A bill introduced by Representative Josh Gottheimer in the House on April 13 would require Apple, Google, and every other operating system vendor to verify the age of anyone setting up a new device in the United States.
The legislation, H.R. 8250, travels under the friendlier name of the Parents Decide Act, and it is among the most aggressive surveillance mandates ever proposed for American consumer technology.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
The press releases describing it lead with children. The text describes something much larger. To confirm a child is under 18, the system has to identify everyone else, too, and the bill builds the infrastructure to do exactly that.
This is child safety as a delivery mechanism for mass identification. The pattern is familiar by now. A genuine harm gets named, a sympathetic victim gets centered, and the solution proposed reshapes the digital lives of three hundred million people who were not the problem.
The Parents Decide Act follows that template with unusual precision. It takes the real suffering of real children and uses it to justify building a national identity layer underneath every device sold in the country, administered by two private companies, with the details to be filled in later.
The mandate sits in Section 2(a)(1), which obligates providers to “Require any user of the operating system to provide the date of birth of the user” both to set up an account and to use the device at all. Adults included.
There is no carve-out for grown users, no opt-out for people who simply want to turn on a phone without handing a date of birth to Apple or Google first.
The age check is the entry fee for owning a computer. What happens to that data afterward gets handed off to the Federal Trade Commission to sort out later. A federal bill that mandates identification as a condition of using a general-purpose computing device represents something the United States has not previously had, which is a national ID requirement for turning on a device.
Hellbound and Down 