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
- Berin Szoka, Senior Fellow, The Progress & Freedom Foundation
We’ve just released the transcript of the event, which I have also pasted down below the fold in a Scribd document reader. Also, the audio for this event can be heard by clicking below:
Download mp3
Here is the full event description: Continue reading →
The latest edition (Version 4.0) of my PFF special report on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now up. For those not familiar with the report, it explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education and media literacy efforts, and various other tools, methods, and initiatives aimed at promoting online child safety. After evaluating that state of this market, I conclude: “There has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.” Moreover, I believe that the parental controls and content management tools cataloged in the report represent a better, less restrictive alternative to government regulation.
Version 4.0 of the report is now over 250 pages long (up from 200 pages in Version 3.0) and it contains almost 70 exhibits (up from 50), 725 references (up from roughly 500), and numerous updates in all five sections of the book. Major updates have been made to the Internet, social networking, and mobile media sections, reflecting the growing importance of those sectors and issues. Other new sections or appendices have also been added to the report, including:
- a new section examining how many households really need parental control tools;
- a new appendix on the downsides of mandatory parental controls and restrictive default settings;
- a new section on the dangers of “deputizing the online middleman” solution as an approach to solving child safety concerns;
- a new appendix reviewing the findings of 5 past online safety task forces;
- … and much more.
I issue major updates once a year and 1 or 2 minor tweaks during the course of the year to reflect the evolution of the parental control and online child safety marketplace and debate. The report is available free-of-charge on the PFF website, and the previous editions of the report are housed there too in case you want to see how it has evolved over the past couple of years. For those interested in taking a quick look at the report, I have embedded it down below the fold as a Scribd file. Finally, as is always the case, I encourage readers to send me updates and suggestions for how to improve the report and I will incorporate them into future versions.
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I’ve just had a new article published by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in which I make the case against “techno-panics,” which refers to public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young. The article is entitled “Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘” and it appears in the July 2009 Inside ALEC newsletter. This is something I have spent a lot of time writing about here in recent years (See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and I finally got around to putting it altogether in a concise essay here. I have pasted the full text below. [And I just want to send a shout-out to my friend Anne Collier of Net Family News.org, whose work on this topic has been very influential on my thinking.]
“Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘”
by Adam Thierer
A cursory review of the history of media and communications technologies reveals a reoccurring cycle of “techno-panics” — public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young. From the waltz to rock-and-roll to rap music, from movies to comic books to video games, from radio and television to the Internet and social networking websites, every new media format or technology has spawned a fresh debate about the potential negative effects they might have on kids.
Inevitably, fueled by media sensationalism and various activist groups, these social and cultural debates quickly become political debates. Indeed, each of the media technologies or outlets mentioned above was either regulated or threatened with regulation at some point in its history. And the cycle continues today. During recent sessions of Congress, countless hearings were held and bills introduced on a wide variety of media and content-related issues. These proposals dealt with broadcast television and radio programming, cable and satellite television content, video games, the Internet, social networking sites, and much more. State policymakers, especially state Attorneys General (AGs), have also joined in such crusades on occasion. The recent push by AGs for mandatory age verification for all social networking sites is merely the latest example.
What is perhaps most ironic about these techno-panics is how quickly yesterday’s boogeyman becomes tomorrow’s accepted medium, even as the new villains replace old ones. For example, the children of the 1950s and 60s were told that Elvis’s hip shakes and the rock-and-roll revolution would make them all the tools of the devil. They grew up fine and became parents themselves, but then promptly began demonizing rap music and video games in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And now those aging Pac Man-era parents are worried sick about their kids being abducted by predators lurking on MySpace and Facebook. We shouldn’t be surprised if, a decade or two from now, today’s Internet generation will be decrying the dangers of virtual reality.
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Internet policy Shame Artist extraordinaire Chris Soghoian has struck again! Chris recently shamed the online advertising industry into improving their privacy practices with his Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO) plug-in for Firefox. Now Chris has set his sight on the security practices of cloud service providers.
A letter released this morning, signed by 37 leading online security experts (and organized by Chris), calls on Google to offer persistent SSL (HTTPS) encryption by default for all Google services—or at the very least, to make more visible the option currently given to users to opt-in to use SSL for all communications. Google, in its response, indicated that it was already “looking into whether it would make sense to turn on HTTPS as the default for all Gmail users.”
