Over 90 Organizations Tell Congress Not To Support Dangerous ‘Kids Online Safety’ Bill
from the it's-not-for-kids-and-it's-not-about-safety dept
We’ve written a number of posts about the problems of KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act from Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn (both of whom have fairly long and detailed histories for pushing anti-internet legislation). As with many “protect the children” or “but think of the children!” 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’s fantasyland thinking, and we need to stop electing politicians who live in fantasyland.
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 to get it included in one of the “must pass” year end omnibus bills. When pressed about this, we heard from Senate staffers that they hadn’t heard much “opposition” 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’t that loud because there hadn’t been any real public opportunity to debate the bill, and since until a few weeks ago it didn’t appear to be moving forward, everyone was spending their time trying to fend off other awful bills.
But, if supporters insist there’s no opposition, well, now they need to contend with this. A coalition of over 90 organizations has sent a letter to Congress this morning explaining why KOSA is not just half-baked and not ready for prime time, but that it’s so poorly thought out and drafted that it will be actively harmful to many children.
Notably, signatories on the letter — which include our own Copia Institute — also include the ACLU, EFF, the American Library Association and many more. It also includes many organizations who do tremendous work actually fighting to protect children, rather than pushing for showboating legislation that pretends to help children while actually doing tremendous harm.
I actually think the letter pulls some punches and doesn’t 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:
While parental control tools can be important safeguards for helping young children learn to navigate the Internet, KOSA would cover older minors as well, and would have the practical effect of enabling parental surveillance of 15- and 16-year-olds. Older minors have their own independent rights to privacy and access to information, and not every parent-child dynamic is healthy or constructive. KOSA risks subjecting teens who are experiencing domestic violence and parental abuse to additional forms of digital surveillance and control that could prevent these vulnerable youth from reaching out for help or support. And by creating strong incentives to filter and enable parental control over the content minors can access, KOSA could also jeopardize young people’s access to end-to-end encrypted technologies, which they depend on to access resources related to mental health and to keep their data safe from bad actors.
The letter further highlights how the vague “duty of care” 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’s not good:
KOSA establishes a burdensome, vague “duty of care” to prevent harms to minors for a broad range of online services that are reasonably likely to be used by a person under the age of 17. While KOSA’s aims of preventing harassment, exploitation, and mental health trauma for minors are laudable, the legislation is unfortunately likely to have damaging unintended consequences for young people. KOSA would require online services to “prevent” a set of harms to minors, which is effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content. Content filtering is notoriously imprecise; filtering used by schools and libraries in response to the Children’s Internet Protection Act has curtailed access to critical information such as sex education or resources for LGBTQ+ youth. Online services would face substantial pressure to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make political points about what kind of information is appropriate for young people. At a time when books with LGBTQ+ themes are being banned from school libraries and people providing healthcare to trans children are being falsely accused of “grooming,” KOSA would cut off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.
And we haven’t even gotten to the normalizing-surveillance and diminishing-privacy aspects of KOSA:
Moreover, KOSA would counter-intuitively encourage platforms to collect more personal information about all users. KOSA would require platforms “reasonably likely to be used” by anyone under the age of 17—in practice, virtually all online services—to place some stringent limits on minors’ use of their service, including restricting the ability of other users to find a minor’s account and limiting features such as notifications that could increase the minor’s use of the service. However sensible these features might be for young children, they would also fundamentally undermine the utility of messaging apps, social media, dating apps, and other communications services used by adults. Service providers will thus face strong incentives to employ age verification techniques to distinguish adult from minor users, in order to apply these strict limits only to young people’s accounts. Age verification may require users to provide platforms with personally identifiable information such as date of birth and government-issued identification documents, which can threaten users’ privacy, including through the risk of data breaches, and chill their willingness to access sensitive information online because they cannot do so anonymously. Rather than age-gating privacy settings and safety tools to apply only to minors, Congress should focus on ensuring that all users, regardless of age, benefit from strong privacy protections by passing comprehensive privacy legislation.
There’s even more in the letter, and Congress can no longer say there’s 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 “must protect the children” when his bill will do the exact opposite.
