Tuesday, The Senate passed a pair of bills that could dramatically change how the government regulates tech companies and child safety.
The bills, called the Children’s Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Adolescents’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), passed by a 91-3 bipartisan consensus.
Despite support from the Senate, the bill, which aims to give the Federal Trade Commission authority to better protect the privacy and online safety of American children, is deeply divided within the tech community and among various interest groups.
Bills that have been circulated in various forms for years now have a greater chance of becoming law than before. While home landed Until September, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Thursday that he would support KOSA. It looks like President Joe Biden will sign the bills into law next calls Bipartisan legislation to protect children’s online safety and online privacy in State of the Union speech.
While COPPA has been widely cited as an overdue improvement to the nation’s meager digital privacy protections, KOSA has been mired in controversy for years.
COPPA 2.0
COPPA 2.0 has faced several critics outside the advertising industry. It updates a 1998 law that sought to establish basic privacy protections for American children and prohibits websites from knowingly collecting information about children 12 or younger without their parents’ permission. The FTC has been in place since 2000 settled several dozen lawsuits with companies that claim to collect or store basic information about children, such as their names, ages, addresses and personal interests, without parental consent.
There are three main changes in the updated COPPA.
It would raise the maximum age of children covered by the law to 17, prohibiting companies from collecting data from those users without their consent.
It updates the law’s definition of personal data to better address how technology tracks people in 2024 to include biometrics such as fingerprints, voiceprints, facial images and gait.
It also aims to close a loophole that allows some companies to track children if they can claim they did not have “actual knowledge” that their customers were minors.
Experts say COPPA 2.0 may not cause immediate and obvious changes to major sites that provide content to children, such as YouTube and TikTok. These companies already have large legal teams to help with COPPA compliance, and can simply change age restrictions based on the new rules to restrict content for minors or ensure proper data permissions.
But provisions in the bill may restrict third party companies from advertising to anyone under the age of 17. COPPA 2.0 includes a ban on so-called contextual advertising for young users, prohibiting companies from using certain personalized information such as a person’s phone location or web surfing history. Suzanne Bernstein, an attorney specializing in data protection and consumer privacy at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, said most are ads tailored to minors.
“If you were on an Instagram page for horses and you’re looking at and there’s an ad for nearby stables on that page, that’s a contextual ad,” he said.
Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence at Check My Ads, a nonprofit that tracks damages from the digital advertising industry, said the update was “necessary for COPPA to be effective.”
Some privacy advocates, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, did not support COPPA 2.0 because they favor a comprehensive digital privacy bill for all Americans, not just children. Congress has different members worked for years to pass a full privacy bill, with no success so far.
Interactive Advertising Bureau, trade association, claimed that COPPA 2.0 will make it harder to accurately serve online ads that help power free internet services, resulting in a “data-poor, less functional, useful internet.”
BOWL
Since its inception, KOSA has garnered both significant support and heavy criticism presented first in 2022.
KOSA aims to solve the complaints of parents on social networks harm to children’s health, from internet addiction to abuse. The central concept of the bill is to create a “duty of care” for internet companies, meaning they can be held legally liable if they recommend content to children that could harm their mental health.
A wide range is supported child protection and mental and physical health teamsSuch as the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Eating Disorder Coalition, and Mental Health America.
But tech policy experts and many of the bill’s public critics have said that if the bill becomes law, social media platforms could respond by proactively over-censoring controversial content. Critics have also raised concerns about how the law could potentially be used for political censorship by future presidential administrations, which may be interested in blocking information about topics such as reproductive health and LGBTQ issues.
Experts have warned of unintended consequences: it can make it harder for both children and adults to find information online. Electronic Frontier Foundation Analysis of KOSA says some websites may implement age verification or simply block content on sensitive topics to avoid potential lawsuits.
There are critics, such as the Open Technology Institute, an offshoot of the New America think tank warned for a long time Current age verification methods are often easily missed and can create a data trail that can be used to unnecessarily identify children online.
KOSA has addressed two major controversies fueling concerns surrounding the event. Last year, a video interview with the bill’s sponsor, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, surfaced. He said in a short interview that also applied to KOSA said conservative lawmakers should prioritize “protecting young children in this culture from being transgender.” Blackburn’s staff later said those comments did not reflect KOSA.
An earlier version of the bill allowed state attorneys general, who have broad discretion to pursue partisan goals, to use KOSA to sue tech companies over content they make available to minors. This sparked an outcry among civil liberties advocates, who saw it as a way for Republicans to censor LGBTQ and other content.
The bill now gives the FTC, not state attorneys general, the power to sue tech companies over content. But critics point out that even the FTX, which traditionally has a 3-2 majority from the president’s party, can be partisan.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the leading civil libertarian on tech issues in the Senate, announced. On BlueSky Thursday’s bill, while “improved,” will still be voted no because “a future MAGA administration could still use this law to allow companies to censor gay, trans, and reproductive health information.”
India McKinney, director of federal affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes KOSA, said that while the change is welcome, the bill still fundamentally blames internet companies for larger societal problems and will result in a more censored internet.
“I am not prepared to argue that there is not a mental health crisis for teenagers in the United States. But I don’t think it’s Instagram,” said McKinney.
“I think the reason is the completely ridiculous events that are happening in the world, such as the Dobbs decision, climate change, the Covid pandemic. This is something we need to talk about as a way to help our teenagers so they don’t limit their access to information,” he said.