Privacy Digest

The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog: "Today's decision in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania again striking down the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 has important implications for the ongoing debate over age verification for social networking websites.

As I mentioned in an essay earlier this week, several state attorneys general (AGs) are currently pushing legislation to mandate age verification of minors before they would be allowed access to social networking sites. Already, age verification proposals have been introduced in Connecticut, Georgia and North Carolina. More proposals are likely on the way. AGs and other policy makers argue that age verification is necessary to protect kids from cyber-predators and other online dangers.

In my new paper, 'Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions' I find that proposals to impose age verification mandates on social networking websites raise many sensitive questions with potentially profound implications for individual privacy and online freedom of speech and expression. That's especially the case in light of the definitional ambiguities associated with 'social networking.'

Today's COPA decision bolsters many of the findings in my paper. 'Requiring users to go through an age verification process would lead to a distinct loss of personal privacy,' Judge Lowell Reed Jr. says on page 55 of the decision. And his other conclusions are also relevant to the debate over social networking regulation.

Of particular importance is Judge Reed's conclusion that 'there is no evidence of age verification services or products available on the market to owners of Web sites that actually reliably establish or verify the age of Internet users. Nor is there evidence of such services or products that can effectively prevent access to Web pages by a minor.' (p. 44)

"

(Via The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog.)