Opinion: The SAFE Kids Act Trades Children's Privacy for a Headline

The House of Representatives on October 12 approved House Bill No. 11566, the proposed Safe and Friendly Environment for Kids in Digital Spaces (SAFE Kids) Act, on third and final reading. The vote was 287 in favor, three against, with no abstentions (BusinessWorld, Bombo Radyo).

This is not yet law. The Senate passed its own version, Senate Bill No. 2424, on October 8 (Digital Watch Observatory). The two versions take different approaches and must be reconciled in a bicameral conference committee, ratified by both chambers, and signed by the President before anything takes effect.

What the House version would do

• Bar children below 13 from creating or keeping accounts on social media and on online gaming services with social or interactive features (BusinessWorld, Bombo Radyo).
• Allow older minors access with safeguards, including restrictions on behavioral profiling (same sources). BusinessWorld reports that users aged 13 to 17 would need parental consent and face limits on targeted advertising, recommendation algorithms and endless scrolling.
• Create a new office under the DICT to oversee compliance with the law (same sources). BusinessWorld reports the office would also develop systems to verify users' ages.

The final age thresholds, platform duties and penalties will be settled in the bicameral committee, so the details above may still change.

My take: this bill should not become law

I build and secure networks for a living, and I oppose this bill. Not the goal of protecting children, but this way of pursuing it.

It means more data collection, not less. An under-13 ban only works if every platform can tell how old every user is. In practice, that means age verification: ID documents, face scans or other biometrics, collected from children and adults alike and stored with platforms and the third-party processors they hire. A law sold as protecting kids would build new databases full of their most sensitive personal data. That is an invasion of children's privacy, written into law.

It hands even more data to the companies that already failed. The platforms this bill targets are the same corporations that failed to keep children safe in the first place. The bill's answer is to entrust them, and their verification vendors, with even more information about our kids. Every new store of IDs and biometrics is a new breach waiting to happen, and once a child's biometric data leaks, it cannot be changed like a password.

It is blind activism, not policy. Banning accounts is a headline, not a security model. A ban that looks tough on paper is easy to get around in practice, while the data collection it requires lands on every law-abiding user. Creating a new office under the DICT to oversee compliance does not change that. It adds another government body to the chain of parties handling verification data.

It takes responsibility away from parents. Online safety is a two-edged sword. Parents have the say over how their children use the internet, and with that comes the duty to educate them. Platforms, in turn, owe parents real tools to set up, restrict and secure their children's accounts. This bill skips both sides of that bargain and replaces the parent with a government gatekeeper.

Access is not the problem. The feed is. What actually harms young users is the advertising practices, the design that encourages doom scrolling, and the content the feed decides to push at them. Platforms should be required to protect users from that kind of social conditioning, and that duty should cover all users, not just children, even though children are the most vulnerable among them. Keeping a 12-year-old off an app does nothing about the machinery that keeps a 14-year-old, or a 40-year-old, hooked.

Follow the logic and it does not stop at social media. If access to platforms has to be gated and verified, then by the same reasoning access to the internet itself would have to be protected next. As a German, I know where that road leads: it is STASI 2.0, a state that checks who you are before you are allowed to speak, read or connect. "Papers, please" comes to mind. We are seeing similar trends all over the world, and especially in Europe, where the EU's proposed Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, better known as "Chat Control", is still being pushed in Brussels. Its negotiators remain at odds over whether and how providers may scan people's private messages (netzpolitik.org). The Philippines does not need to copy that mistake.

If lawmakers want children safer online, they should put the burden on platform design and accountability, not on collecting more personal data from Filipino families. The bicameral committee still has the chance to stop this. It should.