Kids online safety legislation could soon get a Wisconsin Senate floor vote. About eight months after AB-105 passed the Assembly, the age-verification bill received a green light Wednesday from the Senate Mental Health Committee.
State laws that require age verification to access adult websites fail a constitutional cost-benefit analysis and are easy to circumvent, particularly for teens, according to a study by free-market think tank Phoenix Center.
Opponents of social media age-verification requirements Thursday cast a Michigan bill as outdated, bad for consumer privacy and likely to draw a lawsuit. However, at the Michigan House Regulatory Reform Committee hearing, sponsor Rep. Mark Tisdel (R) repeatedly said his legislation is meant to hammer home a critical concept: “Minors can’t consent.”
While age assurance is a useful tool to ensure children have appropriate access to the internet, it's not a silver bullet and must be implemented thoughtfully, a Google official and other privacy experts said during a Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) Monday.
Though the FTC is supposed to ensure “transparency and accountability,” it has fallen short during President Donald Trump’s second term, ex-Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter said during a "people's oversight" hearing hosted Wednesday by Public Knowledge. Another former FTC official during Trump's first term, Bilal Sayyed, said the agency's decline began during the Biden administration and has continued.
The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), k-ID and other stakeholders launched the OpenAge Initiative to develop an open standard for privacy-preserving age assurance, OpenAge announced Monday.
The European Commission, Australian eSafety Commissioner and U.K. Office of Communications will collaborate to boost child safety on digital platforms, they announced Friday.
The California Privacy Protection Agency is exploring possible rulemakings in the categories of employee data, opt-out preference signals (OOPS), disclosures and notices and reducing friction exercising consumer privacy rights, CalPrivacy staff told the board at its Friday meeting. Unlike with the previous rulemaking package on automated decision-making technology and other subjects, the agency plans to “present more targeted recommendations addressing only one or two policy issues at a time,” said General Counsel Philip Laird.
A bill that would ban AI chatbots for minors and require age verification received a show of support from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and other senators in interviews Tuesday.
More than 30 data privacy regulators this week will examine websites and apps for potential children’s privacy violations, regulators said in posts Monday.