Sponsor
Mariannette Miller-Meeks
Representative · R-IA
Representative · R-IA
The bill strengthens children's privacy and gives federal and state enforcers clearer tools — increasing protections for kids and parental control — but does so at the cost of higher compliance and litigation risks, potential changes to teen user experience, and reduced state/local flexibility.
Children under 13 (and their parents) get clearer, stronger legal protections because the bill aligns definitions and scope with COPPA and explicitly preserves COPPA safeguards.
Federal (FTC) and state enforcement is strengthened and clarified — the FTC gets explicit authority and state attorneys general can sue and recover damages, with notice/intervention rules to improve coordination.
Teens and their parents gain additional parental oversight for market- or product-focused research: platforms must obtain verifiable parental consent before researching teens, giving parents more control over teens' commercial data use.
Platforms will face meaningful compliance costs to identify minors, implement parental-consent systems, and change features; many of those costs may be passed to users, advertisers, or reduce services — hitting smaller platforms and businesses hardest.
To avoid liability, platforms may restrict features, impose stricter age verification, or exclude ambiguous users — altering or shrinking service access and online experiences for teens and some youth.
Federal preemption of state and local laws could remove or prevent stronger local protections and reduce governments' flexibility to address community-specific risks, potentially leaving residents with weaker rules than before.
Based on analysis of 7 sections of legislative text.
Bans market- or product-focused research on known children and requires verifiable parental consent before similar research on known teens (13–16) on covered platforms.
Official title: To prohibit market or product-focused research on children and minors, and for other purposes.
Introduced November 21, 2025 by Mariannette Miller-Meeks · Last progress November 21, 2025
Prohibits covered social platforms from doing market- or product-focused research on users the platform knows are children (under 13) and generally forbids similar research on known teens (ages 13–16) unless the company gets verifiable parental consent. It defines which services count as covered platforms (publicly available, user-generated content, searchable/followable usernames, design features that promote minor engagement, and use of personal data for ads/recommendations), preserves existing COPPA protections, assigns enforcement to the FTC, allows state attorneys general to sue under parens patriae (with notice to the FTC), preempts state and local laws on the same topics, and takes effect 90 days after enactment.