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.

After years of stalled attempts to regulate what platforms can do with children's data, the US House passed a package of children's online safety bills on Monday by 267 votes to 117.

The Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, introduced in March, would force platforms to add parental controls by default, ban the use of minors' personal data for targeted advertising, require pornography sites to verify users' ages, and establish rules governing AI chatbots and online games.

What did the House actually agree to?

The House version is deliberately narrower than what the Senate previously approved. KOSA, the Senate's earlier bill, included a "duty of care" clause: a legal obligation for platforms to actively prevent harm to young users. House lawmakers stripped it out.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) was direct about it. "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.

For trade groups like NetChoice, neither bill is much to celebrate. Director of government affairs Zach Lilly wrote on X that the bills "degrade privacy and security" and "materially diminish the First Amendment protections that young people and adults have a full right to as Americans."

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

Possibly, and the concern has little to do with children.

Digital rights groups argue that any age-check system will, in practice, demand proof of identity from everyone. Joe Mullin, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, described the package in a blog post last week as "a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards" adding: "Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms."

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 breaches at identity-verification companies have shown those promises are not always kept. Our 10 July story on countries racing to enforce social-media age limits found that proving how old anyone actually is remains the unsolved problem underpinning every one of these laws.

Tech and free-speech lawyer Preston Byrne was blunt, writing on X: "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 and screen-time limits that parents can enable today. Check the settings of any app your child uses regularly and review what personal data it holds. If a platform asks for a date of birth, treat it as real data worth protecting, because it is.