A growing number of conservatives are calling for Big Government censorship of social media speech platforms. Censorship proposals are to conservatives what price controls are to radical leftists: completely outlandish, unworkable, and usually unconstitutional fantasies of controlling things that are ultimately much harder to control than they realize. And the costs of even trying to impose and enforce such extremist controls are always enormous.
Earlier this year,
The Wall Street Journal ran a response I wrote to a proposal set forth by columnist Peggy Noonan in which she proposed banning everyone under 18 from all social-media sites (“We Can Protect Children and Keep the Internet Free,” Apr. 15). I expanded upon that letter in an essay here entitled, “Should All Kids Under 18 Be Banned from Social Media?” National Review also recently published an article penned by Christine Rosen in which she also proposes to “Ban Kids from Social Media.” And just this week, Zach Whiting of the Texas Public Policy Foundation published an essay on “Why Texas Should Ban Social Media for Minors.”
I’ll offer a few more thoughts here in addition to what I’ve already said elsewhere. First, here is my response to the Rosen essay. National Review gave me 250 words to respond to her proposal:
While admitting that “law is a blunt instrument for solving complicated social problems,” Christine Rosen (“Keep Them Offline,” June 27) nonetheless downplays the radicalness of her proposal to make all teenagers criminals for accessing the primary media platforms of their generation. She wants us to believe that allowing teens to use social media is the equivalent of letting them operate a vehicle, smoke tobacco, or drink alcohol. This is false equivalence. Being on a social-media site is not the same as operating two tons of steel and glass at speed or using mind-altering substances.
Teens certainly face challenges and risks in any new media environment, but to believe that complex social pathologies did not exist before the Internet is folly. Echoing the same “lost generation” claims made by past critics who panicked over comic books and video games, Rosen asks, “Can we afford to lose another generation of children?” and suggests that only sweeping nanny-state controls can save the day. This cycle is apparently endless: Those “lost generations” grow up fine, only to claim it’s the
next generation that is doomed!
Rosen casually dismisses free-speech concerns associated with mass-media criminalization, saying that her plan “would not require censorship.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Rosen’s prohibitionist proposal would deny teens the many routine and mostly beneficial interactions they have with their peers online every day. While she belittles media literacy and other educational and empowerment-based solutions to online problems, those approaches continue to be a better response than the repressive regulatory regime she would have Big Government impose on society.
I have a few more things to say beyond these brief comments. Continue reading →
California’s continuing effort to make the Internet their own digital fiefdom continued this week with Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation that creates an online “Eraser Button” just for minors. The law isn’t quite as sweeping as the seriously misguided “right to be forgotten” notion I’ve critique here (1, 2, 3, 4) and elsewhere (5, 6) before. In any event, the new California law will:
require the operator of an Internet Web site, online service, online application, or mobile application to permit a minor, who is a registered user of the operator’s Internet Web site, online service, online application, or mobile application, to remove, or to request and obtain removal of, content or information posted on the operator’s Internet Web site, service, or application by the minor, unless the content or information was posted by a 3rd party, any other provision of state or federal law requires the operator or 3rd party to maintain the content or information, or the operator anonymizes the content or information. The bill would require the operator to provide notice to a minor that the minor may remove the content or information, as specified.
As always, the very best of intentions motivate this proposal. There’s no doubt that some digital footprints left online by minors could come back to haunt them in the future, and that concern for their future reputation and privacy is the primary motivation for the measure. Alas, noble-minded laws like these often lead to many unintended consequences, and even some thorny constitutional issues. I’d be hard-pressed to do a better job of itemizing those potential problems than Eric Goldman, of Santa Clara University School of Law, and Stephen Balkam, Founder and CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute, have done in recent essays on the issue. Continue reading →
This afternoon, Berin Szoka asked me to participate in a TechFreedom conference on “COPPA: Past, Present & Future of Children’s Privacy & Media.” [CSPAN video is here.] It was a in-depth, 3-hour, 2-panel discussion of the Federal Trade Commission’s recent revisions to the rules issued under the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
While most of the other panelists were focused on the devilish details about how COPPA works in practice (or at least
should work in practice), I decided to ask a more provocative question to really shake up the discussion: What are we going to do when COPPA fails?
