Proposed legislation could shield children and teens from potentially dangerous online content, but may come at the price of their data privacy and access to information.
Two bills that propose new guardrails for children’s and teens’ safety in digital spaces are going to a vote in the US Senate. It’s a major development in young people’s online safety – an ongoing priority for the Biden administration.
However, the development holds complicated implications for privacy and online advertising, as new safety mechanisms could potentially mean a reduction in young people’s data rights and new restrictions on online content, experts say.
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Though an amendment to Kosa clarifies that the bill will not require online services to perform age verification, critics have said that the structure of the bill makes age verification difficult to get around. “Platforms would either need to implement age verification mechanisms that require incremental data collection – like IDs, biometrics – or would be forced to remove content generally, impacting adult users as well,” explains Arielle Garcia, chief privacy and responsibility officer at IPG-owned ad agency UM Worldwide.
Read more in The Drum.