President Joe Biden will address the nation Tuesday night in his second State of the Union address in his term. The president is expected to discuss children’s online safety issues and data privacy, according to a release from the White House.
According to the briefing, Biden will call on bipartisan lawmakers to ban ads that target young people and protect children’s privacy, health and safety. The president also plans to voice his support for imposing stronger transparency requirements on technology companies that collect user data.
These points are almost identical to Biden’s comments last year. In a 2022 speech, Biden emphasized the mental health impact her media has on children and her teens. Mr. Biden especially nodded at the massive document leak of Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen. I have indicated that I am interested in defending her.
As a result of these hearings, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) appeared to be ticking a box on Biden’s policy proposal last year. introduced the law (KOSA). Of all the potential online safety laws, KOSA seems the most likely to gain traction.
The bill would require social media companies to provide users under the age of 16 with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features, and opt out of algorithmic recommendations. Giving parents more control over their children’s social media use. Require social media platforms to conduct annual independent audits to assess their risks to minors. We also enable academics and public interest groups to use Company data to inform research on children’s Internet safety.
Before the new year, Blumenthal and Blackburn made a concerted push to pass KOSA as part of a $1.7 trillion blanket appropriations bill, but without success.
In November, more than 90 organizations, including the ACLU, GLAAD, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), signed an open letter outlining the unintended negative effects of the law. Among other things, the letter states that KOSA may be required to use age and identity verification technology on any service that may be used by minors.
“Age verification may require users to provide personally identifiable information to the platform, such as date of birth and government-issued identification, which threatens user privacy, including the risk of data breaches. It is possible,” the letter said. “Congress will pass comprehensive privacy legislation, rather than age-restricted privacy settings and safety tools that apply only to minors, so that all users, regardless of age, can benefit from strong privacy protections. We should focus on getting it.”
Already, technological policies that force online age verification have created a culture of surveillance. In Louisiana, Pornhub complies with state law and requires visitors to verify their age using a state-run identity verification app.
According to the EFF, KOSA may ask platforms such as Apple’s iMessage, Signal, web browsers, email, VPNs and social platforms to collect more user data. This is the exact opposite of what the law is intended to do.
“Perhaps even worse, this bill would allow individual state attorneys general to decide which topics pose a risk to the physical and mental health of minors, and by default, online services would It allows us to force removal and blocking of access to that material,” the EFF wrote in an online petition. “This is not safe. It’s censored.”
A November open letter specifically describes how KOSA can be used to limit access to sex education and mental health resources for LGBTQ+ youth. After the bill’s amendments, the ACLU, EFF, and five other groups issued another letter saying that even with the new language, KOSA could still “profoundly threaten the lives and rights of LGBTQ youth.” has been issued. The letter also expressed concerns about how end-to-end encryption would be affected, among other privacy technologies.
Biden’s call for changes to the State of the Union address is only as strong as the rest of the government will allow. But later this month, the Supreme Court will hear claims in a case against Google that could affect Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a claim that could significantly affect how people use the Internet.