My notes for the event follow down below. I didn’t have time to put them into a smooth narrative, so please pardon the bullet points. Continue reading →
It was my honor today to be a panelist at a Hill event on “Apps, Ads, Kids & COPPA: Implications of the FTC’s Additional Proposed Revisions,” which was co-sponsored by the Family Online Safety Institute and the Association for Competitive Technology. It was a free-wheeling discussion, but I prepared some talking points for the event that I thought I would share here for anyone interested in my views about the Federal Trade Commission’s latest proposed revisions to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
________
The Commission deserves credit for very wisely ignoring calls by some to extend the coverage of COPPA’s regulatory provisions from children under 13 all the way up to teens up to 18.
- that would have been a constitutional and technical enforcement nightmare. But the FTC realized that long ago and abandoned any thought of doing that. So that is a huge win since we won’t be revisiting the COPA age verification wars.
- That being said, each tweak or expansion of COPPA, the FTC opens the door a bit wider to a discussion of some sort age verification or age stratification scheme for the Internet.
- And we know from recent AG activity (recall old MySpace age verification battle) and Hill activity (i.e. Markey-Barton bill) that there remains an appetite for doing something more to age-segment Internet populations
Continue reading →
In my most recent weekly Forbes column, “Common Sense About Kids, Facebook & The Net,” I consider the wisdom of an online petition that the child safety advocacy group Common Sense Media is pushing, which demands that Facebook give up any thought of letting kids under the age of 13 on the site. “There is absolutely no proof of any meaningful social or educational value of Facebook for children under 13,” their petition insists. “Indeed, there are very legitimate concerns about privacy, as well as its impact on children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development.” Common Sense Media doesn’t offer any evidence to substantiate those claims, but one can sympathize with some of the general worries. Nonetheless, as I argue in my essay:
Common Sense Media’s approach to the issue is short-sighted. Calling for a zero-tolerance, prohibitionist policy toward kids on Facebook (and interactive media more generally) is tantamount to a bury-your-head-in-sand approach to child safety. Again, younger kids are increasingly online, often because their parents allow or even encourage it. To make sure they get online safely and remain safe, we’ll need a different approach than Common Sense Media’s unworkable “just-say-no” model.
Think about it this way: Would it make sense to start a petition demanding that kids be kept out of town squares, public parks, or shopping malls? Most of us would find the suggestion ludicrous. Continue reading →
Today the Federal Trade Commission released a new report entitled, “Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures Are Disappointing,” which concludes that “confusing and hard-to-find disclosures do not give parents the control that they need in this area. The FTC argues that “parents need consistent, easily accessible, and recognizable disclosures regarding in-app purchase capabilities so that they can make informed decisions about whether to allow their children to use apps with such capabilities.”
It’s hard to be against the FTC’s “the more disclosure, the better” policy recommendation and I’m not about to come out against it here. But the question is:
how much disclosure is enough? Reading through the report and seeing how hard the FTC hammers this point home makes me think the agency wants our app store checkout process to be littered with the pages of fine print disclosure policies that now accompany our credit card statements and home mortgage payments! Seriously, would that make us better off?
As a parent of two kids who both download countless apps on my Android phone, my wife’s iPhone, and our family’s Android tablet, I appreciate a certain amount of disclosure about what sort of information apps are collecting and how they are using it. I think Google’s Android marketplace strikes a nice balance here, providing us with the most crucial facts about what the application will access or share. Apple could do more on disclosure but the company also prides itself (to the dismay of some!) on its rigorous pre-screening process to make sure the apps in the App Store are safe and don’t violate certain privacy and security policies. Yet, as the FTC correctly points out, “the details of this screening process are not clear.” Of course, most Apple users simply don’t give a damn. They’re all too happy to let Apple just take care of it for them even if they’re not really sure what’s happening to their data behind the scenes. The more privacy-sensitive crowd wants greater disclosure and control, of course, and I’m sympathetic to that plea. But again, how much disclosure is enough? Are you going to wade through pages of disclosure policies and privacy opt-ins before downloading that latest iteration of “Angry Birds” or “Cut the Rope”? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on that. The more interested findings in the survey relate to price and market dynamics and I am hoping people don’t ignore them. Continue reading →
Filings are due to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today as part of its review of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the COPPA rule that the FTC devised and enforces. I didn’t have time to pen as much as I wanted, but I did submit a short filing to the agency in the matter based on some of my previous work both with Berin Szoka and on my own. Here’s the executive summary for my filing:
It goes without saying that the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is complicated law and rule. When considering the rule and proposals to amend it, it is easy to get lost in the weeds and ignore the bigger picture. That would be a mistake. There are broader, more important questions that need to be asked as part of the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to expand this regulatory regime. These questions involve not only the costs of increased regulation for online business interests, but the impact of expanded regulation on market structure, competition, and innovation. More importantly, these questions cut to the core of whether the public (including children) will be served with more and better digital innovations in the future. There is no free lunch. Regulation—even well-intentioned regulation like COPPA—is not a costless exercise. There are profound trade-offs for online content and culture that must always be considered.
