Senate Panel Advances Kids Online Safety Package Despite Civil Liberties Concerns

The US Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday advanced a package of bills intended to protect children online, despite free speech and privacy concerns long raised by civil liberties groups about such proposals, particularly those that require or urge websites to implement age verification systems.

The panel moved forward the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)—versions of which have been considered in Congress for years—as well as the Children's Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act; the Children's Health, Advancement, Trust, Boundaries, and Oversight in Technology (CHATBOT) Act; and the Youth AI Privacy Act

Some advocacy groups welcomed the development, with Fairplay executive director Josh Golin saying that "the Senate version of KOSA is the most protective, popular, and bipartisan of all children's online safety legislation under consideration. It would be the most important new law to protect kids online in nearly 30 years."

"We are also pleased to see the committee advance both the Youth AI Privacy Act and the CHATBOT Act," Golin continued. "The danger AI chatbots pose to children and teens is a growing crisis. These bills would add deeply needed protections to help mitigate chatbot harms, including strong default settings for long-term memory use, a ban on advertising to minors through a chatbot, a ban on using the data of minors to train AI models, and prohibitions on features that cause compulsive use."

The committee did not advance the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act, which would require pornography websites to verify users' ages so they can block minors, because low attendance led to a failure to meet quorum.

Ahead of the bill markup, the Center for Democracy & Technology wrote to committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to raise alarm about KOSA, the CHATBOT Act, and the SCREEN Act, while acknowledging that the Youth AI Privacy Act "would create important safeguards for the use of minors' data by generative AI services."

The group also stressed that "enacting comprehensive consumer privacy legislation that meaningfully realigns consumer expectations and incentives for online business models is the best path forward to protecting children and everyone online and to addressing root causes of harms related to minors’ activities on social media, generative AI models, and other internet-enabled services."

The Senate action came after a bipartisan vote by the House of Representatives in June to pass the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, which "took portions from 14 digital safety bills—including the SCREEN Act," as The Hill reported Wednesday. "The House's version of KOSA eliminated a 'duty of care' provision that is a redline for the Senate's co-authors, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who called the package 'dead on arrival' in the Senate last month."

"The provision would have legally required platforms to 'exercise reasonable care' to prevent harms to minors. Harms include eating disorders, suicide, substance use disorders, and sexual exploitation," the outlet detailed. "The KIDS Act faces long odds in the Senate as a result, making Cruz's decision to take up some of the bills individually instead not surprising."

Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that "the Senate should reject KOSA's privacy risks," emphasizing that the duty of care obligations included in the upper chamber's version "only work if online services know which users are minors. That means more platforms will be pressured to implement age verification or age estimation systems."

Ahead of the House vote earlier this year, the ACLU's Jenna Leventoff and Christopher Anders similarly noted that "KOSA, although purporting not to require age verification, would nevertheless strongly incentivize it."

The ACLU experts warned that age verification will "severely jeopardize user privacy by turning droves of information over to platforms" and "threatens the First Amendment rights of adults," who may not be able "to verify their ages (because they lack valid identification, face technological difficulties, or lack digital skills), or can but "might still be reluctant to access information online over a fear that a data breach could lead to the disclosure of sensitive information contained within their browsing history."

After the Senate votes on Wednesday, Leventoff reiterated: "Bills that incentivize or require age verification promise safety, but all they deliver is a future where everyone has to undergo invasive identity verification measures that will almost certainly put their sensitive data at risk. We shouldn't need to fork over our IDs, biometrics, or personal information to access the internet, but that's exactly what will happen if these bills become law."

"When the data used to verify a users' age is combined with other commercially available data," she warned, "it can enable adversarial nations to track and attack troops, allow stalkers to locate their victims, and allow scammers to target those who will be most susceptible to their schemes."

Fight for the Future also called out the Senate panel on Wednesday, with campaign director Sarah Philips saying that "Congress is once again doing political theater instead of actually meaningfully regulating the business model of Big Tech companies."

"The Senate Commerce Committee is rushing out bad internet bills so they can go out and campaign on them even knowing they are doomed to failure, either because they will be rejected by the House or overturned by the courts for being unconstitutional," Philips said. "Young people have been calling and emailing Congress on this issue for years, and have been rallying around the world against proposals to fence them off from the internet for a reason. They can see through these efforts. They know more censorship and surveillance, more data collection for companies, and all of us having to turn over ID in order to interact online is not safety."

"We've had hearing after hearing on this issue for the last few years instead of actually moving against the tide of tech corporate power that is making our future unlivable and exploiting our data for profit," Philips added. "We want to protect kids, but we want those proposals to actually do the work, instead of just making an easy headline for congressional leadership. Anyone in Congress still pushing censorship and surveillance bills under the facade of kids safety has failed us, especially members that claim to support trans kids and every community currently being attacked by the Trump administration."