The bills arrive dressed as child protection but leave behind a mandate to build the largest ID grab in American consumer history.

A House committee voted Thursday to advance three child safety bills, bundling them toward the floor in a package that passed.

The votes were close: 28-24 for the KIDS Act, 26-23 for the App Store Accountability Act.Sammy’s Lawalso cleared the committee. The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) never got a House vote, but the Senate Commerce Committee passed its version unanimously.

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Several Democrats voted the package, though largely for the wrong reasons. Their concern was that the bills would block states from passingstrongeronline protections for young users. KOSA has been introduced in various forms for years without ever passing.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) argued the KIDS Act uses child safety as cover for something else entirely. “What Big Tech lobbyists want is a national surveillance program where they can harvest the private and personal data of every American with zero actual protections for people,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez is right in the sense that the broader project is effectively creating a surveillance network where users of each platform would be de-anonymized on sign-up and their usage tied to a real-world ID. However, it’s largely a project of governments that are pushing for this. Some Big Tech players are actually against it.

Ocasio-Cortez called out Discord specifically, whichdelayed age verification plansafter user backlash over privacy and security concerns, and over its partnership with third-party verification platformPersona.

“[Discord] tried to roll out this idea of a data verification or an age verification technique, but they did it in this way that was also very emblematic of what we’re against here today,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “What’s more shocking is that Discord made the decision to move forward with this after they had been hacked, and at least 70,000 users had their data stolen.”

Discord acknowledged last year that anumber of government ID imageswere exposed in a hack affecting a third-party customer service provider it has since dropped.

Source: SGT Report