We’ve all done it. Mindlessly typed in your birthday on a website asking you to verify your age. Maybe you felt a little weird about the website collecting your data, so instead of your real birthday, you typed in a different date, thinking, Why do they need to know that?
This is age verification, and we all know that it is easily bypassed. A child can check “Yes, I am over 18” and enter a website. So when laws like H.R.8250, titled the Parents Decide Act, are proposed to strengthen age verification measures to “keep kids safe,” it’s easy to agree. If you support age verification online, you support keeping kids safe. If you oppose it, you don’t. Simple. And not actually true.
The Parents Decide Act, introduced to Congress on April 13, 2026, asks you to confirm your birthday once when you set up your phone. It builds a system where your exact date of birth is stored by your operating system, linked to your device account, and made available to every app you download. That data, including kids’ data, can be breached, subpoenaed, or used in ways the law fails to protect us from.
This law creates a target for hackers. In October 2025, Discord disclosed that hackers had breached a third-party vendor the company used to process age verification. At least 70,000 government ID images, like passports and driver’s licenses, were stolen. Age verification requirements pressure platforms to outsource identity checks to external providers, which attackers increasingly target precisely because the data is so valuable and so hard to replace. The Parents Decide Act doesn’t collect IDs, however it does build the same kind of centralized verification infrastructure that made Discord a target. Birthdays are still a key piece of information for identity theft. You can change a password, but you can’t change your birthday.
And for what? Kids don’t suddenly stop finding things online because the system gets stricter. They adapt. Australia’s under-16 social media ban took effect in December 2025, and teenagers were bypassing it the very same day with VPNs and using their parents’ faces to fool age detection software. Many moved from mainstream platforms to less regulated ones with fewer safety features. And when children get harassed, groomed, or exploited while they are evading these bans, they’re less likely to ask for help because they know they are breaking the rules.
There are better tools. The UK’s Age-Appropriate Design Code, for example, requires platforms to default to the highest privacy settings for children, restrict who can contact them, and turn off the features designed to increase engagement with the platform. Instagram made all under-18 accounts private by default and blocked adults from messaging minors they didn’t follow. Tiktok stopped sending push notifications to kids at night. These design changes improved child safety without ever collecting a single government ID.
Supporting age verification isn’t the same as protecting children. Opposing it isn’t abandoning them. These laws don’t make kids safer. They make everyone, children included, less private and more vulnerable.
Ask your representatives to vote no on the Parents Decide Act. Fill out the form below.
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