Senators on Protecting Kids’ Privacy: ‘It’s Complicated’

On Friday, news broke that Google reportedly has agreed to pay as much as $200 million to settle claims with the Federal Trade Commission that YouTube, its popular video platform, violated children’s privacy laws on a vast scale.

The FTC started investigating YouTube more than a year ago. At the time, WIRED wrote: “The complaint claims that a significant portion of popular content on YouTube is designed for kids, whose personal information—including IP address, geolocation, and persistent identifiers used to track users across sites—is unlawfully collected by Google and then used to target ads.” Google’s settlement, which was first reported by Politico, would far exceed the record for children’s privacy violations set by TikTok’s $5.7 million fine earlier this year.

There’s growing bipartisan agreement in Washington that the two-decades-old law protecting children online needs updating for the smartphone era. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1998, the same year that Google was founded. Since then, additional privacy legislation has stalled on Capitol Hill, in part because many Republicans have resisted using the power of the federal government to interfere in the business practices of major American firms. (Democrats too were for years all too happy to let Silicon Valley look after itself.) But when it comes to protecting kids from having their data mined and sold online, many leading conservatives say they are more open to interfering with the so-called free market.

Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, recounts that back in 2006 when he was incoming speaker of Florida’s House, he made the targeting of minors on MySpace a priority, one of many ideas that helped propel him onto the national stage as a forward-thinking, new generation of politician. Looking back at his MySpace crusade today, Rubio laughs: “Nobody even knows what the hell that is anymore.”

As the father of four children, Rubio says he often grapples with the balancing act involved in legislating along pro-business conservative ideals and protecting the nation’s kids, especially in the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley.

“The government’s always played a role in public safety, but we always need to sort of balance protecting public safety without quashing innovation and advances or other unintended consequences,” Rubio told WIRED. “It’s complicated. It’s going to take some time, and the legislative process oftentimes cannot keep up with technological advances. I mean, by the time you’ve put your arms around something, the technology has already leapt into some other vulnerability.”

This debate has been on the radar of some of the GOP’s younger members since they began their political careers. As a parent of young boys, freshman senator Josh Hawley of Missouri says protecting children’s privacy when they log on is something that’s constantly on his mind. “I just think, my gosh, I mean, by the time my kids are 20, think about the amount of information about them that will be just out there and available, getting sold by data brokers,” Hawley told WIRED. “How will it affect their ability to get into college, to get a job, to get a loan?”

Hawley is more aggressive than most conservatives when it comes to regulating tech firms. He’s calling to block companies from being able to track kids online and banning all targeted advertising to any children under the age of 15, while also giving all parents the absolute “right to get their kid’s information back.”

“Here’s another area where the law hasn’t kept pace, and we haven’t substantially, meaningfully updated the child protections since the 1990s,” Hawley bemoaned. Earlier this year, he helped introduce a bill to update and strengthen COPPA with Democratic senator Ed Markey, one of the law’s original authors.

Many Republican senators remain focused on a narrower, arguably more traditional set of concerns—namely, protecting minors from sexual predators and shielding them from explicit content online. Back in the 1990s, porn sites were the overarching worry. Now the focus has shifted to the apps that we use 24/7 on our phones.

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Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee has called Snapchat, which has millions of teenage users, “a child predator’s dream.” But it’s not just criminal acts that concern lawmakers like Blackburn. “Even if minors are not exposed to sexual predators, they are exposed to unsolicited, provocative images via advertisements, channels, and search results generated by Snapchat itself,” the Republican wrote in a letter to Snap CEO Evan Spiegel last month. “Although Snapchat’s policies adhere to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, they no longer sufficiently protect our children in the new social media age.”

Blackburn says in the ’90s, after videogames like Mortal Combat raised the ire of lawmakers and many parents for being “violent,” Congress pressured companies into setting up the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which warns consumers about age-sensitive content for videogames. “We need to do that with these apps and get something that is actually appropriate,” Blackburn told WIRED.

Other Republicans go further still, calling for the nanny state on steroids. “What I would like to do is have phones set up such that when parents purchase the [cell]phones certain websites are just automatically barred, period,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana told WIRED. “I mean period.”

But the more things change, the more they stay the same, and there are those Republican senators that seem willing to continue giving Big Tech the benefit of the doubt. Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, from South Carolina, told WIRED that rather than pass a new law, he’d like tech firms to codify standards of good corporate behavior—and follow them.

“Tell me, what are the best business practices for apps and phones and all that good stuff? And let’s make sure that you do that. I want you to earn the liability protections,” Graham said, apparently referring to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which broadly shields online services from being held liable for the things other people post. “I think the companies need to engage in best business practices and have some regulatory body to make sure they’re doing it. That’s sort of my construct, we’ll see where it goes.”

Most of tech’s biggest critics on the right have given up waiting for “best business practices” to come out of Silicon Valley when it comes to the data of millions of Americans. But Blackburn, for one, says it’s hard to take meaningful measures on privacy for children when Congress has failed to define what that even means, for either kids or adults. “First of all, we’ve got to set a privacy standard, so that we have something we can legislate too and work from,” she argued.

“I think it is an area of bipartisan concern, and I’d like to see Congress act. But how you structure it is complicated,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas told WIRED. “At this point I’m considering all the ideas.”

The Republican Cruz is still wrestling with a broader question over whether the issue of children’s privacy should really be so separate from the issue of any American’s privacy, no matter what age. “In both instances we’re dealing with Big Tech abusing their power—and often monopolistic power,” he says. “I think there’s a serious problem. I think the remedy’s complicated.”

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