Senate Commerce Should Reject Bills Jeopardizing Online Safety for Kids and Adults (CDT)

For example, KOSA requires online services to limit by default minors’ ability to communicate with other users and to enable a parent or caregiver account to manage their child’s privacy and account settings. These sorts of settings would not be appropriate to apply to adult users’ accounts, as they would limit key functionality for adult users and put adults’ privacy and safety at risk by giving another user the ability to control their communications. Applying these sorts of restrictive settings only to the accounts of minors, and not all users, will require online service providers to collect additional data from all users, in order to distinguish adults from minors.

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COPPA 2.0 presents similar age verification and privacy issues. It applies to websites that are directed to children (under the age of 13) and teens (between 13 and 16 years old), or are reasonably likely to be used by children and teens. Under the original COPPA, the distinction between websites directed to *young* children and other websites was at least somewhat clear (think Dora the Explorer versus a sports drink website). If COPPA 2.0 passes, that distinction will be much less clear because 16-year-olds engage with almost all of the internet.