Another Day, Another Nonsense Bill From Congress ‘To Protect The Children’

It seems like every day this week a new bill has been introduced in Congress with the grandstanding politicians behind the bill insisting that it’s necessary to protect the children online. It seems like no elected official wants to be left behind on this particular moral panic train. The latest, from Senators Ed Markey and Bill Cassidy is being called COPPA 2.0 in that it updates the original Children’s Online Privacy Protect Act, which was passed in 1998.

And… look, COPPA has long had problems, many of which we’ve called out in the past. COPPA is the main reason why lots of parents teach their kids it’s okay to lie about your age, because many websites say you have to be over 13 to use them. That’s not because websites do a careful assessment of what age is the right age to use a website, but because COPPA applies stringent regulations to any website that targets those under the age of 13.

As danah boyd explained well over a decade ago, COPPA fails parents, educators, and (most importantly) the kids themselves.

While many parents do not believe that social network sites like Facebook and MySpace are suitable for young children, they often want their children to have access to other services that have age restrictions (email, instant messaging, video services, etc.). Often, parents cite that these tools enable children to connect with extended family; Skype is especially important to immigrant parents who have extended family outside of the US. Grandparents were most frequently cited as the reason why parents created accounts for their young children. Many parents will create accounts for children even before they are literate because the value of connecting children to family outweighs the age restriction. When parents encourage their children to use these services, they send a conflicting message that their kids eventually learn: ignore some age limitations but not others.

By middle school, communication tools and social network sites are quite popular among tweens who pressure their parents for permission to get access to accounts on these services because they want to communicate with their classmates, church friends, and friends who have moved away. Although parents in the wealthiest and most educated segments of society often forbid their children from signing up to social network sites until they turn 13, most parents support their children’s desires to acquire email and IM, precisely because of familial use. To join, tweens consistently lie about their age when asked to provide it. When I interviewed teens about who taught them to lie, the overwhelming answer was parents. I interviewed parents who consistently admitted to helping their children circumvent the age restriction by teaching them that they needed to choose a birth year that would make them over 13. Even in households where an older sibling or friend was the educator, parents knew their children had email and IM and social network sites accounts. Interestingly, in households where parents forbid Facebook but allow email, kids have started noting the hypocritical stance of their parents. That’s not a good outcome of this misinterpretation.

When I asked parents about how they felt about the age restrictions presented by social websites, parents had one of two responses. When referencing social network sites, parents stated that they felt that the restrictions were justified because younger children were too immature to handle the challenges of social network sites. Yet, when discussing sites and services that they did not believe were risky environments or that they felt were important for family communication, parents often felt as though the limitations were unnecessarily restrictive. Those who interpreted the restriction as a maturity rating did not understand why the sites required age confirmation. Some other parents felt as though the websites were trying to tell them how to parent. Some were particularly outraged by what they felt was a paternal attitude by websites, making statements like: “Who are they to tell me how to be a good parent?”

That was written 12 years ago. We’ve had a dozen years to make COPPA better, and nothing has been done.

So, instead, Senators Markey and Cassidy have decided to make COPPA worse. As laid out by the sponsors, the bill would do the following:

1. Build on COPPA by prohibiting internet companies from collecting personal information from users who are 13 to 16 years old without their consent;  
2. Ban targeted advertising to children and teens; 
3. Revise COPPA’s “actual knowledge” standard, covering platforms that are “reasonably likely to be used” by children and protecting users who are “reasonably likely to be” children or minors; 
4. Create an “Eraser Button” for parents and kids by requiring companies to permit users to eliminate personal information from a child or teen when technologically feasible;
5. Establish a “Digital Marketing Bill of Rights for Teens” that limits the collection of personal information of teens; and
6. Establish a Youth Marketing and Privacy Division at the FTC.

So… again, out of the best intentions danger lies. This bill would require age verification, and all the assorted problems we’ve discussed about that. Which is kind of ironic, given that the bill is pitched as protecting privacy. But since it has special rules for different age groups, that’s going to require websites to determine how old their visitors are, which is privacy invasive, and potentially dangerous as well.

Getting rid of the “actual knowledge” standard raises some big 1st Amendment issues (you can’t be punished for speech you don’t know about), and switching to a “reasonably likely to be used by…” standard is massively destructive, especially when combined with the increase in age to 16. Again, we write about issues that impact high schoolers here on Techdirt, so we’d switch from a site that is currently not covered by COPPA, since we’re not targeting children under 13 to one that might now be covered, because some high schoolers may be “reasonably likely” to want to come to Techdirt to read about how their Senators are trying to destroy the internet and the ways in which they communicate with friends and family today.

Banning “targeted advertising” is one of those ideas that sounds good if you don’t know what you’re talking about, have no experience with internet advertising, and don’t know how anything works. Again, we already have the issue of age verification associated with this, but also, in many ways all advertising is targeted in some form or another. The bill purports to exclude “contextual” advertising from the definition of “targeted marketing,” but just the fact that they have to do that suggests they haven’t really thought this through and had to slot in this random exclusion at the end to avoid breaking basically everything.

The “consent” part also gets tricky, as we’ve discussed with various state bills that require parental consent for kids. Not all kids have a good relationship with their parents. Their parents may be estranged. Or a child may want to visit a website that the parent disagrees with but is important to that child. Perhaps a child is LGBTQ and wishes to find a welcoming community, while their parents disapprove.

There are so many problems with bills like this, and literally no evidence whatsoever that any of this will actually help or protect children. It’s all built on the moral panic that the internet is — full stop — bad for kids. Even as the evidence says that’s not true at all, and it’s actually quite useful for most kids.

For all the talk of internet companies “experimenting” on our children, why do we keep letting politicians do these experiments on children not backed up by any understanding or evidence?