised access to platforms designed for adults
5. Use family privacy tools rather than relying on government mandates