The decision by a federal judge on Monday to strike down a California law designed to reduce children’s exposure to harmful content online could have far-reaching implications, according to privacy and technology experts, setting up debate over how to define harm and determining at what point it overrides the First Amendment.
The ruling on the law, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code (CAADC), is considered particularly significant because the judge took issue with nearly all aspects of the law on First Amendment grounds. It also comes as Congress is negotiating the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which contains similar provisions.
The California case “no matter what will be appealed to the Supreme Court,” Eric Goldman, a law professor who is co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, told Recorded Future News in an interview. Goldman’s scholarship was cited throughout the court decision.
Age-appropriate design laws typically require online services targeted to children not to expose them to harmful content; not to design for compulsive use of their content; to estimate the age of child users with reasonable certainty; and to minimize the collection or use of children’s data among other things.
Five state legislatures have enacted bills focused on children’s online safety and age verification requirements in recent months, often as part of broader comprehensive data privacy bills, according to a tracker created by the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF). Three states, including California, have passed laws more focused on age-appropriate design.
Experts and advocates say the California law’s fate could lead to a domino effect impacting the other laws.
Both Connecticut and Florida included provisions that “appeared to be inspired by the AADC in their broader consumer privacy laws,” FPF Senior Counsel Bailey Sanchez and FPF Fellow Jordan Francis wrote in a newsletter.
The report noted that “both states’ laws contain several other provisions flagged by the [California] Court, so we will be watching how this holding influences the broader children’s online privacy and safety legislative landscape.”
While it is unclear whether Congress will consider the California decision as KOSA continues to be debated, Sanchez said KOSA’s focus on platform design resembles CAADC.
There’s little difference between placing children in front of a school thats targeted to be bombed, and taking away citizens’ freedom to “protect the children”. They don’t care about the children. They are just using them to further their objectives.