Whatever one thinks about the effectiveness or sensibility of the COPPA regulatory model for the Web 1.0 world, it is clear that the regime is being strained by the unforeseen realities of the Web 2.0 world of hyper-ubiquitous connectivity and user-generated content creation and sharing. The digital genie cannot be put back in the bottle. While COPPA may continue to have a marginal role to play in this rapidly evolving world, that role will likely be increasingly limited by the inherent realities of the information age.
Entire filing can be found on the Mercatus website, on SSRN, or via Scribd [Also embedded below in a Scribd reader.] Continue reading →
I highly recommend this important new study on “Why Parents Help Their Children Lie to Facebook about Age: Unintended Consequences of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act” by danah boyd of New York University, Eszter Hargittai from Northwestern University, Jason Schultz from University of California, Berkeley, and John Palfrey from Harvard University. COPPA is a complicated and somewhat open-ended law and regulatory regime. COPPA requires that commercial operators of websites and services obtain “verifiable parental consent” before collecting, disclosing, or using “personal information” (name, contact information) of children under the age of 13 if either their website or service (or “portion thereof”) is “directed at children” or they have actual knowledge that they are collecting personal information from a child.
The new study, which surveyed over 1,000 parents of children between the ages of 10 and 14, reveals that, despite the best of intentions, COPPA is having many unintended costs and consequences:
Although many sites restrict access to children, our data show that many parents knowingly allow their children to lie about their age — in fact, often help them to do so — in order to gain access to age–restricted sites in violation of those sites’ ToS. This is especially true for general–audience social media sites and communication services such as Facebook, Gmail, and Skype, which allow children to connect with peers, classmates, and family members for educational, social, or familial reasons.
The authors conclude that “COPPA inadvertently undermines parents’ ability to make choices and protect their children’s data” and that their results “have significant implications for policy–makers, particularly in light of ongoing discussions surrounding COPPA and other age–based privacy laws.” Indeed, this paper could really shake up the debate over online kids’ privacy regulation. I will have more analysis of the paper in my weekly
Forbes column this weekend.
Additional reading for COPPA background and current controversies: Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer, “COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech,” (May 21, 2009); and Adam Thierer, “Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet: Finding the Right Balance,” (August 12, 2011).
On Wednesday afternoon, it was my great pleasure to make some introductory remarks at a Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) event that was held at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, CA. FOSI CEO Stephen Balkam asked me to offer some thoughts on a topic I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about in recent years: Who needs parental controls? More specifically, what role do parental control tools and methods play in the upbringing of our children? How should we define or classify parental control tools and methods? Which are most important / effective? Finally, what should the role of public policy be toward parental control technologies on both the online safety and privacy fronts?
In past years, I spent much time writing and updating a booklet on these issues called
Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods. It was an enormous undertaking, however, and I have abandoned updating it after I hit version 4.0. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still putting a lot of thought into these issues. My focus has shifted over the past year more toward the privacy-related concerns and away from the online safety issues. Of course, all these issues intersect and many people now (rightly) considered them to largely be the same debate.
Anyway, to kick off the FOSI event, I offered three provocations about parental control technologies and the state of the current debate over them. I buttressed some of my assertions with findings from a recent FOSI survey of parental attitudes about parental controls and online safety. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.