On July 27th, The Progress & Freedom Foundation hosted a Capitol Hill panel discussion entitled “Online Child Safety, Privacy, and Free Speech: An Overview of Challenges in Congress & the States.” The event featured remarks from: Parry Aftab, Executive Director, WiredSafety.org Todd Haiken, Senior Manager of Policy, Common Sense Media Jim Halpert, Partner, DLA Piper [...]
The new Maine law I blogged about on Sunday is much worse than I thought based on my initial reading. If allowed to stand, it would constitute a sweeping age verification mandate introduced through the back door of “child protection.” The law, which goes into effect in September, would extend the approach of the Children’s Online Privacy [...]
Maine has just enacted a law severely restricting marketing to kids: the Act To Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices against Minors, summarized by Covington & Burling. Adam and I released a major paper in June about such laws: COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech. Maine is following the lead of several other states [...]
The painful issue of cyberbullying has recently taken center stage in the ongoing debate about online child safety. Last week I wrote about Lori Drew’s acquittal on charges related to Megan Meier’s tragic suicide, suggesting that the judge in the case was right to overturn her conviction on a very expansive reading of the federal anti-hacking [...]
The Gawker offers a fascinating discussion of the legal right to anonymity: “There is clearly a moral case that some people should be able to join the public debate and retain their anonymity,” Tench told Gawker. “And I think this will have a chilling effect. Blogs like this can only exist anonymously, and I imagine [...]
As Berin mentioned last week, we have a new paper out on proposals to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998. We generically refer to those COPPA-expansion efforts as “COPPA 2.0.” Hence, the title of our paper: “COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech.” To [...]
Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.” As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most [...]