A bill moving through the U.S. Senate, the GUARD Act (S. 3062), would require AI services to verify the age of every user before letting them in. Not a checkbox. Real identity proof: a government ID, a credit record, or a biometric face scan.

We all want our children safe online. But a mandate that turns the open internet into a “papers, please” checkpoint isn’t safety. It’s surveillance. And the families it claims to protect are the ones who’d hand over the most.

At Patriot Voices, we believe parents, not federal bureaucrats, should decide what’s right for their children. Parents matter. This bill forgets that.

Age Verification Creates New Privacy Risks for Families

That’s a problem for everyone, but especially for families:

• More of your personal data, online, in more places. Parents and kids alike would be required to surrender sensitive identification to use everyday tools they currently access freely.

• New databases, new breaches. Every company forced to collect IDs and face scans becomes a fresh target. Identity-verification vendors have already been hacked, exposing millions of people’s most sensitive information. This bill multiplies those targets.

• Your identity, linked to what you do. To verify your age, a system has to record who you are. That can tie a real name to private activity that used to be anonymous.

Protecting children should never require building a massive database of American families’ identification. There is no such thing as a “safe” way to collect everyone’s IDs.

Families Could Lose Access to the Tools They Count On

The GUARD Act puts that access at risk in two ways:

• It locks young people out, with no room for parents. If a service decides a user is under 18, that user is simply blocked. There’s no parental-consent option, no appeal if the age check gets it wrong. The decision is taken out of your hands.

• It’s so broadly written that ordinary tools get swept in. The bill’s definitions are vague enough to reach far beyond what most people picture. Faced with steep fines, companies will play it safe, restricting or shutting off access rather than risk getting it wrong.

When that happens, families don’t just lose the harmful stuff. They lose the helpful stuff right alongside it: the tutoring tool, the study helper, the resource a parent chose for their own child.

This Is a Decision for Parents, Not Washington

The federal government should not be the default “guardian” of your children’s digital lives. No agency knows your child the way you do. No bureaucrat can weigh what’s right for your family the way you can.

The right answer to online risk is empowering parents and protecting a free market of tools and choices, not a one-size-fits-all federal mandate that treats a seven-year-old and a seventeen-year-old exactly the same, and treats every parent as if they can’t be trusted to decide.

We can take children’s safety seriously and refuse to trade away our privacy and our parental rights to get it. Those aren’t in conflict. The GUARD Act just pretends they are.

Tell Congress: Trust Parents, Not a Federal Mandate

The GUARD Act has already cleared a key Senate committee and now awaits a vote by the full Senate. There’s still time to be heard, but not much. Add your name and tell your senators to oppose S. 3062.