US House passes kids' online safety bill, but critics say the cure may be worse than the disease

Key points

• The House passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act on Monday by a 267-117 vote, a bipartisan margin.
• The bill would require age verification on pornography sites, restrict data use for targeted advertising aimed at minors, and set new rules for AI chatbots and online games.
• The House removed the "duty of care" clause that was in the Senate's Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), angering some senators who say the House version is weaker.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that age-gating systems could force all users, not just children, to hand over government ID or biometric data to browse normally.
• The bill still faces a difficult path in the Senate, where key members have publicly criticised the House package.

The US House of Representatives passed a package of children's online safety bills on Monday, clearing a significant legislative hurdle after years of stalled attempts to regulate what technology platforms can do with children's data and attention.

The legislation, formally called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, or KIDS Act, was introduced in March. It passed 267 votes to 117. Broadly, it would force online platforms to add parental controls and safety features by default, ban the use of children's personal information, meaning names, locations, and browsing habits, for targeted advertising, require pornography websites to verify users' ages, and create rules around how AI chatbots and online games interact with minors.

What did the House actually agree to?

The House version is deliberately narrower than the Senate's earlier bill. The Senate had previously passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which included a "duty of care" clause, a legal requirement for platforms to actively work to prevent harm to young users. House lawmakers stripped that out.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) said the move gutted the legislation. "The bottom line is that this package has gutted many of the key provisions in the Senate bill necessary to protect kids and their families," she wrote in a statement last week.

Should ordinary users be worried about the age-verification rules?

Possibly, yes, and the concern is not about children at all.

Digital rights groups argue that any system requiring age checks will, in practice, demand proof of identity from everyone. Joe Mullin, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit that defends civil liberties online, described the package as "a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards." His concern: faced with legal complexity, many platforms will default to demanding ID from all users across their entire sites, not just on age-restricted sections.

Age verification typically works one of two ways: uploading a government-issued document, or submitting to biometric age estimation, where software analyses a photo of your face to guess your age. Both methods create records. Even where third-party vendors promise to delete that data, recent data breaches at identity-verification companies have shown those promises are not always kept.

The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, where the gap over the duty-of-care clause remains unresolved. Tech and free-speech lawyer Preston Byrne, writing on X and reported by NBC News Tech, was blunt: "I'm not sure any of this gets worked out in conference between the two chambers."

What should people with children do right now?

Don't wait for a law. Most major platforms already offer parental controls, screen-time limits, and restricted content settings that parents can turn on today. Check the settings menu of any app your child uses regularly, and review what personal information it has collected. If a platform asks for a date of birth, treat that as real data worth protecting, because it is.