Privacy, Child Safety, and Legislation

A conversation with Julie Barrett

This week I was honored to speak with Julie Barrett in a livestream in which we covered a range of topics all focused on data privacy & child safety in the larger context of legislative efforts throughout the United States. You can watch our conversation on YouTube at the link below:

I have been following Julie’s work for quite a while via X and featured her analysis of recent legislation in my review of the GUARD Act and of the trend spreading across America to legislate so-called “age-based restrictions” for accessing Internet-based services. I encourage you to also pay attention to her work. You can find her on X/Twitter at Julie Barrett . She has also recently formed an advocacy organization called Protecting Kids Online with the following mission: “Protecting Kids Online is a national coalition fighting to protect children's privacy from government Digital ID mandates and data farming legislation by putting parents at the center of every conversation.” https://www.protectingkids.online

Here’s an expansion of that mission and her work in her own words:

Protecting Kids Online@PKOproject

I’m a mom of four. A few years ago the system decided the government knew better than I did about my own child. That pushed me into reading the bills… then into testifying against them. These “child safety” laws don’t protect kids. They build surveillance infrastructure and

7:53 PM · Jul 27, 2026 · 6.7K Views

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4 Replies · 19 Reposts · 50 Likes

While our conversation spanned a range of topics, we only just stared to scratch the surface of some very deep issues and I look forward continuing to address them.

But Julie is doing incredibly important work that I think we take for granted and do not pay enough attention to. She’s keeping an eye on legislative efforts throughout our country that pertain to online safety, security, and privacy for our children. She’s diving into the details, spotting the issues with keen discernment, and not only bringing those points to our attention, but she also travels our country testifying before legislative bodies and speaking to parents. While we can and should criticize the health of our republic and its representative political parties, we also need to express that criticism via the means we are afforded. We need to be an informed citizenry and we need to be active participants in our government which does still frame and influence our culture and with that our everyday lives. I greatly appreciate Julie’s work in this regard and hope you will also find value in what she is doing, and can join in the work where you are able to.

We need people like Julie keeping an eye on legislative movements for us, but we also need to expand their work by taking a participatory role ourselves. I’m inspired by Julie to do more of this myself.

From our conversation there is much I want to follow-up with—one of those topics being the concept of digital ID vs. age-based verification. I will work on technical analysis of the difference soon. Legislators and lobbyists who are pushing for age-based verification as a gateway to access common online resources are making the claim that this is not digital ID. In my opinion, that’s like buying all the parts to assemble a car and telling a mechanic to assemble it half-way on your behalf and then claiming “we’re not building a car” by comparing it to a fully completed version of the same thing. The government may not be building digital ID yet, but it is calling on our technology sector to put in place the foundation and framework for the functional equivalent.

And therein lies another danger. Some of the legislation is actually granting tech companies the permission and legal mandate to define what the technical solution will be, and as Julie pointed out in our conversation, these tech companies are actually lobbying for this power in the name of protecting our children. Is it though? Have these providers demonstrated an interest in protecting children in the past? Whose interest is this actually serving? Would Meta intentionally give up a share of the market that their platform has been accused of explicitly targeted?

I am truly bewildered by this 180 degree shift in stance that Conservatives are taking relative to Big Tech. We just exited a period of deep corroboration between Big Tech and the US Government which resulted in deep cultural and political issues including the suppression of free speech, the elevation of politically favored personas and perspectives, political profiling and targeting of citizens, and valid accusations of election interference if not direct election tampering. Yet here we are gifting expanded power to Big Tech by way of legislation that mandates they build the foundation for controlling who can access what online. Is this really protecting children? If so, at what cost? Is this the only way? Where is this leading us? What are we losing in the process? These are the questions we need to consider as we step forward, and they are questions I will be working to explore for Practive Security, while also continuing to learn from what Julie shares.

Until then, here is a collection of articles already available on Substack that address some of these issues, with even more to come. I encourage you to also watch Julie’s work and find ways to express your concerns and feedback to our legislators. We have the opportunity to shape our culture and our society, and we should leverage that.