Tim Wu Asks Why Congress Keeps Failing To Protect Kids Online. The Answer Is That He’s Asking The Wrong Question

Overhype

from the wrong-question,-dumb-answer dept

While I often disagree with Tim Wu, I like and respect him, and always find it interesting to know what he has to say. Wu was also one of the earliest folks to give me feedback on my Protocols not Platforms paper, when he attended a roundtable at Columbia University discussing early drafts of the papers in that series.

Yet, quite frequently, he perplexes me. The latest is that he’s written up a piece for The Atlantic wondering “Why Congress Keeps Failing to Protect Kids Online.”

The case for legislative action is overwhelming. It is insanity to imagine that platforms, which see children and teenagers as target markets, will fix these problems themselves. Teenagers often act self-assured, but their still-developing brains are bad at self-control and vulnerable to exploitation. Youth need stronger privacy protections against the collection and distribution of their personal information, which can be used for targeting. In addition, the platforms need to be pushed to do more to prevent young girls and boys from being connected to sexual predators, or served content promoting eating disorders, substance abuse, or suicide. And the sites need to hire more staff whose job it is to respond to families under attack.

Of course, let’s start there. The “case for legislative action” is not, in fact, overwhelming. Worse, the case that the internet harms kids is… far from overwhelming. The case that it helps many kids is, actually, pretty overwhelming. We keep highlighting this, but the actual evidence does not, in any way, suggest that social media and the internet are “harming” kids. It actually says the opposite.

Let’s go over this again, because so many people want to ignore the hard facts:

• Last fall, the widely respected Pew Research Center did a massive study on kids and the internet, and found that for a majority of teens, social media was way more helpful than harmful.
• This past May, the American Psychological Association (which has fallen for tech moral panics in the past, such as with video games) released a huge, incredibly detailed, and nuanced report going through all of the evidence, and finding no causal link between social media and harms to teens.
• Soon after that, the US Surgeon General (in the same White House where Wu worked for a while) came out with a report which was misrepresented widely in the press. Yet, the details of that report also showed that no causal link could be found between social media and harms to teens. It did still recommend that we act as if there were a link, which was weird and explains the media coverage, but the actual report highlights no causal link, while also pointing out how much benefit teens receive from social media).
• A few months later, an Oxford University study came out covering nearly a million people across 72 countries, noting that it could find no evidence of social media leading to psychological harm.
• The Journal of Pediatrics just published a new study again noting that after looking through decades of research, the mental health epidemic faced among young people appears largely due to the lack of open spaces where kids can be kids without parents hovering over them. That report notes that they explored the idea that social media was a part of the problem, but could find no data to support that claim.

What most of these reports did note is that there is some evidence that for some very small percentage of the populace who are already dealing with other issues, those issues can be exacerbated by social media. Often, this is because the internet and social media become a crutch for those who are not receiving the help that they need elsewhere. However, far more common is that the internet is tremendously helpful for kids trying to figure out their own identity, to find people they feel comfortable around, and to learn about and discover the wider world.

So, already, the premise is problematic that the internet is inherently harmful for children. The data simply does not support that.

None of this means that we shouldn’t be open to ways to help those who really need it. Or that we shouldn’t be exploring better regulations for privacy protection (not just for kids, but for everyone). But this narrative that the internet is inherently harmful is simply not supported by the data, even as Wu and others seem to pretend it’s clear.

Wu does mention the horror stories he heard from some parents while he was in the White House. And those horror stories do exist. But most of those horror stories are similar to the rare, but still very real, horror stories facing kids offline as well. We should be looking for ways to deal with those rare but awful stories, but that doesn’t mean destroying all of the benefits of online services in the meantime.

And that brings us to the second problem with Wu’s setup here. He then pulls out the “something must be done, this is something, we should do this” approach to solving the problem he’s already misstated. In particular, he suggests that Congress should support KOSA:

A bolder approach to protecting children online sought to require that social-media platforms be safer for children, similar to what we require of other products that children use. In 2022 the most important such bill was the Kid’s Online Safety Act (KOSA), co-sponsored by Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Marcia Blackburn of Tennessee. KOSA came directly out of the Frances Haugen hearings in the summer of 2021, and particularly the revelation that social-media sites were serving content that promoted eating disorders, suicide, and substance abuse to teenagers. In an alarming demonstration, Blumenthal revealed that his office had created a test Instagram account for a 13-year-old girl, which was, within one day, served content promoting eating disorders. (Instagram has acknowledged that this is an ongoing issue on its site.)

The KOSA bill would have imposed a general duty on platforms to prevent and mitigate harms to children, specifically those stemming from self-harm, suicide, addictive behaviors, and eating disorders. It would have forced platforms to install safeguards to protect children and tools to enable parental supervision. In my view, the most important thing the bill would have done was simply force the platforms to spend more money and more ongoing attention on protecting children, or risk serious liability.

But KOSA became a casualty of the great American culture war. The law would give parents more control over what their children do and see online, which was enough for some groups to transform the whole thing into a fight over transgender issues. Some on the right, unhelpfully, argued that the law should be used to protect children from trans-related content. That triggered civil-rights groups, who took up the cause of teenage privacy and speech rights. A joint letter condemned KOSA for “enabl[ing] parental supervision of minors’ use of [platforms]” and “cutting off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.”

It got ugly. I recall an angry meeting in which the Eating Disorders Coalition (in favor of the law) fought with LGBTQ groups (opposed to it) in what felt like a very dark Veep episode, except with real lives at stake. Critics like Evan Greer, a digital-rights advocate, charged that attorneys general in red states could attempt to use the law to target platforms as part of a broader agenda against trans rights. That risk is exaggerated. The bill’s list of harms is specific and discrete; it does not include, say, “learning about transgenderism,” but it does provide that “nothing shall be construed [to require a platform to prevent] any minor from deliberately and independently searching for, or specifically requesting, content.” Nonetheless, the charge had a powerful resonance and was widely disseminated.

This whole thing is quite incredible. KOSA did not become a “casualty of the great American culture war.” Wu, astoundingly, downplays that both the Heritage Foundation and the bill’s own Republican co-author, Marsha Blackburn, directly said that the will would be helpful in censoring transgender information. For Wu to then say that the bill’s own co-author is wrong about what her own bill does is quite incredible.

He’s also wrong. While it is correct that the bill lists out six designated categories of harmful information that must be blocked, he leaves out that it’s the state Attorneys’ General who get to decide. And if you’ve paid attention to anything over the last decade, it’s that state AGs are inherently political, and are some of the most active “culture warriors” out there, quite willing to twist laws to their own interpretation to get headlines.

