Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Sen. Amy Klobuchar just released a letter to Facebook demanding the site require “a prominent safety button or link on the profile pages of users under the age of 18″—akin to the so-called “panic button” app launched earlier this week by the UK’s Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP). She doesn’t seem to realize that this [...]
What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation? [pdf] by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka The Progress & Freedom Foundation, Progress on Point No. 16.19 Anyone who has spent time following debates about speech and privacy regulation comes to recognize the striking parallels between these two policy arenas. In this paper we will highlight [...]
The Economist magazine has just released an important feature article entitled, “Sex Laws: Unjust and Ineffective.” In an indirect way, the article makes a point that I have been trying to get across in my work on this issue: If you want to keep your kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to scrap [...]
In an earlier post, I mentioned an important new online child safety task force report that has just been released from the “Point Smart. Click Safe.” Blue Ribbon Working Group. It’s a great report and I encourage you to read the whole thing. It was my great pleasure to serve on this task force, and [...]
When it comes to theories about how to best raise kids, I’m a big believer in what might be referred to “a resiliency approach” to child-rearing. That is, instead of endlessly coddling our children and hovering over them like “helicopter parents,” as so many parents do today, I believe it makes more sense to instill [...]
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 [...]
Online child safety — especially the fear of predators lurking on social networking sites (SNS) — continues to spur calls by state and federal lawmakers for regulation. At first, some federal lawmakers advocated outright bans on SNS in schools and libraries via the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). Meanwhile, state and local lawmakers — specifically [...]
I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years trying to debunk various myths about online child safety or at least put those risks into perspective. Too often, press reports and public policy initiatives are being driven by myths, irrational fears, or unjustified “moral panics.” Luckily, the New York Times reports that there’s another study [...]
This week, I have been up at Harvard University participating in another meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF), of which I am a member. The ISTTF was organized earlier this year pursuant to an agreement between 49 state attorneys general (AGs) and social networking giant MySpace.com. A group of experts from academia, [...]
On Monday, October 9th, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) delivered a major address about Internet content and online child safety that was intended to serve as a sort of call-to-arms for policymakers, parents and industry to get more serious about the issue. In his wide-ranging remarks, Lieberman bemoaned the relentless pace of technological change and how [...]
May 28, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
