Arkansas State Legislature’s Youth Safety Online Bill is Misguided

Arkansas state legislators are currently considering legislation that would aim to strengthen child safety online. By all accounts, this is a well-intended piece of legislation that seeks to protect Arkansan children from the deepest, darkest sections of the internet. However, this bill would have unfortunate consequences for individual privacy while only applying to a select few social media companies.

The culprit bill – SB 396 – would place awkward constraints on social media users and companies, seeking to enforce age verification for minors, parental consent to use the platform, and a private right-of-action as an enforcement mechanism.

Beyond these new regulatory burdens and the giveaway to trial lawyers to pursue frivolous claims, the legislation unfortunately carves out wide swaths of where all internet users (children included) spend most of their time. For example, under the bill Meta would be covered while YouTube, a larger website in terms of average monthly users, would not be affected despite similar social media features.

Age verification is one way this bill attempts to reign in the dangers of youth online activity. However, this is easier said than done. Age verification would be overly burdensome to legal users without the necessary identification as well as companies tasked with collecting and verifying this sensitive data. The requirement also backfires in terms of privacy, forcing companies to collect and screen even more sensitive data about users, children included, than they already do.

Establishing parental consent or controls may be duplicative at best and impossible at worst. Many of these social media companies, in addition to device manufacturers and operating system and browser providers, already have parental controls in place. Also, the requirements to verify an immediate family member are ill-defined and inherently require companies to collect effectively double the amount of data about youth users.

The bill text insists that users will be required to have a “digitized identification card” that would be verified by a third party. Again, this forces users (particularly young users without the need for driver’s licenses), to hand over more sensitive data and then concentrates it in a way that creates a lucrative target for cybercriminals. Look no further than the recent breach of Washington, DC’s healthcare exchange for an example of concentrating sensitive personal data in one place.

Youth safety online is pertinent to a safer internet. However, SB 396 misses the mark. Rather than educating parents about the safety controls that social media companies, device manufacturers, and browser providers already offer, this bill makes the choice for them on which companies should have these controls. The bill targets a few very specific companies while leaving out most of the places where internet users spend the bulk of their time. This is analogous to age verifying purchasers of liquor, but not beer and wine.

The time and resources of Arkansas taxpayers would be better suited educating and encouraging families to utilize the plethora of tools already available to them to protect their children online.