Also, even worse, as we’ve explained over and over again, laws like these that do require “mitigation” of “harmful content” around things like “eating disorders,” often fail to understand how that content works. As we’ve detailed, Instagram and Facebook made a big effort to block “eating disorder” content, and it backfired in a huge way. First, the issue wasn’t social media driving people to eating disorders, but people seeking out information on eating disorders (in other words, it was a demand side, not a supply side, problem).

So, when that content was removed, people with eating disorders still sought out the same content, and they still found it, either by using code words to get around the blocks or moving to darker, and even more problematic forums, where the people who ran them were way worse. And one result of this was that those forums lost the actually useful forms of mitigation, which include people talking to the kids and helping them get the help they need.

So here we have Tim Wu misunderstanding the problem, misunderstanding the solution he’s supporting (such that he’s supporting an idea already shown to make the problem worse), and he asks why Congress isn’t doing anything? Really?

It doesn’t help that there has been no political accountability for the members of Congress who were happy to grandstand about children online and then do nothing. No one outside a tiny bubble knows that Wicker voted for KOSA in public but helped kill it in private, or that infighting between Cantwell and Pallone helped kill children’s privacy. I know this only because I had to for my job. The press loves to cover members of Congress yelling at tech executives. But its coverage of the killing of popular bills is rare to nonexistent, in part because Congress hides its tracks. Say what you want about the Supreme Court or the president, but at least their big decisions are directly attributable to the justices or the chief executive. Congressmen like Frank Pallone or Roger Wicker don’t want to be known as the men who killed Congress’s efforts to protect children online, so we rarely find out who actually fired the bullet.

Notice that Wu never considers that the bills might be bad and didn’t deserve to move forward?

But Wu has continued to push this, including on exTwitter, in which he attacks those who have presented the many problematic aspects of KOSA, suggesting that they’re simply ignoring the harms. They’re not. Wu is ignoring the harms of what he supports.

Again, while I often disagree with Wu, I usually find he argues in good faith. The argument in this piece, though, is just utter nonsense. Do better.

Filed Under: children, congress, duty of care, eating disorders, kosa, privacy, social media, think of the children, tim wu

KOSA Won’t Make The Internet Safer For Kids. So What Will?

Policy

from the let's-think-this-through dept

I’ve been asked a few times now what to do about online safety if the Kids Online Safety Act is no good. I will take it as a given that not enough is being done to make the Internet safe, especially for children. I think there is enough evidence to show that while the Internet can be a positive for many young people, especially marginalized youth that find support online, there are also significant negatives that correlate to real world harms that lead to suffering.

As I see it, there are three separate but related problems:

1. Most Internet companies make money off engagement, and so there can be misaligned incentives especially when some toxic things can drive engagement.
2. Trust & Safety is the linchpin of efforts to improve online safety, but it represents a significant cost to companies without a direct connection to profit.
3. The tools used by Trust & Safety, like content moderation, have become a culture war football and many – including political leaders – are trying to work the refs.

I think #1 tends to be overstated, but X/Twitter is a natural experiment on whether this model is successful in the long run so we may soon have a better answer. I think #2 is understated, but it’s a bit hard to find government solutions here – especially those that don’t run into First Amendment concerns. And #3 is a bit of a confounding problem that taints all proposed solutions. There is a tendency to want to use “online safety” as an excuse to win culture wars, or at least tack culture war battles onto legitimate attempts to make the Internet safer. These efforts run headfirst into the First Amendment, because they are almost exclusively about regulating speech.

KOSA’s main gambit is to discourage #1 and maybe even incentivize #2 by creating a sort of nebulous duty of care that basically says if companies don’t have users’ best interests at heart in six described areas then they can be sued by the FTC and State AGs. The problem is that the duty of care is largely directed at whether minors are being exposed to certain kinds of content, and this invites problem #3 in a big way. In fact, we’ve already seen politically connected anti-LGBTQ organizations like Heritage openly call for KOSA to be used against LGBTQ content and Senator Blackburn, a KOSA co-author, connected the bill with protecting “minor children from the transgender.” This also means that this part of KOSA is likely to eventually fall to the First Amendment, as the California Age Appropriate Design Code (a bill KOSA borrows from) did.

So what can be done? I honestly don’t think we have enough information yet to really solve many online safety problems. But that doesn’t mean we have to sit around doing nothing. Here are some ideas of things that can be done today to make the Internet safer or prepare for better solutions in the future:

Ideas for Solving Problem #1

• Stronger Privacy: Having a strong baseline of privacy protections for all users is good for many reasons. One of them is breaking the ability of platforms to use information gathered about you to keep you on the platform longer. Many of the recommendation engines that set people down a bad path are algorithms powered by personal information and tuned to increase engagement. These algorithms don’t really care about how their recommendations affect you, and can send you in directions you don’t want to go but have trouble turning away from. I experienced some of this myself when using YouTube to get into shape during the pandemic. I was eventually recommended videos that body shamed and recommended pretty severe diets to “show off” your muscles. I was able to reorient the algorithm towards more positive and health-centered videos, but it took some degree of effort and understanding how things worked. If the algorithm wasn’t powered by my entire history, and instead had to be more user directed, I don’t think I’d be offered the same content. And if I did look for that content, I’d be able to do so more deliberately and carefully. Strong privacy controls would force companies to redesign in that way.

• An FTC 6(b) study: The FTC has the authority to conduct wide-ranging industry studies that don’t need a specific law enforcement purpose. In fact, they’ve used their 6(b) authority to study industries and produce reports that help Congress legislate. This 6(b) authority includes subpoena power to get information that independent researchers currently can’t. KOSA has a section that allows independent researchers to better study harms related to the design of online platforms, and I think that’s a pretty good idea, but the FTC can start this work now. A 6(b) study doesn’t need Congressional action to start, which is good considering the House is tied up at the moment. They can examine how companies work through safety concerns in product design, look for hot docs that show they made certain design decisions despite known risks, or look for mid docs that show they refused to look into safety concerns.

• Enhance FTC Section 5 Authority: The FTC has already successfully obtained a settlement based on the argument that certain harmful design choices violate Section 5’s prohibition of “unfair or deceptive” business practices. The settlement required Epic to turn off voice and text chat in the game Fortnite for children and teens by default. Congress could enhance this power by clarifying that Section 5 includes dangerous online product design more generally and require the FTC to create a division for enforcement in this area (and also increase the FTC’s budget for such staffing). A 6(b) study would also lay the groundwork for the FTC to take more actions in this area. However, any legislation should be drafted in a way that does not undercut the FTC’s argument that it already has much of this authority, as doing so would discourage the FTC from pursuing more actions on its own. This is another option that likely does not need Congressional action, but budget allocations and an affirmative directive to address this area would certainly help.

