Open Letter Template: Standing Against Mandatory ID Verification Laws - For Real Privacy and Child Safety

Here is a letter template you can use to mail or email your local lawmakers. To make this an effective campaign, it's important to customize it with your own voice (this may be a good use of local model AI to assist). The key here is to point out the fallacy in the laws and help let them know that we are listening, we're angry, and we're not going to just sit there and take these new laws, which are designed for one purpose: 'control'.

For those in the US this site maybe of help to you: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

*Thank you JB for sending us that link at deviantairwaves.com. If we should include other links please reach out and we will get this updated.

Add this as your email subject line or letter header or email

Subject line:

Urgent: Reconsider [Specific Bill Name, e.g., HB 1181 or Your State/Province/Countries Age/ID Verification Mandate] . These Laws Fail to Protect Kids and Actually Put Them at Greater Risk

Include:

[Lawmaker’s Full Name]
[Their Title - e.g., State Senator / Representative]
[Their Office Address]
[City, State, ZIP Code]

Customize This Template below:

Dear [Lawmaker’s Title and Last Name, e.g., Senator Smith],

My name is [Your Full Name], and I’m writing to you as a concerned resident of [Your City or District], [Your State]. As someone who values straightforward insights into digital privacy and security, and who wants to take control of our tech lives, I’m deeply troubled by the direction these policies are heading.

That’s exactly why I’m reaching out today. The wave of ID verification and age-gating laws being passed right now is being sold as the way to “protect the children.” I completely understand the good intentions behind them. No parent wants kids exposed to harmful online content. But after examining how these policies actually play out in the real world of security and privacy, I have to be honest: these mandates don’t protect children; they further endanger them.

Here’s the clear, factual breakdown:

These laws require websites and apps to collect government-issued IDs, facial scans, or other biometric data from everyone before letting them through. Sounds simple, like showing ID at a store. In practice, it forces the creation of huge databases of our most sensitive personal information, often handled by third-party verification companies.

We’ve already seen exactly how dangerous that is. In 2025, a third-party service tied to Discord’s age verification process was breached, leaking government ID photos of tens of thousands of users. Before that, AU10TIX (the same company used by TikTok, Uber, X, and others) left admin credentials exposed for over a year, putting driver’s licenses, dates of birth, and more at risk. These aren’t “what if” scenarios; they’re documented warnings. When that data gets stolen, it doesn’t just disappear. Hackers and bad actors now have real names, addresses, and sometimes even links to what people were trying to view. For families with kids, the fallout can last a lifetime: identity theft, blackmail, doxxing, or worse.

And here’s the part that actually makes kids less safe:

1. It’s trivially easy to bypass. Tech-savvy teens (and let’s be real, they all are) simply grab a VPN, use a shared account, or hop over to unregulated overseas sites. We’ve seen spikes in downloads of privacy tools every time these laws roll out. The result? Kids still find the content, but now it’s on sketchier, completely unmonitored platforms where real predators operate with zero oversight.
2. It creates a dangerous false sense of security. Parents and lawmakers think “the internet is now safe,” so they relax about what actually works, like open conversations at home, device-level parental controls, and teaching digital literacy. Meanwhile, the real threats (grooming on social apps, peer-to-peer sharing) keep happening. Predators will go where the kids are, and they will pretend to be kids in order to participate in online games designed for kids or in places where we 'think' our kids are safe. These laws do nothing to stop that.
3. It normalizes handing over our identities. Once kids grow up in a world where every click requires ID, they become desensitized to sharing personal data. That makes them more vulnerable to scams, phishing, and long-term tracking, not less.

This isn’t protection. It’s an illusion that trades real privacy and security for a checkbox on a bill. The focus should be on empowering people with knowledge and better tools, not on forcing centralized surveillance, which we already know gets hacked.

Better solutions exist right now; solutions that don’t punish everyone or build new honeypots for hackers:

• Stronger parental empowerment tools and open-source controls that families actually control.
• Real investment in digital literacy and media education in schools.
• Tougher enforcement against actual child exploitation, without gutting anonymity for the rest of us.

As your constituent who cares deeply about both freedom and responsibility online, I’m asking you to stand up for practical policies that actually work. Please vote against any expansion of these ID verification mandates and support reviewing or rolling back the ones already passed. I’d be happy to share more resources or chat about this anytime.

Thank you for your service and for taking the time to consider the real long-term impact on families, kids, and innovators.

Sincerely,
[Your Full Name]
[Your Contact Info] *If you want to share

STOP

Quick Customization Notes

• Swap in your personal details and any specific bill name for maximum punch.
• Add a short personal line in the intro if you want (e.g., “As a parent of two teenagers…” or “Working in IT security myself…”).
• Feel free to tweak any sentence to sound more like your own words while keeping the core message.
• Print, email, or mail it, lawmakers pay attention when constituents speak up with clear, reasoned arguments.