While Google’s response identifies some clear problems with implementing persistent SSL for all users (esp. connection speed), few would deny that it makes sense for webmail providers to encrypt all traffic using SSL, rather than sending email data “in the clear,” which risks interception by hackers. We at PFF hold no brief for Google, in fact we have found ourselves disagreeing with them on many other occasions on a range of issues (most notably net neutrality mandates). Nonetheless, on this front, Google has long been a leader, having offered SSL since Gmail launched and having begun providing the persistent HTTPS option last summer while most of their competitors still use SSL only for the initial authentication that occurs when a user first signs in. While the letter focuses on Google and webmail in particular, this issue has far broader implications for all online cloud service providers.
No Free Lunch: The Costs of Encryption
Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, etc. are, of course, “free” (
i.e., ad-supported). Google in particular has lead the way in increasing the functionality offered in Gmail, not just constantly increasing the total storage space provided to every user (now over 7GB), but regularly adding innovative new features—at no charge to users. Continue reading →
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 importantly that websites obtain the “verifiable consent” of a child’s parent before collecting personal information about that child or giving that child access to interactive functionality that might allow the child to share their personal information with others. The law was intended primarily to “enhance parental involvement in a child’s online activities” as a means of protecting the online privacy and safety of children.
Yet advocates of expanding COPPA—or “COPPA 2.0″—see COPPA’s verifiable parental consent framework as a means for imposing broad regulatory mandates in the name of online child safety and concerns about social networking, cyber-harassment,
etc. Two COPPA 2.0 bills are currently pending in New Jersey and Illinois. The accelerated review of COPPA to be conducted by the FTC next year (five years ahead of schedule) is likely to bring to Washington serious talk of expanding COPPA—even though Congress clearly rejected covering adolescents age 13-16 when COPPA was first proposed back in 1998.
We’ll discuss some of the key points of our paper in a series of blog posts, but here are the top nine reasons for rejecting COPPA 2.0, in that such an approach would:
- Burden the free speech rights of adults by imposing age verification mandates on many sites used by adults, thus restricting anonymous speech and essentially converging—in terms of practical consequences—with the unconstitutional Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA), another 1998 law sometimes confused with COPPA;
- Burden the free speech rights of adolescents to speak freely on—or gather information from—legal and socially beneficial websites;
- Hamper routine and socially beneficial communication between adolescents and adults;
- Reduce, rather than enhance, the privacy of adolescents, parents and other adults because of the massive volume of personal information that would have to be collected about users for authentication purposes (likely including credit card data);
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Today, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced the members of the new Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG). I am honored to be among those chosen to participate in this new task force and I look forward to continuing the work started last year with the Harvard Berkman Center’s Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF), which I also served on. I was very proud of the work done by the ISTTF and the impressive final report that Prof. John Palfrey crafted to reflect our findings. I am eager to investigate these issues further and take a look at the latest research and technologies that can help us better understand how to protect our kids online while also protecting the free speech and privacy rights of Netizens.
The new NTIA working group, which was established under the “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” will report to the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information on industry-implemented online child safety tools and efforts. Within a year of convening its first meeting, the group will submit a report of its findings and make recommendations on how to increase online safety measures.
Below the fold I have listed the complete roster of OSTWG task force members. I very much looking forward to working with this outstanding group. And I’m happy to report that my TLF blogging colleague Braden Cox will be joining me on this task force!
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My friend Anne Collier of Net Family News, one of America’s great sages on child safety issues, has produced a terrific list of reasons “Why Technopanics are Bad.” Technopanics and moral panics are topics I’ve spent quite a bit of time commenting on here. (See 1, 2, 3, 4.) Anne is a rare voice of sanity and sensible advice when it comes to online child safety issues and I encourage you to read all her excellent work on the subject, including her book with Larry Magid, MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking. Anyway, here’s Anne’s list, and I encourage you to go over to her site and contribute your thoughts and suggestions about what else to add:
Technopanics are bad because they…
- Cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.
- Cause schools to fear and block digital media when they need to be teaching constructive use, employing social-technology devices and teaching new media literacy and citizenship classes throughout the curriculum.
- Turn schools into barriers rather than contributors to young people’s constructive use.
- Increase the irrelevancy of school to active young social-technology users via the sequestering or banning of educational technology and hamstring some of the most spirited and innovative educators.
- Distract parents, educators, policymakers from real risks – including, for example, child-pornography laws that do not cover situations where minors can simultaneously be victim and “perpetrator” and, tragically, become registered sex offenders in cases where there no criminal intent (e.g., see this).
- Reduce the competitiveness of US education among developed countries already effectively employing educational technology and social media in schools.
- Reduce the competitiveness of US technology and media businesses practicing good corporate citizenship where youth online safety is concerned.
