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🇺🇸 Congress just passed a bill that could force you to upload your ID or scan your face to use the internet.
It is called the KIDS Act, and almost nobody wants to vote against protecting children online.
That is exactly the problem.
Last week the House passed it 267 to 117. It bundles 14 digital safety bills together, anchored by a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act.
The bill says it does not require age verification. It even includes a disclaimer saying so.
The catch is one clause away. Platforms get held liable if they "knew or should have known" a user was a minor.
That is a low bar. It means a regulator decides after the fact whether a company should have figured out someone was 15. No platform wants to gamble on that, so the safe move is to just verify everyone.
Here is where "protect the kids" quietly flips. To prove you are not a minor, you have to prove you are an adult. Driver's licenses, passports, or a facial scan to log on.
The net does not catch children. It catches all of us.
Then there is the security problem. Force millions of people to upload IDs everywhere, and somebody ends up sitting on a giant pile of passport scans and face data.
The Tea app showed how it goes. It required a selfie and a government ID, promised to delete them right after, and did not. In July 2025, about 13,000 of those IDs and selfies leaked onto 4chan, some still carrying GPS data that let someone map where users lived.
The KIDS Act would mandate that exact collection across the whole internet.
Kids do run into real harm online, and wanting to fix that is fair. But this fix builds a surveillance system that touches every adult. Rep. Thomas Massie called it a Trojan horse bill.
It now heads to the Senate. The real question is simple. Is protecting kids online worth building an internet where everyone has to prove who they are just to log on?
Source: EFF, ACLU, R Street Institute, NBC News, The Hill / Writer: Julie
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