CDT Comments to NTIA Task Force on Kids Online Health & Safety Urge Protection of Rights

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) submitted these comments in response to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) request for comments regarding efforts to protect youth mental health, safety, and privacy online.

Protecting children online is a critical priority. But that goal must be pursued in a manner that does not cause more harm than it brings benefits. Some proposals, while well-intentioned, may jeopardize the safety and well-being of the youth they are intended to protect and undermine their rights and those of adults.

These comments discuss four ways in which initiatives to protect children can undermine the safety, well-being, and rights of all users, adults and children alike, and impede services offered by educational institutions:

• Approaches to children’s safety should not legitimize or facilitate content-based restrictions. Many approaches to protecting young children rest on the premise that certain types of content are harmful to children. Studies are divided regarding the impacts of online content on children and the question of what the right solutions to protect children should be. What is certain is that baking this principle into law and imposing a legal obligation on online service providers to filter out potentially harmful content under the threat of liability will create incentives for online services to err on the side of caution and over-filter content, undermining the right to free expression and minors’ access to information. In past instances, for example, filtering technology has led to lawful content related to LGBTQ+ identity being over-removed impeding all users’ ability to seek important information. 

• Expanding surveillance of young people by parents and through the use of school monitoring systems will undermine young people’s rights, particularly teens’ right to privacy. Teenagers, especially older teens aged 15 and 16, have a reasonable need for privacy and private channels through which to access and exchange information. However, mandating the availability of parental surveillance mechanisms and student activity monitoring systems undermines young peoples’ ability to seek information securely and leads to decreased teen independence, which researchers say correlates with negative mental health consequences. Additionally, surveys of educators and students conducted by CDT found that overbroad use of student activity monitoring systems led to increased encounters with law enforcement for young people of color and inadvertent outings of LGBTQ+ teens.

• Explicit or implicit age verification or assurance requirements to determine which users are children can undermine the privacy of minors and adults by mandating more data collection and potentially violating the right to speak and access information anonymously. Approaches to estimate and/or verify the ages of all users to identify child users will require further data collection and processing for children and adults alike and eliminate the ability for all users to seek information anonymously. Further, age estimation and identity verification systems can have discriminatory effects.  For example, facial analysis methods to estimate age may perform poorer on faces with different morphologies due to cognitive or physical disabilities, trans and non-binary faces, and non-white faces. 

• Efforts to protect children should account for the unique needs of educational institutions. Schools and other educational institutions, including vendors of education technology, should not be treated the same as commercial actors so as not to inadvertently undermine educational services. Subjecting education providers and local education agencies to certain privacy provisions such as data deletion rights and data minimization protections may inadvertently undermine education service delivery by, for example, enabling parents to delete their children’s grades or attendance records. 

NTIA should recommend and advance proactive approaches to protecting young people online that avoid these pitfalls. These include:

• Establishing comprehensive federal privacy protections to protect children as well as adults;
• Promoting the development and deployment of user tools that empower young people online and help them shape their online experiences;
• Investing in more research to better understand the harms different groups of minors face online and the causes of those harms; and
• Developing dynamic and age-appropriate education and digital literacy initiatives to equip young users with the knowledge and responsible use practices to help them navigate the digital ecosystem.

Read the full comments here.

With contributions from Nick Doty, Maddy Dwyer, Kate Ruane, and Elizabeth Whatcott.