- Lead to bad legislation, which aggravates above outcomes and takes the focus off areas where good laws on the books can be made relevant to current technology use.
- Widen the participation gap for youth – technopanics are barriers for children and teens to full, constructive participation in participatory culture and democracy.
Ars Technica has just posted the transcript of a friendly debate I recently engaged in with Harvard University law professor John Palfrey about the future of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and online liability more generally. Our debate got started last fall, shortly after I penned a favorable review of John’s excellent new book (with Urs Gasser), Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. [Listen to my podcast with John about it here.] Although I enjoyed John’s book, I also raised some concerns about his call in the book to reopen and revise Section 230, specifically to address child safety concerns. At the time, John and I were working together on the Berkman Center’s “Internet Safety Technical Task Force” and we decided to begin an e-mail exchange about the future of 230 and online liability norms more generally. The result was the debate that Ars has just published.
In our exchange, I begin by asking John to more fully develop some statements and proposals he sets forth in
Born Digital. Specifically, he and co-author Urs Gasser argue that: “The scope of the immunity the CDA provides for online service providers is too broad” and that the law “should not preclude parents from bringing a claim of negligence against [a social networking site] for failing to protect the safety of its users.” They also suggest that “There is no reason why a social network should be protected from liability related to the safety of young people simply because its business operates online.” Specifically, the call for “strengthening private causes of action by clarifying that tort claims may be brought against online service providers when safety is at stake,” although they do not define those instances.
Using those proposals as a launching point for our discussion, I challenge John as follows:
I’m troubled by your proposals because I believe Section 230 has been crucial to the success of the Internet and the robust marketplace of online freedom of speech and expression. In many ways — whether intentional or not — Section 230 was the legal cornerstone that gave rise to many of the online freedoms we enjoy today. I fear that the proposal you have set forth could reverse that. It could lead to crushing liability for many online operators-and not just giants like MySpace or Facebook-that might not be able to absorb the litigation costs. Could you elaborate a bit more about your proposal and explain why you think the time has come to alter Section 230 and online liability norms?
And John does and then we go back-and-forth from there. Again, you can read the whole exchange over at Ars.
It was a great pleasure to engage in this exchange with Prof. Palfrey and I look forward to what others have to say in response to our debate. I am working on a longer paper looking broadly at the rising threats to Sec. 230 and the increasing calls for expanded online liability and middleman deputization. I will use whatever feedback I get from this exchange to refine my paper and proposals.
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 state Attorneys General (AGs) — have been even more vociferous in their calls for regulation in the form of mandatory age verification for social networking sites, which would cover a broad swath of online sites and activities according to their definitions of SNS. But the question that ultimately gets lost in this debate is: Just how much risk do social networking sites really pose for teens? Which risks are real and which are overblown? And what’s the best way to deal with the risks that we find to be legitimate?
Nancy Willard devotes her life to answering those questions. Willard is one of America’s leading experts on online safety and risk prevention. She runs the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use and she is the author of two outstanding books, Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats and Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens. In my opinion, Willard’s general approach to online child safety is the most enlightened, level-headed, and likely to be effective. That’s because Willard focuses on putting fears in perspective, identifying the actual risks that kids face online, and devising sensible strategies to deal with risks and problems as they are discovered. Her approach is holistic and built upon sound data, targeted risk-identification strategies, and time-tested education and mentoring methods. For my money, it’s the most sensible approach to online safety issues. In fact, when other parents ask me for “just one thing” to read on the topic, I usually recommend Willard’s work — especially her amazing book Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens. And her background in early childhood education, special education for “at risk” children with emotional and behavior difficulties, as well as experience in computer law, means she is uniquely suited to be analyzing these issues. In sum, this is woman we should all be closely listening to on these issues.
Recently, Willard has been responding to criticisms that state AGs have leveled against the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) and its final report. [Disclaimer: I was a member of the ISTTF.] I’ve already outlined the ISTTF’s work at length here, but the three key takeaways from the report were that:
- the risk of predation on social network sites has been over-stated; the data suggest that cyber-bullying is the bigger problem on SNS;
- there is no silver-bullet technical solution to online child safety concerns, and mandatory age verification, in particular, would not make kids safer online but could even create bigger problems in the long-run;
- education and empowerment are the real keys to keeping kids safer online.
Continue reading →
(HT The 463) Forget the sex offenders on MySpace, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (and C|Net reporter Elinor Mills) should be investigating reincarnation on Facebook!!
Terrorism too!
Seriously, they appear to have been completely taken in by a joke MySpace page.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.