Heinrich Advances Legislation to Protect Children Online and Safeguard their Privacy, Hold Big Tech Accountable

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Founder and Co-Chair of the Senate Artificial Intelligence Caucus, applauded Senate passage of legislation he cosponsored to protect children online and safeguard their privacy, and hold Big Tech accountable. The Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) passed the Senate as part of the Kids Online Safety & Privacy Act.

"Our kids use the internet for homework, learning, gaming, and staying connected with friends. As parents, we must ensure the internet is a safer, more secure space for children and teens. That's the goal of this legislation," said Heinrich. "These two bills will empower parents to safeguard their kids' well-being and privacy - while holding Big Tech accountable."

Heinrich continued, "It's time for social media companies to prioritize our children's safety and privacy over engagement and profits. With this legislation, we tell Big Tech: Our children's private lives are not for sale. I will continue to fight for policies that put the interests of New Mexicans first by putting guardrails on Big Tech that protect safety, privacy, and civil liberties."

The Kids Online Safety Act would provide kids and parents with better tools to protect themselves online, hold Big Tech accountable, and provide transparency into black box algorithms. The legislation is led by U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

Heinrich pushed to update language to ensure that the focus of the bill was to protect children from addictive and harmful social media platform design features, not to empower overzealous state attorneys general to police and penalize children for accessing and creating online content.

Specifically, the Kids Online Safety Act:

• Requires social media platforms to provide minors with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features, and opt out of personalized algorithmic recommendations.
• Platforms are also required to enable the strongest privacy settings for kids by default.
• Gives parents new controls to help protect their children and spot harmful behaviors, and provides parents and educators with a dedicated channel to report harmful behavior.
• Creates a duty for online platforms to prevent and mitigate specific dangers to minors, including promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and advertisements for certain illegal products (e.g. tobacco and alcohol).
• Ensures that parents and policymakers know whether online platforms are taking meaningful steps to address risks to kids by requiring independent audits and research into how these platforms impact the well-being of kids and teens.

The updated bill text can be found here.

The landing page with the latest information about the bill is here and helpful resources can be found here.

The Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) would modernize and strengthen the online privacy law for children, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). COPPA 2.0 is led by U.S. Senators Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.).

Specifically, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act:

• Builds on COPPA by prohibiting internet companies from collecting personal information from users who are 13 to 16 years old without their consent.
• Bans targeted advertising to children and teens.
• Revises COPPA's "actual knowledge" standard to close the loophole that allows covered platforms to ignore kids and teens on their site.
• Creates an "eraser button" by requiring companies to permit users to eliminate personal information from a child or teen when technologically feasible.
• Establishes data minimization rules to prohibit the excessive collection of children and teens' data.

A one-page summary of the bill is here.

The text of the bill is here.

Last week, Heinrich also passed the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act of 2024 (DEFIANCE Act), legislation he cosponsored that will hold accountable those responsible for the proliferation of nonconsensual, sexually-explicit "deepfake" images and videos.

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