• NIH/other agency studies: Another way to help the FTC to pursue Section 5 complaints against dangerous design, and improve the conversation generally, is to invest in studies from medical and psychological health experts on how various design choices impact mental health. This can set a baseline of good practices from which any significant deviation could be pursued by the FTC as a Section 5 violation. It could also help policy discussions coalesce around rules concerning actual product design rather than content. The NTIA’s current request for information on Kids Online Health might be a start to that. KOSA’s section on creating a Kids Online Safety Council is another decent way of accomplishing this goal. Although, the Biden administration could simply create such a Council without Congressional action, and that might be a better path considering the current troubles in the House. I should also point out that this option is ripe for special interest capture, and that any efforts to study these problems should include experts and voices from marginalized and politically targeted communities.

• Better User Tools: I’ve written before on concerns I had with an earlier draft of KOSA’s parental tools requirements. I think that section of the bill is in a much better place now. Generally, I think it’s good to improve the resources parents have to work with their kids to build a positive online social environment. It would also be good to have tools for users to help them have a say in what content they are served and how the service interacts with them (i.e. turning off nudges). That might come from a law establishing a baseline for user tools. It might also come from an agency hosting discussions on and fostering the development of best practices for such tools. I will again caution though that not all parents have their kids’ best interests at heart, and kids are entitled to privacy and First Amendment rights. Any work on this should keep that in mind, and some minors may need tools to protect themselves from their parents.

• Interoperability: One of the biggest problems for users who want to abandon a social media platform is how hard it is to rebuild their network elsewhere. X/Twitter is a good example of this, and I know many people that want to leave but have trouble rebuilding the same engagement elsewhere. Bluesky and Mastodon are examples of newer services that offer some degree of interoperability and portability of your social graph. The advantages of that are obvious, creating more competition and user choice. This is again something the government could support by encouraging standards or requiring interoperability. However, as Bluesky and Mastodon have shown, there has been a problem with interoperable platforms and content moderation because it’s a large cost not directly related to profit. This remains a problem to be solved. Ideally a strong market for effective third party content moderation should be created, but this is not something the government can be involved in because of the obvious First Amendment problems.

Ideas for Solving Problem #2

• Information sharing: When I went to TrustCon this year the number one thing I heard was that T&S professionals need better information sharing – especially between platforms. This makes perfect sense: it lowers the cost of enforcement and improves the quality of enforcement. The kind of information we are talking about are emerging threats and the most effective ways of dealing with them. For example, coded language people are adopting to get around filters to catch sexual predation on platforms with minors. There are ways that the government can foster this information sharing at the agency level by, for example, hosting workshops, roundtables, and conferences geared towards T&S professionals on online safety. It would also be helpful for agencies to encourage “open source” information for T&S teams to make it easier for smaller companies.

• Best Practices: Related to other solutions above, a government agency could engage the industry and foster the development of best practices (as long as they are content-agnostic), and a significant departure of those best practices could be challenged as a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act. Those best practices should include some kind of minimum for T&S investment and capabilities. I think this could be done under existing authority (like the Fortnite case), although that authority will almost certainly be challenged at some point. It might be better for Congress to affirmatively task agencies with this duty and allocate appropriate funding for them to succeed.

Ideas for Solving Problem #3

• Keeping the focus on product design: Problem #3 is never going away, but the best way to minimize its impacts AND lower the risk of efforts getting tossed on First Amendment grounds is to keep every public action on online safety firmly grounded in product design. That means every study, every proposed rulemaking, and every introduced bill needs to be first examined with a basic question: “does this directly or indirectly create requirements based on speech, or suggest the adoption of practices that will impact speech.” Having a good answer to this question is important, because the industry will challenge laws and regulations on First Amendment grounds, so any laws and regulations must be able to survive those challenges.

• Don’t Undermine Section 230: Section 230 is what enables content moderation work at scale, and online safety is mostly a content moderation problem. Without Section 230 companies won’t be able to experiment with different approaches to content moderation to see what works. This is obviously a problem because we want them to adopt better approaches. I mention this here because some political leaders have been threatening Section 230 specifically as part of their attempts to work the refs and get social media companies to change their content moderation policies to suit their own political goals.

Matthew Lane is a Senior Director at InSight Public Affairs.

Filed Under: children, internet safety, kosa, parental tools, privacy

As Congress Rushes To Force Websites To Age Verify Users, Its Own Think Tank Warns There Are Serious Pitfalls

Policy

from the a-moral-panic-for-the-ages dept

We’re in the midst of a full blown mass hysteria moral panic claiming that the internet is “dangerous” for children, despite little evidence actually supporting that hypothesis, and a ton arguing the opposite is true. States are passing bad laws, and Congress has a whole stack of dangerous “for the children” laws, from KOSA to the RESTRICT Act to STOP CSAM to EARN IT to the Cooper Davis Act to the “Protecting Kids on Social Media Act” to COPPA 2.0. There are more as well, but these are the big ones that all seem to be moving through Congress.

The NY Times has a good article reminding everyone that we’ve been through this before, specifically with Reno v. ACLU, a case we’ve covered many times before. In the 1990s, a similar evidence-free mass hysteria moral panic about the internet and kids was making the rounds, much of it driven by sensational headlines and stories that were later debunked. But Congress, always happy to announce they’ve “protected the children,” passed the Communications Decency Act from Senator James Exon, which he claimed would clean up all the smut he insisted was corrupting children (he famously carried around a binder full of porn that he claimed was from the internet to convince other Senators).

You know what happened next: the Supreme Court (thankfully) remembered that the 1st Amendment existed, and noted that it also applied to the internet, and Exon’s Communications Decency Act (everything except for the Cox/Wyden bit which is now known as Section 230) got tossed out as unconstitutional.

It remains bizarre to me that all these members of Congress today don’t seem to recognize that the ruling in ACLU v. Reno existed, and how all their laws seem to ignore it. But perhaps that’s because it happened 25 years ago and their memories don’t stretch back that far.

But, the NY Times piece ends with something a bit more recent: it points to an interesting Congressional Research Service report that basically tells Congress that any attempt to pass a law targeting minors online will have massive consequences beyond what these elected officials intend.

As we’ve discussed many times in the past, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) is Congress’ in-house think tank, which is well known for producing non-political, very credible research, which is supposed to better inform Congress, and perhaps stop them from passing obviously problematic bills that they don’t understand.

