Beyond Bright Shiny Objects: Situating Children’s Privacy within a Comprehensive Privacy Framework
Washington is experiencing a “Privacy Spring”: the online privacy debate has been rejuvenated and for the first time in over a decade, privacy is back on the policy table. Both the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Commerce have issued reports setting out robust frameworks for privacy protections, bills are being introduced in Congress, and the Obama Administration has announced support for baseline privacy legislation.
Not surprisingly, teenagers have become a focal point of the current debate over online privacy, tracking, and advertising. Thirteen years ago, concern about online collection of children’s personal information led to the enactment of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Now, children’s advocates and policy makers have a more complex set of concerns: data-sharing by teens on social networking sites, behavioral advertising, data collection by mobile applications, and advertising campaigns aimed at teens that offer prizes and gifts in return for personal data. These concerns have prompted a raft of new proposals to address the perceived shortcomings of COPPA, including its application only to children under 13. Proposals have ranged from an expansion of the COPPA age to cover older minors under 18, a Do Not Track (DNT) law for kids, and a Fair Information Practices (FIPs) law that addresses the collection and use of teens’ data.
In this piece, I argue that that the drive for additional child and/or teen specific privacy laws is counterproductive and threatens to divert policy makers from the urgent task of enacting a comprehensive baseline privacy law for all Americans. Concerns about teen privacy will best be addressed through a strong comprehensive privacy law that requires adherence to Fair Information Practices by all commercial entities, including advertisers, that collect and use personal data.
Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
