Several states have passed laws that will require parental consent for app store downloads, ban the collection and sale of children’s online data—including precise geolocation information—and implement what advocates of the legislation have called “privacy-by-default” safeguards.
“There is strong bipartisan support and recognition that social media is a source of harm,” Bracewell’s Lucy Porter told S&P Global. “What ultimately these laws have at their root is an attempt to prevent or shield those children from those harms.”
At the federal level, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) remains in limbo after being modified into several different iterations. The current iteration of KOSA allows for states to be more restrictive in requiring companies to step up and mitigate potential harms, Porter said.
“They’re certainly all coming from a place of, ‘we have this thing that society has decided is a problem, and therefore, how can we attempt to solve it?’” Porter said. “And so they’re going to try to solve it in a bunch of different ways, and that’s what these laws are trying to do.”
