TL;DR
A month ago the EU narrowly kept alive a rule letting platforms voluntarily scan private messages, no warrant, no suspicion. Last week the US Senate advanced four bills (KOSA and others) built on the same logic: to protect kids, platforms must verify everyone’s age. Britain has already gone furthest, legally naming eleven platforms that must verify users. The ID-verification infrastructure behind all this already failed once, a vendor breach exposed 70,000 government ID photos last October. Same justification, three different jurisdictions, all moving the same direction.
A month ago the European Parliament voted on whether to block a rule letting platforms scan private messages, emails, and photos, no warrant, no suspicion required.
The vote to kill it actually won more votes than the vote to keep it, 314 to 276, but fell short of the absolute majority needed to block it under the procedure used.
So it survived on a technicality, not a mandate. That rule, Chat Control 1.0, is now extended until 2028. It stays voluntary and does not touch fully encrypted apps. The bigger, mandatory version, sometimes called Chat Control 2.0, has not passed. It collapsed in negotiations in June and comes back for another attempt in September.
Last week the US Senate Commerce Committee advanced four bills addressing the same territory: the Kids Online Safety Act, the Youth AI Privacy Act, the CHATBOT Act, and a bill on AI-enabled toys. Advanced, not passed, they still need a full Senate vote and the House. But the mechanism inside KOSA is worth understanding: platforms face liability the moment a minor is harmed, and the only way to avoid that liability is to verify the exact age of every single user. Not most. Every one.
That infrastructure has already failed once. In October last year, a vendor called 5CA, handling age verification appeals for Discord, was breached. Roughly seventy thousand government ID photos were exposed. A class action lawsuit followed within days and remains open.
Britain has gone furthest of the three. Ofcom’s official register, published in July, legally names eleven platforms, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and more, requiring them to verify who is and is not an adult. Wikipedia narrowly avoided the same designation after a formal legal challenge, and the Foundation has said the threat has only paused, not disappeared.
Full sourced breakdown, every claim linked to the original filing, court docket, or regulator statement, is on the blog: raw.natschooler.com
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All sources can be found here: https://www.natschooler.com/they-want-your-id-how-the-eu-the-us-and-the-uk-are-quietly-building-the-same-system/
