In her latest Huffington Post column, CDT President Leslie Harris argues against current moves to expand the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) to include teens up to 17-years-old. As the law stands, only 12-and-under are covered.
COPPA, on the books now for a dozen years, has done yeoman like work in helping parents control what information is collected from their kids when they are online. Websites with content dedicated to children must follow COPPA rules, which includes gaining parental consent. However, extending those provisions "is unworkable and unwise. And because teenagers have independent rights to access information, any such law would ultimately run afoul of constitutional protections as well," Harris writes in Huffington Post.
COPPA is doing its job; there is no need to pop the hood and tinker with the law. The expansion effort is well intentioned, but the solution is shot through with privacy and free speech problems. The best move at this time can be summed up in a borrowed line from the iconic rock group Pink Floyd: "Leave them kids alone."
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.
