Latest Congressional Effort on Kids Online Safety Is All Pain, No Gain – Inside Sources

The House of Representatives recently passed the KIDS Act, a bill taken from 14 proposals that claim to protect children from online harms. Unfortunately, the measure includes worrying trade-offs for all Americans’ privacy, data security and access to speech. 

Before the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act becomes law, Americans should consider whether those trade-offs are necessary, given that the vast majority of the bill’s touted benefits can already be achieved by families using parental controls available on their smartphones, tablets and laptops.

“There are no solutions, only trade-offs,” so the oft-quoted Thomas Sowell saying goes. The claimed “solutions” for keeping kids safe online in the KIDS Act come at the cost of the privacy and security of Americans of every age. For example, the act raised the legal liability threshold for a company regarding a user’s age. To keep a flood of lawsuits at bay, online companies will have to be virtually certain of their users’ ages. 

There are various ways to do that using metadata, behavioral cues and self-declared birthdates, but these methods are not always accurate. So, while the legislation never explicitly calls for government age verification, the increase in liability risk will likely be enough to force companies’ hands in requiring government identification from users.

Because society doesn’t give out government IDs to kids to prove they are not adults, that means adults will likely have to produce their government IDs or agree to biometric scanning to prove instead that they are not minors. That de facto age verification will be a rational decision for companies that fear crippling liability in court. 

In practice, it will also be the end of much anonymous speech (a proud tradition in this country) and will put Americans’ privacy and security at serious risk. Data breaches are already common online, and the collection of age-verification data makes a juicy target for hackers.

Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” describing anecdotal and correlational (but not causal) harms to kids from being online, has sold millions of copies and ignited a global conversation about potential harm to kids in the digital world. A recent Pew Research Center survey shows majority enthusiasm for regulating, and even banning, social media for kids. Every generation has its own moral panic, often driven by new technologies, but fears around kids online might not be as straightforward as some suppose.

A previous Pew report shows that 95 percent of American teens have, or have access to, a smartphone. Parents surely have concerns about their kids’ online lives, but apparently not enough to refuse to spend hundreds of dollars on a smartphone and to proactively pay carrier costs every month to keep them online. That’s what economists call a “revealed preference,” a theory stating that the best way to determine what a consumer truly values is to observe their actual purchasing choices, rather than relying on what they say they prefer. In laymen’s terms, actions speak louder than words.

That almost every family in America has chosen to give their child access to a smartphone suggests that the solution to keeping those kids safe online is more nuanced than bans or one-size-fits-all regulations can address. Happily, that solution already exists. And it exists within the same locus of authority as the decision to give them a phone in the first place: with parents.

Parental controls are built into all smartphones and integrated into every level of the tech stack. There are additional safeguards in popular apps and add-on services that can further empower parents. Most of the design-change features mandated by the KIDS Act can already be addressed by these tools, including auto-play and infinite scrolling.

As action on this issue moves to the other side of the Capitol, it’s important to note what isn’t included in the House version of the KIDS Act. The Senate has its own version of online child safety legislation, with an even more punitive “duty or care” provision that the House declined to include. It makes technology companies liable for minors’ eating disorders, suicidal behaviors and substance abuse, among other mental health disorders, based on the design of their online products.

Early reports indicate Senate sponsors are not inclined to accept the House version.

Both chambers’ plans are poor substitutes for parental authority and come with harms to privacy, security and adult access to online speech. Each family deciding what’s best for their children is the best solution with the fewest trade-offs. No act of Congress needed.