Reclaim The Net Illinois is one Senate vote away from making every laptop in the state card you at setup.
By Ken Macon
Illinois moved one step closer last week to requiring every phone and computer sold in the state to know how old its user is. House Bill 5511 passed the Illinois House on an 82-27 vote and now heads to the Senate, where Governor JB Pritzker, a top backer of the measure, is expected to push for quick passage.
The bill, rebranded the Children’s Social Media Safety Act, forces operating system providers to prompt every account holder for a birth date, age, or both at account setup by January 2028. That age data then gets passed to apps as a signal. Miss the prompt, and the device stays locked. The only real escape is a paid family account where the primary holder has already been verified as an adult using, in the bill’s own language, “commercially available methods that are reasonably designed to ensure accuracy.”
What those methods actually are, the bill leaves to the market to figure out.
Government-issued ID checks. Face scans. Credit card matching. Third-party identity brokers. All of them have been pitched as “commercially available” age verification, and all of them require the OS vendor, or a contractor working for them, to collect identifying information about adults who just want to set up a laptop.
The law says operating systems should send “only the minimum amount of information necessary.” It says nothing similar about the companies standing up the verification pipeline behind it.
Rep. Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz, a Glenview Democrat and the chief sponsor, framed the bill as a privacy upgrade. “Rather than transmitting data about a child’s birthday directly to each app, House Bill 5511 gives parents the peace of mind that comes from knowing that their child is not being fed addictive content in a way that does not compromise their privacy,” she said.
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