Category: World

New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner isn’t convinced that Australia’s incoming prohibition on social media accounts for users under 16 is a good idea. In a recent webinar hosted by IAPP, “Conversations on privacy in Aotearoa,” New Zealand Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster and Deputy Privacy Commissioner Liz MacPherson talk about the challenges facing regulators in the AI age, and weigh in on its neighbor’s controversial and closely-watched age verification law.

Webster raises privacy concerns about the so-called social media ban, noting that they impact everyone. “It’s not just children who are affected by something like an under-16 social media ban,” he says. “To prove your age, it affects every user.” It’s a fair point, which some appear to have struggled with in the rollout of the UK’s Online Safety Act: age assurance is intended to protect children, but adults have to do it, too.

Webster says New Zealand has the luxury of observing what policy work has already been done in other countries – Australia and elsewhere. He believes there should probably be more questions directed at the providers of social media platforms, “in terms of both the self-policing function and the undoubted need for some regulation around what happens with social media.”

Don’t make cigarettes out of free speech, says NetChoice

Across the pond in the U.S., tech lobby NetChoice continues to rattle its chains at legislators and their pesky age assurance laws. Its latest missive calls California’s AB 56, “a censorship provision requiring that online services become ‘roving censors for the state’ and display government-approved warning messages on their sites.”

The post also lashes out at AB 1043, which requires app stores to perform identity verification.

“NetChoice urged Gov. Newsom to veto AB 56 and AB 1043 and cautioned the legislature before passage that these bills are unconstitutional,” it says. However, it also lauds Newsom for vetoing three other provisions it didn’t like.

The group is also mounting active opposition in Colorado, where it has urged a federal judge to block a Colorado law set to take effect next year. HB 24-1136 is similar to California’s AB 56, in that it requires platforms to provide users under 18 with “information about social media that helps the user understand the impact of social media use on the developing brain and the mental and physical health of youth.”

MLex quotes lawyers for NetChoice, who say “Colorado wants to apply a cigarette-style warning to speech,” and argue that the compelled speech provision will not withstand judicial scrutiny.

Representatives for Colorado Attorney General Philip Weiser say the statute “only asks social media platforms to provide evidence-based research in the form of notices to its users that can be tailored to each platform.”

CCIA challenges Texas app store age check law

NetChoice is not the only industry group dealing out lawsuits. In Texas, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) is challenging Senate Bill 2420, which imposes age assurance requirements on app stores.

Specifically, says a report from KXAN, the bill says app stores must use “a commercially reasonable method to verify” a user’s age, and would “allow software to access age verification documents stored by an app store, provided it deletes them after verifying the user’s age.” Downloads and in-app purchases would require parental consent for those under 18.

In her statement of intent, the bill’s author, Senator Angela Paxton, writes that “app stores have touted that they already employ age verification, so this simply provides additional framework, transparency, and enforcement to protect the children of Texas.”

The CCIA says SB 2420 is a “misguided attempt to protect minors” and says a requirement on developers to set an age-rating for their product is “onerous.”

“Our Constitution forbids this,” says the lawsuit, dismissing the analogy with age verification in brick-and-mortar stores. “None of our laws require businesses to ‘card’ people before they can enter bookstores and shopping malls. The First Amendment prohibits such oppressive laws as much in cyberspace as it does in the physical world.”

The First Amendment has been a major crutch for NetChoice in its litigation blitz. The argument that age assurance technology is unconstitutional because it stifles free speech is easy to exploit, given the central role the First Amendment plays in the American psyche (and in current political discourse). It has been mustered to oppose age verification laws for pornographic websites and social media platforms. Now it’s being used to beat on warning labels and app store age checks.

Indeed, in its embrace of the First Amendment as a lobbying tool, NetChoice is an apt embodiment of the U.S. at this moment in time: an organization, backed by Silicon Valley, for which the only more sacred right in America than freedom of speech is the right to sue those you disagree with.