Filed Under: filters, for the children, kosa, online safety, parents, privacy, richard blumenthal, surveillance
Comments on “Over 90 Organizations Tell Congress Not To Support Dangerous ‘Kids Online Safety’ Bill”
A Keister Leaves NY at 55 mph Going West......
Keisters obviously support anything
Is it obvious yet that the Internet covers so many countries that toxifying content is not a new tactic?
I believe I read today where China ramped up spam bots to cover protest posts by deploying pR0n and other dubious content.
The generational divide has become more than obvious with outdated swirld views.
If age verification becomes mandatory, how many companies would use that to require account creation using your real name, verified by credit card details?
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Thing is age verification is a pretty big mess and hard to enforce.
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At the beginning of November, there were several articles in the UK about their scheme to support age verification methods.
“UK’s Department for Education Gave Student Data to Gambling Industry”
So many industries sending birthday cards when they come of age that way.
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Meaning… I would have to get a credit card?
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If age verification becomes real using those criteria, how many poor people without credit good enough to get a credit card will be blocked from using important sites, and how many kids will use their parents’ card without their knowledge?
Age verification only works if you can both guarantee that adults have an ID that can be verified online and that the person entering the ID is the person they’re claiming to be. There’s many layers of complexity, which the “for the children” idiots don’t even being to start to think about.
Re: Re: 'Doing Something', the political version of air guitar
There’s many layers of complexity, which the “for the children” idiots don’t even being to start to think about.
Because by and large while I’m sure there’s the occasional gullible but well-meaning politician involved for the most part the entire point of ‘Won’t someone think of the children?!’ bills isn’t actually to solve real problems but for the politician(s) involved to Be Seen Doing Something.
How the stated goals will be accomplished, the bill implemented or how much damage will result from it is of no matter to them because that’s past the point where they’ve gotten what they wanted from the process and therefore past where they stopped caring.
Hopefully Ron Wyden and others are aware of this bill, Can not see him supporting this bill in its current state let alone let in be fact tracked into a must pass bill.
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Wyden doesn’t appear to be aware of this bill, he’s been dropping the ball on stopping bs like this and if kosa, earn it, etc are part of riders it’s unlikely he’ll stop their passage.
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Seems he is aware of it and he also the finance chairman so he may get the final say as to what goes into the spending bill.
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Did he state that recently because I’m not seeing it.
reality sucks, if you can see it
The Thinking that BAd things Abound MORE on the internet then in real life, really confuses me.
Just cause you cant see something dont mean its not there in the first place.
What CAN the internet do, to help? Well, you can listen to the children with that Smart phone, and Chat/forum/??? and See what may be happening, rather then NOT seeing it, because you LOCKED down access to certain ages and peoples.
This is Means allot when you look back to ‘backpage’ on the internet. Who were helping cops do a job. Then had to Shut down.
Do you THINK Prostitution or ADULT dating sites went away? NOPE.
There was a threat put out to ADULT sites, about Illegal material. And if Any was found on those sites, They would take over the banking accounts, and Force Credit card corps NOT to deal with them. Many sites Disappeared or went underground.
OR they went back to Magazines and Private access.
Do you THINK its not there?
Senator Cantwell saw the letter and I bet did not open it
Unless your a military lobbying group, senator cantwell could care less. I bet she sneaks it into the omnibus bill anyway. Senator Cantwell is a democrat who opposes what her donors oppose which is no privacy for the little guy. Hope I am wrong but remember this is Senator Maria Cantwell from The state of Washington. Down there Democrats are actually Republicans and support most of there causes unless it’s about abortion.
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DKO Closed Beta Soon
Dangerous Kids Online sounds like it should be a MMO, not a piece of legislation. But I would probably check out if it was F2P.
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Maybe it’s an anime about a dystopian MMO.
Privacy is at the heart of Age Verification
The essence of age verification is being able to prove your age online, without giving away your identity to the platform you are accessing. By using regulated third-party providers, users are able to prove their age once, and then use that same check across multiple sites. The AV provider only confirms to the website if a user is old enough, or young enough, to access their content and verification providers do not need to retain any personally identifiable information and can even complete an age check using just a selfie image, which is immediately deleted. The best solution is provide estimates within 1.5 years of the real age which, for most purposes is considered accurate enough by regulators, who take a proportional attitude