State Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a brief this week asking a federal district court judge to strike down a lawsuit challenging the state’s law requiring social media companies to prioritize the privacy and safety of data collected from minors.
Assembly Bill 2733, authored by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, was signed into law last year and regulates companies that provide “an online service, product or feature likely to be accessed by children.”
The law is modeled on the United Kingdom’s Age Appropriate Design Code, which requires that businesses provide privacy protection to children by default. It also prohibits businesses from using a child’s data or information for any other reason besides the purpose for which it was collected.
While the law isn’t set to go into effect until July 1, 2024, the industry group NetChoice — representing a group of companies that include Meta, Twitter, TikTok and Amazon — filed a lawsuit arguing that it violates the First Amendment via the government controlling online speech.
“AB 2273 undermines children’s privacy by forcing sites, regardless of how secure they are, to track and store information identifying which users are children,” NetChoice argues on its website about the lawsuit. “Child predators and hackers will be drawn to less secure sites as goldmines for children’s sensitive data.”
Bonta is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. In his brief, filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, he argued that the law does not violate free speech rights because it does not regulate or restrict social media content for any user and does not conflict with existing federal law.
“This is not about free speech: the companies challenging this law are doing so because they want to continue to make money from our kids’ online activity,” Bonta said. “In California, it is no longer business as usual when it comes to designing online services, products, and features that are accessed by kids – it’s time to elevate and protect children’s privacy and safety.”
A hearing on Bonta’s brief and request to dismiss the lawsuit is scheduled for July 27, 2023, according to the Northern District of California.
3 comments
Social media is out of control. As it is computers know to much about you, and you know they sell it to the highest bidder. I find it funny that with all the info they collect on you they are worried they would have to keep track of a kids age. A real bunch of phonies.
Google is very much into “scientific business procedures” as if one can become a billionaire that way. I still think it’s luck which the kids there don’t understand. Google upgraded is analytics plugin and demanded that users of analytics go update their settings to a very complicated very complicated set. Mind you that analytics just aggregates data and you get a report on the user flow on your site. Many people, who probably had just small websites didn’t want to do all that work if could even understand what was wanted. So now Google if you don’t update they will do it for you. Such is life in this over technified world.
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Personally I don’t see a good reason for the people to live in such a sci-fi world but there seems to be a lot of nuts who do. So it’s good to stand up to that group.
I want businesses to provide privacy protection to adults as well as children by default. In the nineties Congress messed up big time when they debated opt-out versus opt-in by default. Businesses make false assumptions with the data they collect and sell it to anyone. So I get calls at 5 AM from India offering to lower my credit card interest rate. I must unplug my phone every night at bedtime. No emergency calls can get through.
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