In committee
KIDS Act
Online platforms, social media services, and multiplayer video games must apply their strongest privacy, messaging, and safety controls by default for anyone under 17, while completely banning targeted advertising to minors. Parents will receive tools to track and limit screen time, block purchases, and manage who can message their children. Adult websites will be required to verify visitors' ages before showing sexual material, and AI chatbots must remind young users to take breaks and immediately provide crisis helpline info if suicide is mentioned.
People affected—not determinable from the text provided; the bill broadly covers U.S. minors under 17 or 18, their parents, and internet users generally, but names no specific population figure.
Fiscal magnitude—Section 612(c) authorizes the FTC to collect an annual registration fee of at least $22,500 from covered data brokers, but the text does not contain a specific overall appropriation or aggregate fiscal estimate.
Reach85provisional · pending reviewrigor: heuristic llm
What this bill touches.
Market protections+60Big-tech & platforms+70Substance use & mental health+15Personal data & privacy+68Federal vs. state/local+30Speech & expression+40AI & emerging tech+48
Who it helps · who it burdens.
Who it helps
- Minors (children and teens under age 18)Minors receive default safety and privacy settings on social media and video game platforms, protection against individual-specific targeted advertising, controls over direct messaging, and the right to delete personal data collected about them.
- Parents and legal guardiansParents gain new tools to monitor and control their children's account privacy settings, limit screen time, restrict purchases, manage messaging features, and request review or deletion of personal data collected from their children.
- Online educational service providersPermitted to collect and process personal data of children and teens without direct parental consent when operating under a written agreement with a school solely for educational purposes.
Who it burdens
- Covered social media platformsMust implement default protective safety and privacy settings for minors, provide parental and teen messaging controls, establish reporting mechanisms for harms with a 10-day response window, undergo annual third-party audits, and cease market research and individualized targeted advertising on minors.
- Commercial adult content websitesWebsites where more than one-third of content is sexual material harmful to minors must implement age verification technologies to block minors without retaining verification data or demanding government-issued IDs.
- Online video game providersMust configure minor accounts to the most restrictive communication settings by default, provide parental controls over in-game communications, playtime, and purchases, and provide clear notices to users.
- Consumer artificial intelligence chatbot providersMust clearly disclose that chatbots are AI, provide suicide crisis helpline information upon suicide-related prompts, advise minors to take breaks after 3 hours of continuous use, and refrain from falsely claiming to be licensed professionals.
- Online operators and mobile app developersMust obtain verifiable consent before collecting personal data from children under 14 and teens ages 14 through 17, cannot serve individualized targeted ads to minors, must honor data deletion requests without denying service, and must limit data retention and foreign transfers.
- Commercial data brokersEntities that sell personal data of minors must register annually with the FTC, disclose categories of data sold and security breach histories, and submit to inclusion on a public searchable registry.
- Federal Trade CommissionTasked with enforcing the Act, establishing age-determination guidelines, setting up a national public awareness campaign, conducting multiple studies on algorithms and safety tools, and maintaining a data broker registry.
Who backs it
- Commercial data brokersMust pay an annual registration fee of at least $22,500 (adjusted for inflation) to register with the Federal Trade Commission.