Dear Representative,
Thank you for what you do for our country. I wanted to write to you to encourage you to oppose the Parents Decide Act. This act is going to do a lot more harm to our country than good.
Parents Decide claims to help parents decide how to protect their children. However, this is name that implies that parents can’t already decide how to protect their children based on their age. This is a faulty assumption. Parents are already aware of their children’s age. They can already decide whether their children have access to computers, and they have access to parental controls that allow them to monitor their children’s use of technology. They don’t need the operating system to know the age of their child too.
I am concerned about the breach of privacy that the Act proposes. It requires that a sensitive piece of information, a person’s age, be available for any app that would like to use it. For companies, this will enable techniques such as targeted advertising that will be harmful to the user. For example, social media has been known in the past to present beauty ads to teenage girls, which has damaged their mental health by reinforcing the message that “I’m not good enough”. This would be made much easier if apps have direct access to the person’s age.
In addition, once age is required to be stored in the operating system, that opens the door for other sensitive identifying information to be stored in the operating system. For example, maybe they want to verify the age is actually correct, so they require a state or national ID to be stored as well. This would be even more problematic in terms of privacy.
One reason that this breach of privacy would be harmful is that it gives large companies, such as Google and Meta, a way to track their users. These companies are already working hard to get as much data from their users as possible, and this would just give them more. These companies sell the data that they collect from their users. This practice is absolutely not in the best interests of their users, and we should not be supporting them in it.
Another reason that this act will hurt people is that it gives the US (and other countries) another way to track their citizens. Freedom of speech plays a big role in keeping the government in check. However, as we’ve seen recently, the government can retaliate against those with whom it disagrees. One of the greatest protections that people have against this is privacy. When people are able to act while retaining privacy, they can help to call out the government when it does something wrong without fear of retaliation. Requiring every device to store identifying information breaks down privacy, making it harder for us to keep the government in check.
One final reason that the act is harmful is that it exposes sensitive data to hackers that may not otherwise be available. If an operating system is required to hold information about a user’s identity, this gives hackers another surface of attack. They are guaranteed to find ways around any protections that are put in place, and they could use that information to compromise and blackmail the user. For example, if the user is a child or adolescent, they are more likely to fall prey to phishing schemes or predatory requests. Knowing this, a hacker can craft their messages to hit the target audience. Then, they may be able to use any information that they get from the child as blackmail for the child or for those around them, putting them in danger. We should not be giving hackers access to more sensitive data than they already have.
Again, I would ask you to please oppose the Parents Decide Act. Supporting the Act will hurt the citizens of the United States more than it will help. If the Act passes, it will open the door for requiring more identifying information. The act will give large companies a new way to harvest data from their users, it will give governments another tool to oppress their citizens and retaliate against them, and it will give malicious hackers another way to compromise and blackmail people.
Please, take a stand for privacy. Take a stand for the people.
Sincerely, Brendon Bown