The report focuses on age verification techniques, which most of these laws will require (even though some of them pretend not to: the liability for failure will drive many sites to adopt it anyway). But the CRS notes, it’s just not that easy. Almost every solution out there has real (and serious) problems, either in how well they work, or what they mean for user privacy:

Providers of online services may face different challenges using photo ID to verify users’ ages, depending on the type of ID used. For example, requiring a government-issued ID might not be feasible for certain age groups, such as those younger than 13. In 2020, approximately 25% and 68% of individuals who were ages 16 and 19, respectively, had a driver’s license. This suggests that most 16 year olds would not be able to use an online platform that required a driver’s license. Other forms of photo ID, such as student IDs, could expand age verification options. However, it may be easier to falsify a student ID than a driver’s license. Schools do not have a uniform ID system, and there were 128,961 public and private schools—including prekindergarten through high school—during the 2019-2020 school year, suggesting there could be various forms of IDs that could make it difficult to determine which ones are fake.

Another option could be creating a national digital ID for all individuals that includes age. Multiple states are exploring digital IDs for individuals. Some firms are using blockchain technologies to identify users, such as for digital wallets and for individuals’ health credentials. However, a uniform national digital ID system does not exist in the United States. Creating such a system could raise privacy and security concerns, and policymakers would need to determine who would be responsible for creating and maintaining the system, and verifying the information on it—responsibilities currently reserved to the states.

Several online service providers are relying on AI to identify users’ ages, such as the services offered by Yoti, prompting firms to offer AI age verification services. For example, Intellicheck uses facial biometric data to validate an ID by matching it to the individual. However, AI technologies have raised concerns about potential biases and a lack of transparency. For example, the accuracy of facial analysis software can depend on the individual’s gender, skin color, and other factors. Some have also questioned the ability of AI software to distinguish between small differences in age, particularly when individuals can use make-up and props to appear older.

Companies can also rely on data obtained directly from users or from other sources, such as data brokers. For example, a company could check a mobile phone’s registration information or analyze information on the user’s social media account. However, this could heighten data privacy concerns regarding online consumer data collection.

In other words, just as the French data protection agency found, there is no age verification solution out there that is actually safe for people to rely on. Of course, that hasn’t stopped moral panicky French lawmakers from pushing forward with a requirement for one anyway, and it looks like the US Congress will similarly ignore its own think tank, and Supreme Court precedent, and push forward with their own versions as well.

Hopefully, the Supreme Court actually remembers how all this works.

Filed Under: age verification, children, crs, free speech, kosa, protect the children, restrict act, stop csam

Utah’s Governor Live Streams Signing Of Unconstitutional Social Media Bill On All The Social Media Platforms He Hates

Failures

from the utah-gets-it-wrong-again dept

On Thursday, Utah’s governor Spencer Cox officially signed into law two bills that seek to “protect the children” on the internet. He did with a signing ceremony that he chose to stream on nearly every social media platform, despite his assertions that those platforms are problematic.

Yes, yes, watch live on the platforms that your children shouldn’t use, lest they learn that their governor eagerly supports blatantly unconstitutional bills that suppress the free speech rights of children, destroy their privacy, and put them at risk… all while claiming he’s doing this to “protect them.”

The decision to sign the bills is not a surprise. We talked about the bills earlier this year, noting just how obviously unconstitutional they are, and how much damage they’d do to the internet.

The bills (SB 152 and HB 311) do a few different things, each of which is problematic in its own special way:

• Bans anyone under 18 from using social media between 10:30pm and 6:30am.
• Requires age verification for anyone using social media while simultaneously prohibiting data collection and advertising on any “minor’s” account.
• Requires social media companies to wave a magic wand and make sure no kids get “addicted” with addiction broadly defined to include having a preoccupation with a site that causes “emotional” harms.
• Requires parental consent for anyone under the age of 18 to even have a social media account.
• Requires social media accounts to give parents access to their kids accounts.

Leaving aside the fun of banning data collection while requiring age verification (which requires data collection), the bill is just pure 100% nanny state nonsense.

Children have their own 1st Amendment rights, which this bill ignores. It assumes that teenagers have a good relationship with their parents. Hell, it assumes that parents have any relationship with their kids, and makes no provisions for how to handle cases where parents are not around, have different names, are divorced, etc.

Also, the lack of data collection combined with the requirement to prevent addiction creates a uniquely ridiculous scenario in which these companies have to make sure they don’t provide features and information that might lead to “addiction,” but can’t monitor what’s happening on those accounts, because it might violate the data collection restrictions.

As far as I can tell, the bill both requires social media companies to hide dangerous or problematic content from children, and blocks their ability to do so.

Because Utah’s politicians have no clue what they’re doing.

Meanwhile, Governor Cox seems almost gleeful about just how unconstitutional his bill is. After 1st Amendment/free speech lawyer Ari Cohn laid out the many Constitutional problems with the bill, Cox responded with a Twitter fight, by saying he looked forward to seeing Cohn in court.

Perhaps Utah’s legislature should be banning itself from social media, given how badly they misunderstand basically everything about it. They could use that time to study up on the 1st Amendment, because they need to. Badly.

Anyway, in a de facto admission that these laws are half-baked at best, they don’t go into effect until March of 2024, a full year, as they seem to recognize that to avoid getting completely pantsed in court, they might need to amend them. But they are going to get pantsed in court, because I can almost guarantee there will be constitutional challenges to these bills before long.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, age verification, children, parental permission, parents, privacy, protect the children, social media, social media bans, spencer cox, utah

NYPD Says Kids Don’t Need Lawyers While Fighting Reforms Targeting Interrogations Of Minors

Legal Issues

from the all-lawyers-do-is-make-us-respect-rights! dept

Leave it to the NYPD to suggest some people’s rights just don’t matter. The NYPD has resisted pretty much every reform effort shoved in its general direction and this one — which would affect questioning of juvenile detainees — is being resisted as well. (“Stop resisting!” only works in one direction, unfortunately.)

Here’s C.J. Ciaramella with more details for Reason:

The City recently reported that a coalition of public defenders, juvenile justice organizations, and other groups are pushing to pass a bill in the next session of the New York Legislature that would require minors speak with a lawyer before they waive their Miranda rights and talk to police.

If such a bill passed, New York would join several other states that have tightened rules for juvenile interrogations in recent years. Both Maryland and Washington passed laws requiring attorney consultations for minors before interrogations. Last year, Illinois became the first state in the U.S. to ban police from lying to minors during interrogations. Oregon followed suit shortly after. 

It’s a simple reform: one that ensures minors receive the same constitutional protections adults do when detained by police. There’s no reason they shouldn’t have these protections. While the rights of minors can sometimes be slightly diminished to ensure things like school safety, their rights when arrested by police officers remain exactly the same as every other American.

All this would do is force the NYPD to give juveniles access to lawyers during questioning — the same demand that can be made by anyone under arrest. The NYPD ain’t having it, though. And, as Ciaramella points out, the statement it gave The City suggests it thinks children should be underserved when arrested, unable to fully utilize their constitutional rights.

