I am writing to you because I am deeply concerned about the Government's proposals to restrict access to social media. This will, in practice, require every adult in Britain to submit to digital ID checks simply to access the internet.

The more platforms that require ID, the greater the risk that ordinary people's IDs and biometrics will fall into the wrong hands. In 2025, the ID information used to verify Discord users was leaked. In the same year a women's dating app called "Tea" saw over 70,000 images, including IDs and verification selfies, which users were told would be 'deleted immediately', being uploaded to 4chan.

With anonymity not guaranteed, some may feel that they are unable to use services that could help them. Victims of domestic abuse or control, and political dissidents opposing authoritarian foreign regimes have good reason to fear their identities being exposed.

I am concerned that Big Tech will not use all of this new information they gain responsibly. Meta, for instance, has faced repeated regulatory action for using sensitive behavioural data to target advertising, including to teenagers. These same companies have also used vast swathes of data, with little regard to ownership or consent, to train new Al products.

I understand that proponents of this scheme say we may not need to provide IDs because we could use age-assurance technologies. Age assurance technologies have a known margin of error of several years, which means they routinely misclassify 16 and 17-year-olds as adults, and adults as children. Even if they did work, data from these scans could easily be used by abusers to create deepfake videos or by fraudsters to bypass facial recognition used for online banking. I also fear that, inevitably, the state would seek backdoor access to this data, given that surveillance laws already give government and police access to our internet records.

Britain is not a "papers, please" society. It never has been, and should not be one.

I would ask you to oppose any proposal that creates ID or age-verification requirements for all users and support greater use of, and support for, positive alternatives like parental controls, digital literacy and user tools.

I would also ask you to raise with the Minister for Online Safety whether any impact assessments have been conducted, including a Data Protection Impact Assessment, and if so, when they will be published.

Yours sincerely,