{"id":19443,"date":"2022-11-28T23:26:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-28T23:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/11\/28\/over-90-organizations-tell-congress-not-to-support-dangerous-kids-online-safety-bill\/"},"modified":"2022-11-28T23:26:00","modified_gmt":"2022-11-28T23:26:00","slug":"over-90-organizations-tell-congress-not-to-support-dangerous-kids-online-safety-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/11\/28\/over-90-organizations-tell-congress-not-to-support-dangerous-kids-online-safety-bill\/","title":{"rendered":"Over 90 Organizations Tell Congress Not To Support Dangerous \u2018Kids Online Safety\u2019 Bill"},"content":{"rendered":"

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from the it’s-not-for-kids-and-it’s-not-about-safety<\/i> dept<\/h3>\n

We\u2019ve written a number of posts about the problems of KOSA<\/a>, the Kids Online Safety Act<\/a> from Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn (both of whom have fairly long and detailed histories for pushing anti-internet legislation). As with many \u201cprotect the children\u201d or \u201cbut think of the children!\u201d kinds of legislation, KOSA is built around moral panics and nonsense, blaming the internet any time anything bad happens, and insisting that if only this bill were in place, somehow, magically, internet companies would stop bad stuff from happening. It\u2019s fantasyland thinking, and we need to stop electing politicians who live in fantasyland.<\/p>\n

KOSA itself has not had any serious debate in Congress, nor been voted out of committee. And yet, there Blumenthal admitted he was was actively seeking<\/a> to get it included in one of the \u201cmust pass\u201d year end omnibus bills. When pressed about this, we heard from Senate staffers that they hadn\u2019t heard much \u201copposition\u201d to the bill, so they figured there was no reason to stop it from moving forward. Of course, that leaves out the reality: the opposition wasn\u2019t that loud because there hadn\u2019t been any real public opportunity to debate the bill, and since until a few weeks ago it didn\u2019t appear to be moving forward, everyone was spending their time trying to fend off other<\/em> awful bills.<\/p>\n

But, if supporters insist there\u2019s no opposition, well, now they need to contend with this. A coalition of over 90 organizations has sent a letter to Congress<\/a> this morning explaining why KOSA is not just half-baked and not ready for prime time, but that it\u2019s so poorly thought out and drafted that it will be actively harmful to many children.<\/p>\n

Notably, signatories on the letter \u2014 which include our own Copia Institute \u2014 also include the ACLU, EFF, the American Library Association and many more. It also includes many organizations who do tremendous work actually<\/em> fighting to protect children, rather than pushing for showboating legislation that pretends to help children while actually doing tremendous harm.<\/p>\n

I actually think the letter pulls some punches and doesn\u2019t go far enough in explaining just how dangerous KOSA can be for kids, but it does include some hints of how bad it can be. For example, it mandates parental controls, which may be reasonable in some circumstances for younger kids, but KOSA covers teenagers as well, where this becomes a lot more problematic:<\/p>\n

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\nWhile parental control tools can be important safeguards for helping
\nyoung children learn to navigate the Internet, KOSA would cover older minors as well, and
\nwould have the practical effect of enabling parental surveillance of 15- and 16-year-olds. Older
\nminors have their own independent rights to privacy and access to information, and not every
\nparent-child dynamic is healthy or constructive. KOSA risks subjecting teens who are
\nexperiencing domestic violence and parental abuse to additional forms of digital surveillance
\nand control that could prevent these vulnerable youth from reaching out for help or support. And
\nby creating strong incentives to filter and enable parental control over the content minors can
\naccess, KOSA could also jeopardize young people\u2019s access to end-to-end encrypted
\ntechnologies, which they depend on to access resources related to mental health<\/a> and to keep
\ntheir data safe from bad actors<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The letter further highlights how the vague \u201cduty of care\u201d standard in the bill will be read to require filters for most online services, but we all know how filters work out in practice. And it\u2019s not good:<\/p>\n

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\nKOSA establishes a burdensome, vague \u201cduty of care\u201d to prevent harms to minors for a broad
\nrange of online services that are reasonably likely to be used by a person under the age of 17.
\nWhile KOSA\u2019s aims of preventing harassment, exploitation, and mental health trauma for minors
\nare laudable, the legislation is unfortunately likely to have damaging unintended consequences
\nfor young people. KOSA would require online services to \u201cprevent\u201d a set of harms to minors,
\nwhich is effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors\u2019 access to
\ncertain online content. Content filtering is notoriously imprecise; filtering used by schools<\/a> and
\nlibraries in response to the Children\u2019s Internet Protection Act has curtailed access to critical
\ninformation such as sex education or resources for LGBTQ+ youth<\/a>. Online services would face
\nsubstantial pressure to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make
\npolitical points about what kind of information is appropriate<\/a> for young people. At a time when
\nbooks with LGBTQ+ themes are being banned from school libraries<\/a> and people providing
\nhealthcare to trans children are being falsely accused of \u201cgrooming<\/a>,\u201d KOSA would cut off
\nanother vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And we haven\u2019t even gotten to the normalizing-surveillance and diminishing-privacy aspects of KOSA:<\/p>\n

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\nMoreover, KOSA would counter-intuitively encourage platforms to collect more personal
\ninformation about all users. KOSA would require platforms \u201creasonably likely to be used\u201d by
\nanyone under the age of 17\u2014in practice, virtually all online services\u2014to place some stringent
\nlimits on minors\u2019 use of their service, including restricting the ability of other users to find a
\nminor\u2019s account and limiting features such as notifications that could increase the minor\u2019s use of
\nthe service. However sensible these features might be for young children, they would also
\nfundamentally undermine the utility of messaging apps, social media, dating apps, and other
\ncommunications services used by adults. Service providers will thus face strong incentives to
\nemploy age verification techniques to distinguish adult from minor users, in order to apply these
\nstrict limits only to young people\u2019s accounts. Age verification may require users to provide
\nplatforms with personally identifiable information such as date of birth and government-issued
\nidentification documents, which can threaten users\u2019 privacy, including through the risk of data
\nbreaches, and chill their willingness to access sensitive information online because they cannot
\ndo so anonymously. Rather than age-gating privacy settings and safety tools to apply only to
\nminors, Congress should focus on ensuring that all users, regardless of age, benefit from strong
\nprivacy protections by passing comprehensive privacy legislation.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s even more in the letter, and Congress can no longer say there\u2019s no opposition to the bill. At the very least, sponsors of the bill (hey, Senator Blumenthal!) should be forced to respond to these many issues, rather than just spouting silly platitudes about how we \u201cmust protect the children\u201d when his bill will do the exact opposite.<\/p>\n