While kids’ online safety remains a priority for policymakers and parents alike, Congress has yet to agree on federal kids online safety legislation. In a new insight, Director of Technology and Innovation Policy Nick Krosse discusses how the most popular federal legislative proposals would lead to age verification mandates with inherent privacy, speech, and innovation tradeoffs—as well as how industry has provided parental control solutions that may yield the desired protections without these tradeoffs.

Key points:

• Several bills have been introduced in Congress that would change standards for how much digital platforms need to know about the age of users.
• Changing these “knowledge standards” to presume platforms know more about user age would likely lead platforms to engage in identity verification of their users to minimize liability, creating new privacy risks for both minor and adult users as an unintended consequence; they would also redirect industry efforts already underway to increase kids’ safety features on platforms.
• As the House and Senate consider different legislative packages that would effectively require age verification for various platforms, policymakers should consider the tradeoffs for privacy, speech, and innovation that heightened knowledge presumptions and age verification mandates would create for users and platforms.

Read the analysis.