“Parents and guardians are in the best position to make decisions for their children, and this bill, while well-intentioned, supplants the judgment of parents and guardians with an attorney who may never have met the individual,” a police spokesperson said in an unsigned email. 

No wonder no one signed this horseshit. Who would want to put their name on such self-interested stupidity?

The NYPD knows lawyers specializing in criminal defense are pretty goddamn good at defending the rights of accused and arrested people. Of course the NYPD doesn’t want anyone qualified to do this important job anywhere near people being questioned, whether they’re juveniles or adults. Pretending its in the best interest of arrestees to get help from people with little to no legal experience works out best for the NYPD and its apparent desire to engage in as much unconstitutional questioning as possible.

It’s not like this is just reform for the sake of reform. It’s the desire to prevent the NYPD from adding to the long list of false confessions and rights violations perpetrated by law enforcement agencies across the nation against minors they’ve arrested. There’s nothing theoretical about the potential harm. There are plenty of real life cases found everywhere in the nation.

Ciaramella highlights just one of them — a case that shows exactly why the NYPD wants children to have access to no one but parents, as well as why this reform effort is sorely needed.

Reason reported in 2021 on the case of Lawrence Montoya, who at the age of 14 falsely confessed to being at the scene of a murder after several hours of being badgered by two Denver police detectives. Montoya’s mother was present for the first part of the interview. She encouraged him to talk and eventually left her son alone in the interrogation room with detectives, allowing them to lean on him until he gave them what they wanted: a flimsy confession constructed with the facts that they had fed to Montoya.

That’s what the NYPD prefers: parents who will likely suggest cooperation is the best route and leave it in the hands of professionals who want to secure confessions and convictions, rather than actually seek justice.

Filed Under: children, civil rights, lawyers, minors, nypd, public defenders, representation

Epic To Pay $520 Million Over Deceptive Practices To Trick Kids

Privacy

from the before-we-pass-new-laws... dept

Maybe, just maybe, before we rush to pass questionable new laws about “protecting children online,” we should look to make use of the old ones? The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has been in place for years, and it has problems, but so many companies ignore it. I’ve mentioned in the past how I once walked around a part of CES that had a bunch of startups focused on offering services to kids, and a DC lawyer I was with made sure to ask each one what their COPPA compliance strategy was… and we just got blank stares.

On Monday, video game giant Epic agreed to pay $520 million in two separate fines to the FTC for violating COPPA with some pretty deceptive behavior targeted at kids. First up were your garden variety privacy violations in collecting data on kids under 13 without obtaining parental consent:

• Violated COPPA by Failing to Notify Parents, Obtain Consent: The FTC alleged that Epic was aware that many children were playing Fortnite—as shown through surveys of Fortnite users, the licensing and marketing of Fortnite toys and merchandise, player support and other company communications—and collected personal data from children without first obtaining parents’ verifiable consent. The company also required parents who requested that their children’s personal information be deleted to jump through unreasonable hoops, and sometimes failed to honor such requests.
• Default settings harm children and teens: Epic’s settings enable live on-by-default text and voice communications for users. The FTC alleges that these default settings, along with Epic’s role in matching children and teens with strangers to play Fortnite together, harmed children and teens. Children and teens have been bullied, threatened, harassed, and exposed to dangerous and psychologically traumatizing issues such as suicide while on Fortnite.

As the FTC notes, Epic employees knew this was a problem, but the company didn’t fix things. In fact, when it finally did create an option to turn the voice chat off, “Epic made it difficult for users to find.”

Perhaps more concerning were the deceptive practices.

• Used dark patterns to trick users into making purchases: The company has deployed a variety of dark patterns aimed at getting consumers of all ages to make unintended in-game purchases. Fortnite’s counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration led players to incur unwanted charges based on the press of a single button. For example, players could be charged while attempting to wake the game from sleep mode, while the game was in a loading screen, or by pressing an adjacent button while attempting simply to preview an item. These tactics led to hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized charges for consumers.
• Charged account holders without authorization: Children and other users who play Fortnite can purchase in-game content such as cosmetics and battle passes using Fortnite’s V-Bucks. Up until 2018, Epic allowed children to purchase V-Bucks by simply pressing buttons without requiring any parental or card holder action or consent. Some parents complained that their children had racked up hundreds of dollars in charges before they realized Epic had charged their credit card without their consent. The FTC has brought similar claims against companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Google for billing consumers millions of dollars for in-app purchases made by children while playing mobile app games without obtaining their parents’ consent.
• Blocked access to purchased content: The FTC alleged that Epic locked the accounts of customers who disputed unauthorized charges with their credit card companies. Consumers whose accounts have been locked lose access to all the content they have purchased, which can total thousands of dollars. Even when Epic agreed to unlock an account, consumers were warned that they could be banned for life if they disputed any future charges.

I generally dislike the term “dark patterns,” as it’s frequently used to basically just mean “making a service useful in a way that someone else dislikes.” But, uh, yeah, making it way too easy for kids to rack up huge bills on their parents’ credit cards? That seems super sketchy.

For this behavior, Epic will pay $245 million, which the government will use to provide rebates for Fortnite players.

This all seems like the kind of thing that the FTC should be doing, rather than some of the other sillier things it’s been focused on of late. And, also, again, suggests that maybe we don’t need these new, badly drafted laws, but instead should just make sure the FTC is able to better enforce existing laws.

Filed Under: children, coppa, dark patterns, fees, fortnite, ftc, kids, parents, privacy
Companies: epic games

Congress Still Pushing Dangerous ‘Online Safety’ Bill With A Few Flimsy Fixes That Don’t Really Fix Much

Policy

from the make-it-stop-already dept

We’ve written a bunch of posts concerning KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which is one of those moral panic kinds of bills that politicians and the media love to get behind, without really understanding what they mean, or the damage they’d do. We’ve covered how it will lead to greater surveillance of children (which doesn’t seem likely to make them safer), how the vague language in the bill will put kids at greater risk, how the “parental tools” provision will be used to harm children, and a variety of other problems with the bill as well. There’s a reason why over 90 different organizations asked Congress not to slip it into a year-end must pass bill.

And while it didn’t make it into the NDAA bill, there are still some efforts to put it in the year end omnibus spending bill. Indeed, the sponsors of the bill quietly released a new version a few days ago that actually does fix some of the most egregious problems of the original. But… it’s still a mess, as TechFreedom’s Ari Cohn explained in a thread on Mastodon.

As his thread notes, there are still concerns about knowing which users are teenagers. The original bill would have effectively mandated age verification, which comes with massive privacy concerns. The new version changes it to cases where a site knows or should know that a user is under 18. But, what constitutes knowledge in that case, and what trips the standard for “should know?” The end result will still be a strong incentive for dodgy age verification, just so sites don’t need to go through the litigation hassle of proving that they didn’t, or shouldn’t, have known the age of their users.

