The Vets Connect Act establishes a secure, opt-in platform for verified veterans to reconnect based on service history while strictly protecting personal contact information.
Charles (Chuck) Edwards
Representative
NC-11
The Vets Connect Act establishes a secure, opt-in platform for verified veterans to reconnect with former service members based on shared service details. This system prioritizes veteran privacy by restricting the sharing of personal contact information unless explicitly authorized by the user. The platform strictly prohibits the use of veteran data for solicitation, marketing, or commercial purposes.
Vets Connect Act Proposes Secure VA Platform to Help Veterans Reconnect While Guarding Personal Privacy
The Vets Connect Act aims to solve a common problem for those who’ve served: losing touch with the people who were in the trenches with them. The bill directs the Department of Veterans Affairs to build a secure, internal messaging platform where veterans can find former unit members without having to hand over their personal cell phone numbers or email addresses to the entire internet. It’s designed to be a digital muster formation that prioritizes security over social media noise.
Digital Privacy by Design
Under Section 2, this isn’t an automatic enrollment program. You won’t just find yourself on a list because you used the GI Bill once. The legislation is strictly "opt-in," meaning a veteran must take a clear, documented action to be discoverable in search results. Even then, the system only carries the bare essentials: branch, rank, dates of service, and deployments. If you want to go by a nickname instead of your legal name, the bill specifically allows for a chosen display name. For a veteran who wants to find an old friend from a 2005 deployment but doesn't want their home address searchable, this provides a middle ground that currently doesn't exist in the private sector.
No Solicitation, No Spam
One of the biggest headaches for veterans is the constant barrage of "VA loan" offers and legal solicitations. This bill draws a hard line in the sand regarding data usage. Section 2 explicitly prohibits the information in the Vets Connect system from being used for marketing, advertising, or legal claims services. It also bans data brokerage, meaning the VA can’t sell or license your participation to third parties. Contractors working on the site are legally restricted to using data only for their specific job duties, and the bill mandates industry-standard encryption and audit logs to ensure no one is snooping where they shouldn’t be.
Control and Consequences
The bill gives users a high level of "delete" power. At any point, a veteran can change their visibility, block specific users, or scrub their information from the system entirely. To keep the community legitimate, access is restricted to those whose service is verified by the VA or DoD. For those who try to game the system—say, a bad actor trying to scrape data for a scam—the bill authorizes the Secretary to hit them with penalties under existing federal privacy laws (38 U.S.C. 5701). It’s a straightforward attempt to build a community space that feels more like a secure VFW hall and less like a data-hungry social media site.