Is Your State’s Child Safety Law Unconstitutional? Try Comprehensive Data Privacy Instead

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Comprehensive data privacy legislation is the best way to hold tech companies accountable in our surveillance age, including for harm they do to children. Well-written privacy legislation has the added benefit of being constitutional—unlike the flurry of laws that restrict content behind age verification requirements that courts have recently blocked. Such misguided laws do little to protect kids while doing much to invade everyone’s privacy and speech.

Courts have issued preliminary injunctions blocking laws in Arkansas, California, and Texas because they likely violate the First Amendment rights of all internet users. EFF has warned that such laws were bad policy and would not withstand court challenges. Nonetheless, different iterations of these child safety proposals continue to be pushed at the state and federal level.

The answer is to re-focus attention on comprehensive data privacy legislation, which would address the massive collection and processing of personal data that is the root cause of many problems online. Just as important, it is far easier to write data privacy laws that are constitutional. Laws that lock online content behind age gates can almost never withstand First Amendment scrutiny because they frustrate all internet users’ rights to access information and often impinge on people’s right to anonymity.

It Is Comparatively Easy to Write Data Privacy Laws That Are Constitut

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Is Your State’s Child Safety Law Unconstitutional? Try Comprehensive Data Privacy Instead