But, the much bigger problem is that the bill still has a “duty of care” component. This was core to the original bill so it’s no surprise that it remains in place. As we’ve discussed for years, the “duty of care” is a “friendly sounding” way of violating the 1st Amendment. In this context, the bill requires sites to magically know if a kid is going to come to some harm from accessing some sort of content on their website. And, given the litigious nature of the US, as soon as any harm comes to anyone under the age of 18, websites will get sued (no matter how loosely they were connected to the actual harm), and they will have to litigate over and over again whether or not they met their “duty of care.”

The end result, most likely, is that websites basically start blocking any kind of controversial content, no matter how legal — and we’re right back to the issue of Congress trying to turn the internet into Disneyland, which is not healthy, takes away both parental and child autonomy, and does not prepare people for the real world.

The new KOSA tries to claim this won’t happen, because it says that nothing in the bill should be “construed to require a covered platform to prevent or preclude any minor from deliberately and independently search for, or specifically requesting, content.” But that won’t make any difference at all, if under the duty of care, the minors find that content, and then can later tie some future harm back to that content. So the real world effect of the law is absolutely going to be to stifle that legal content.

Even worse, lawyers will always stretch things as far as possible to make it possible to sue big pockets, even if they’re very distant from the actual harm. And, as Cohn, notes, the bill is so vaguely worded that the “harm” that can be sued over doesn’t even have to be connected to a minor accessing that content on the site. Rather… under the law as written, it appears that if there are minors on the site and separately, some harm occurs related to some content… KOSA is triggered. So even as the bill is supposedly about protecting children, as written, it can be used if it’s adults who are harmed in some manner, loosely tied to content on the site.

There’s a lot more in Ari’s thread that shows just how dangerous this bill is, even as its backers pretend they’ve fixed all the problems. And yet, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn are pleading with their colleagues to put it into the must pass omnibus spending bill.

This is a bill that will give them headlines, allowing them to pretend they’re helping kids, but which actually do tremendous harm to kids, parents, free speech and the internet. Sneaking it into a must pass bill suggests, yet again, that they know the bill is too weak to go through the normal process. The rest of Congress should not allow it to pass in this current state.

Filed Under: children, duty of care, free speech, kosa, marsha blackburn, protect the children, richard blumenthal, section 230

Authentic Brands Group Behind Another Silly Parent, Child Trademark Dispute

Trademark

from the childish-dispute dept

We’ve talked about Authentic Brands Group here a couple of times and never for good behavior. The company that manages the rights for several living and deceased celebrities is also a notorious trademark troll and enforcer. Most recently we discussed a bizarre trademark opposition brought against Shaqir O’Neal, Shaq’s son, who had the trademark application for Shaqir’s name opposed by ABG… on behalf of his father Shaq.

That was a couple of week ago and, at the time, I had thought it was something of a unique and weird situation, on top of thinking that ABG’s opposition was stupid and dumb. Turns out that kind of stupid and dumb wasn’t as unique as I thought, as now we have a second incident in which this has happened. In this case, Laila Ali, daughter of the late Muhammad Ali, has had her own trademark application for her name opposed by ABG.

A Notice of Opposition was filed by the company that owns Muhammad Ali’s trademark, attempting to stop his daughter Laila Ali from registering her name. Based on information from attorney Josh Gerben, the root of the issues goes all the way back to 2006, when Muhammad Ali sold rights to his trademarks and likeness to Authentic Brands Group (ABG) for $50 million.

According to Josh Gerben, Authentic Brand Group’s filing has three listed complaints in its opposition.

-False Connection: consumers will believe that Laila Ali’s trademark is connected to Muhammad Ali and that any goods sold under her name are licensed by Authentic Brands Group.

-Likelihood of Confusion: the “Laila Ali” and “Muhammad Ali” trademarks are so similar that they will be confused.

-Dilution by Tarnishment: the registration of the “Laila Ali” trademark will harm the reputation of Authentic Brands Group and tarnish its rights in the “Muhammad Ali” trademark.

This bullshit really has to stop. None of ABG’s concerns are legitimate in this instance. The public isn’t going to associate Laila Ali’s trademark to ABG’s any further than acknowledging their father/daughter relationship. The marks in question are also not similar in a form that will confuse the public. It’s her name. “Ali” is also not a terribly unique surname. Does ABG contend that nobody can trademark anything that includes the name “Ali” due to confusion? Because that would be a hell of a claim for the company to make.

And tarnishment? How? Why? Laila Ali isn’t some villain who’s name is somehow going to bring ABG into ill-repute. Frankly, the company is doing just fine in that arena all on its own.

And you really do have to wonder how a counter-culture icon like Muhammad Ali would react to his own daughter being targeted for this sort of thing by a company that rakes in millions of dollars utilizing other people’s names and brands.

Filed Under: children, laila ali, muhammad ali, trademark
Companies: authentic brands

White House Releases Performatively Ridiculous ‘Principles’ For ‘Tech Platform Accountability’ That Include Removing Section 230

Policy

from the last-minute-homework dept

During the 2020 campaign, there were a few times when candidate Joe Biden insisted he wanted to get rid of Section 230 entirely, though he made it clear he had no idea what Section 230 actually did. When I wrote articles highlighting all of this, I had some Biden supporters (even folks who worked on his campaign) reach out to me to say not to worry about it, that Biden wasn’t fully briefed on 230, and that if he became President, more knowledgeable people would be tasked to work on stuff, and the 230 stuff wouldn’t be an issue. I didn’t believe it at the time, and it turns out I was correct.

The White House has released a truly bizarre set of “Principles for Enhancing Competition and Tech Platform Accountability” that are so poorly thought out that I’m confused as to how anyone in the White House thought these were good ideas. First of all, they’re mostly silly simplistic platitudes that don’t take into account the complexities of each of these items. They’re perhaps red meat for the “big tech bad!” crowd, but not even in a coherent way.

Some of them don’t make sense at all and are incoherent. Some of them buy into disinformation (which is depressingly ironic, as the White House argues that some of this is about fighting disinformation).

It’s a really weird list in that it just… isn’t that sophisticated or well thought out at all. It looks kinda like no one seriously worked on this issue, or really spoke to that many experts about it, and then scrambled together something at the last minute to make sure they had something they could roll out before the mid-terms as a “we’re taking on big tech” platform.

Let’s go through them, though out of order, to start with the most egregious nonsense here: removing Section 230.

Remove special legal protections for large tech platforms. Tech platforms currently have special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that broadly shield them from liability even when they host or disseminate illegal, violent conduct or materials. The President has long called for fundamental reforms to Section 230.

I mean… how the hell can the White House say this?

Section 230 is NOT SPECIAL PROTECTIONS FOR LARGE PROVIDERS. That’s a lie. Mostly made up by disgruntled Republicans who want websites to be forced to carry their propaganda and disinformation through must-carry provisions.

Section 230 is not “special legal protections.” It’s codification of some common law liability principles. And it’s not “for large tech platforms.” It does much more to protect users’ speech and smaller companies then protecting large companies.

On top of that, the line that it “broadly shields them from liability even when they host or disseminate illegal, violent conduct or materials” is oddly worded and basically nonsense. First of all, you’d think the White House, of all places, would be aware that Section 230 includes section (e)(1) that notes that there is no effect on criminal law. So, um, if it’s “illegal,” Section 230 does not help. Second, Section 230 protects companies from being held liable for someone else’s speech. I’m not sure what “violent conduct or materials” has to do with any of that.

More to the point: if there is “illegal, violent conduct or materials,” then, um, isn’t it law enforcement’s job to go after those actually breaking the law? In the end, all 230 is really doing is saying “don’t blame the tool, blame the person actually violating the law.”

Also, as we’ll get to, much of this document talks about enabling more competition. Removing Section 230 does the exact opposite. The big tech companies literally have buildings full of lawyers and massive content moderation teams. They’re better positioned than others to handle the burden that removing Section 230 would create.

Startups? Mid-sized companies? Removing Section 230 would kill them.

It’s such a nonsensical position for the White House to take. There certainly must be some people in the White House who understand Section 230. Why weren’t they invited to weigh in on this?

Protect our kids by putting in place even stronger privacy and online protections for them, including prioritizing safety by design standards and practices for online platforms, products, and services. Children, adolescents, and teens are especially vulnerable to harm. Platforms and other interactive digital service providers should be required to prioritize the safety and wellbeing of young people above profit and revenue in their product design, including by restricting excessive data collection and targeted advertising to young people.

Ah, yes, the ever present “but think of the children” issue. Again, this is vague and unclear, but it sounds an awful like the “age appropriate design code” that California just passed, which has all sorts of problems (including constitutional ones). As we recently explained, back in 1996 Congress tried to pass sweeping “but think of the kids online” legislation, and the Supreme Court rightly threw it in the trash. We don’t need to go through that again, no matter how politically popular this seems to whichever political consultants insisted it be included.

Either way, the devil’s in the details here, and this vague statement has none. The fact that the language sounds so similar to the California Kids Code means it’s likely exactly that. And that’s a problem — and as we’ve seen with the muted opposition to the California bill, it’s one that is politically popular because no one wants to be branded as being “against protecting the kids,” even if these bills don’t do anything to actually protect kids, but do help rich people with savior complexes think they’re helping.

Increase transparency about platform’s algorithms and content moderation decisions.  Despite their central role in American life, tech platforms are notoriously opaque. Their decisions about what content to display to a given user and when and how to remove content from their sites affect Americans’ lives and American society in profound ways. However, platforms are failing to provide sufficient transparency to allow the public and researchers to understand how and why such decisions are made, their potential effects on users, and the very real dangers these decisions may pose.

Here’s another one that sounds good as a platitude, but the reality is much different. As we’ve said over and over again, transparency is good, but mandated transparency creates all sorts of problems. Again, we can look to the terrible, terrible problems with California’s transparency bill, demanding this kind of transparency often only serves to help bad actors learn how to game your systems.

People pushing for these kinds of transparency mandates have clearly never actually run a website that has user content on it. It’s a constant struggle, and a dynamic one, where bad actors are always, always, always trying to game your system. And if you’re forced to publish clear rules on how you moderate it does two terribly dangerous things. First, it gives those bad actors a road map for how to game your system and limits your ability to change on the fly to deal with the changing nature of the attacks.

And let’s not even get into how this same policy is being pushed for by Republicans as a tool to block websites from moderating disinformation. Already, Texas and Florida have tried to pass content moderation bills that have (so far…) been found to be unconstitutional — and parts of those bills were pitched using this exact same language, how they were really about “transparency” regarding moderation, and how they just wanted the companies to be “less opaque” about how they made their decisions. Except that those laws also came with the stick of liability.

It’s so weird to see GOP nonsense talking points that have already been deemed unconstitutional showing up in an official White House policy document coming out of the Biden administration.

Stop discriminatory algorithmic decision-making. We need strong protections to ensure algorithms do not discriminate against protected groups, such as by failing to share key opportunities equally, by discriminatorily exposing vulnerable communities to risky products, or through persistent surveillance.

Again, this is one of those things that sounds good, but tends to be problematic in practice. Last year I wrote about a bill that attempted to do this, where I noted that it seemed entirely mistargeted, and (see a pattern here?) seemed based on a near total lack of understanding of how things work. The issue, again, is that the people most vocally claiming “algorithmic discrimination” are actually… disinformation peddlers, insisting that they’re being discriminated against not for peddling disinformation, but because they’re Christian white male conservatives.

So, uh, yeah, be careful what you wish for.

There are, of course, legitimate concerns about algorithms that use historically biased data to further continue a bias against marginalized platforms, but there are ways to deal with that without broadly outlawing “discrimination” via algorithms. Because that is the kind of thing that will be weaponized.

Also, as we noted in that post, it’s often quite difficult to separate out “discriminatory algorithmic decision-making” from more traditional discriminatory human decision-making, and there’s a real risk here that a bill of this nature starts holding tech companies responsible for bigotry by humans making decisions, rather than actual problems in the algorithm.

Provide robust federal protections for Americans’ privacy. There should be clear limits on the ability to collect, use, transfer, and maintain our personal data, including limits on targeted advertising. These limits should put the burden on platforms to minimize how much information they collect, rather than burdening Americans with reading fine print. We especially need strong protections for particularly sensitive data such as geolocation and health information, including information related to reproductive health. We are encouraged to see bipartisan interest in Congress in passing legislation to protect privacy.

So, yeah, sure. We need a federal privacy law. But the details here matter quite a lot, and the details in this vague paragraph suggest that whoever put this together… hasn’t actually thought through any of the details and the associated tradeoffs. For example, again, the final item we’ll go over in these principles is one about competition, but how do privacy laws and competition interact? The fact is that many of the proposed privacy bills would only be helping the largest companies, since they’ll be able to put in place the necessary compliance regimes, while the smaller competitors will be overwhelmed by it.

Also, it’s slightly weird to limit targeted advertising. I get that people hate advertising, but… I’d also kinda rather have advertising be better targeted so that it’s actually more useful to me than not? As I keep saying over and over again, privacy is about a set of trade-offs: how much am I willing to give up to get what kind of benefit. And the problem tends to come in not when I’m just handing off information, but when there’s a mismatch (or lack of clarity) in how much information I’m giving up and what exactly is the benefit I’m giving up in return. But, if I had more visibility and control over that — for example the ability to better target useful ads to myself by seeing what advertisers see about me, and having some control over what info is included in whatever “profile” they have on me — then that’s not a privacy violation to me any more. That allows me to customize things in a way where I’m comfortable and I even get relevant and useful ads.

But, again, so many in the privacy realm refuse to even consider that world a possibility, and simply want to cut off even the ability for me to enable that kind of world. Instead, they want to stop targeted ads entirely. Even for people who want them. And that seems… not all that helpful?

Promote competition in the technology sector. The American information technology sector has long been an engine of innovation and growth, and the U.S. has led the world in the development of the Internet economy. Today, however, a small number of dominant Internet platforms use their power to exclude market entrants, to engage in rent-seeking, and to gather intimate personal information that they can use for their own advantage. We need clear rules of the road to ensure small and mid-size businesses and entrepreneurs can compete on a level playing field, which will promote innovation for American consumers and ensure continued U.S. leadership in global technology. We are encouraged to see bipartisan interest in Congress in passing legislation to address the power of tech platforms through antitrust legislation.

This is the first one on the list, and it’s probably the one I have the least complaints about — except that, again, the devil is in the details. So far the bill that has gotten the farthest on this front, AICOA, is so poorly drafted that it basically would allow it to be a content moderation bill in disguise, where disinformation peddlers would be able to use provisions in the law to claim, disingenuously, that moderation for, say, disinformation, was actually being done in an anti-competitive manner.

Indeed, as noted above, many of the other provisions in this platform are, themselves, anti-competitive, in that they would create massive compliance costs that the biggest providers could shoulder, but everyone else would be left out in the cold.

It is increasingly difficult for me to take any policymakers seriously when they refuse to look at how competition, privacy, content moderation, and much, much, more are interconnected, and how movements you make on one impact others.

All of these proposals (and the bills they likely refer to) are half-baked performative ideas that make for great headlines, but show a real lack of understanding how the world actually works and how these changes will flow through the internet ecosystem.

That this is the best the Biden White House can put out after 20 months in office is kind of a condemnation of the administration’s tech policy chops. They seem to have very few actual experts on board who could better inform these discussions. And thus… we get this.

It’s performative. It creates headlines that maybe sound good. But it doesn’t solve any of the real problems.

Filed Under: antitrust, children, content moderation, for the children, joe biden, section 230, tech policy, whitehouse

Spending Too Long Pooping At School? There’s A (Government) App For That

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the early-adopters-should-be-forced-to-form-a-human-centipede dept

There’s a vast difference between what the government thinks it should know vs. what it’s actually entitled to know. And when the government decides more surveillance is needed, the most frequent targets are non-citizens (even if they’re legal residents) and children.

Children are vulnerable. In the name of protecting children, the government often exploits the innate vulnerability of children who are not afforded the full constitutional protection adults are given. Lower the right to privacy and you can get away with about anything.

To wit:

• The Glendale (CA) school district declared it would retain a third-party service to do “round the clock” monitoring of student’s (obviously) off-campus social media activities.
• With some students still utilizing distance learning as a result of a global pandemic, schools feel they’re entitled to access everything pertaining to distanced students, including psychiatric records and (yes, again) their social media activities.
• The trade-off for not being in school is being treated like a cheater. Eye tracking, key logging, mouse click examination, how fast you do or don’t scroll… all grounds for suspicion of cheating according to test proctoring software/apps/extensions.
• Schools hoping to head off shootings are investing in tech (using your tax dollars) that mistake coughing and slammed locker doors as gunshots.
• Legislators in several states are forcing educators to somehow “verify” a student’s sexual identity before allowing them to participate in sports programs.

This is on top of strip search after strip search after 850 aggressive fondlings of high school students (including breasts and genitals) performed by school administrators or their favorite proxies, “school resource officers.”

Students appear to be little more than prisoners school administrators graciously allow to return to their homes between classes. There’s apparently nothing we won’t subject minors to in the name of education, as Joseph Cox reports for Motherboard.

e-HallPass, a digital system that students have to use to request to leave their classroom and which takes note of how long they’ve been away, including to visit the bathroom, has spread into at least a thousand schools around the United States.

The system has some resemblance to the sort of worker monitoring carried out by Amazon, which tracks how long its staff go to the toilet for, and is used to penalize workers for “time off task.” It also highlights how automated tools have led to increased surveillance of students in schools, and employees in places of work.

Ah, the dystopian industrial complex, but now for kids. It takes the post-fascist ideals of Amazon’s brand of capitalism (i.e., “Work will set you free”) and applies it to children, tracking every moment spent “off task” to determine whether using the restroom “too often” (whatever the fuck that means) to apply discipline.

Feels bad, man. But if you think those helping the system be The System have any qualms about their contribution to the treatment of students as objects, you’re in for a bit of a shock. The company marketing this questionable “service” seems to think it’s schools that are falling behind by not purchasing third-party restroom tracking.

Brian Tvenstrup, president of Eduspire, told the outlet that the company’s biggest obstacle to selling the product “is when a school isn’t culturally ready to make these kinds of changes yet.”

I’m sure being greeted with questions like “what the actual fuck” and “how did you get in my office” must be disheartening to Eduspire and its salespersons. It also must be tough to explain how the word “inspire” got folded into this unfortunate corporate name, considering all the company provides is ways to destroy trust between students and educators.

On top of tracking bathroom visits, the software also provides school administration with ways to prevent students from interacting with each other or otherwise limit use of hall passes. And that’s all on top of the restroom monitoring I can’t seem to recall any educators (note: not school administrators) expressing an interest in obtaining.

The “service” provided here simply duplicates what teachers already know: which students seem to obtain hall passes more often than others. If this created problems, it’s nothing that could not be addressed by educators or students’ parents.

All the purchase of third-party spyware does is allow administrators to plausibly deny responsibility. After all, a computer thing told them to do it. They certainly wouldn’t have done it on their own. And, as the Excel spreadsheet (or whatever output options Eduspire provides) clearly shows (using specifically-tailored output), your child is a bathroom outlier. And since their restroom visits fall outside the mean, things must be done, Mr./Mrs. Parent of Said Student. I’m sorry but our hands are tied.

Hey, clever people out there: stop making bullshit like this. Maybe create a BTFSTTG app that gives students ways to generate junk data for intrusive collections like these that will overwhelm administrators with false positives until they finally decide it’s not worth spending (other people’s) money for. That would definitely be preferable to acting as virtual hall monitors while lowering students’ resistance to always-on surveillance of their activities.

Filed Under: children, dystopia, e-hallpass, for the children, monitoring, students, surveillance, tracking
Companies: e-hallpass, eduspire