Markey Wants Passage of Do-Not-Track Law Now, Which Blumenthal Largely Supports

Markey, who wrote the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, lit into Internet companies that expose youngsters’ data that ought to be kept private, often invoking the example of Facebook. Leibowitz, whose agency settled with that company in a 20-year monitoring agreement, “knows a few things about talking back to Facebook,” Markey said. “We must build on this and we must have our victories in the very near future,” he said of DNT. The “BF era -- the before-Facebook era” of when COPPA became law in 1998, is a relic now, Markey told the conference sponsored by Common Sense Media. There’s “an incredibly intrusive invasion into the privacy of the children that just knows no bounds” and is why the DNT Act would bar such activities for anyone younger than 15 without parental OK, he said: “We have to put these rules” on the books. The FTC will finish its work on a proposed COPPA update this year, Leibowitz said.

For youth, “the Internet is like online oxygen, they can’t live without it … yet at the same time they don’t have the capacity to make the decisions about what kind of information they should put online,” Markey said. He cited research showing there are 7.5 million preteens on Facebook, including a few million younger than 10. “Is YouTube going to turn into YouTrack?” he asked of that Google-owned website. Facebook policy prohibits anyone under 13 from registering, and when it finds them on its site their accounts are permanently deleted, a spokesman said. “When underage users lie about their age, it means that services like Facebook treat them as users of a different age, and therefore cannot provide special settings and protections for kids pretending to be much older than they actually are. We see ourselves as innovators, and believe it is time to focus on how to keep kids safe online and on Facebook, rather than on how to keep them off.”

Leibowitz said industry has “a commitment to balance, to doing the right thing.” That’s why setting a “general standard, a self-regulatory one that everyone will want to abide by” makes sense so no company has an unfair competitive advantage in targeting youth, he said. Having a DNT plan for young people is “something that absolutely needs to be considered,” given minors are “tech savvy and judgment poor” and it’s key “that we give at least some capacity” to remove information from the Internet. “Potential employers and colleges … really should not be prying into their zone of some degree of privacy,” Leibowitz said. “There is a lot of bipartisan support for privacy,” which is “one of the least partisan issues,” he said. “That’s one issue where you can anticipate some legislative fervor and action in the near future."

That it’s “very difficult to get anything done in Congress” means for DNT “any proposal, no matter how well intentioned, no matter how well supported, faces an uphill battle” in the Senate, Blumenthal said. “It’s something that should come because there is broad consensus for it,” the sponsor of a bill to bar employers from getting workers or applicants’ website passwords said of DNT generally. The DNT Kids Act “at its core” is sound, he said. “It will be a standard feature, pick a number, within 5 years, there is such broad demand for it,” he said of industry following a DNT regime, which he noted the administration supports part of (CD Feb 24 p6). “All of us deserve an eraser button of some kind,” Blumenthal said. “We need to view informed consent as the touchstone."

Since everyone’s part of the problem, all can be part of any solution, Clyburn said. The FCC’s role is limited in this area unless broadcast content is indecent or illegal, so “from a content perspective, my role is somewhat limited,” she said. It “definitely is within my sphere of influence,” she continued, voicing hopes that media be “inclusive” of minorities and other groups. For Tate, co-chair of a healthy media commission (CD April 16 p2), “pervasively, media impacts them,” she said of kids. Girls can see 3,000 ad-related images a month and kids of both genders can send and receive 3,300 text messages monthly, she said of the “somewhere between eight and 10 hours of media that they are consuming every day.”

Given there are “all these issues where the government is already involved in children’s lives” in other realms, “why wouldn’t we be concerned about cyberbullying and about their privacy,” Tate said. “Perhaps we need a digital driver’s license.” She hopes for “good digital literacy, good digital citizenship, in every classroom in America,” and asked whether new communications platforms should adopt a code of ethics that would apply “across the entire media ecosystem.” There needs to be “more education and more dialogue on all fronts” about the types of content kids are exposed to, said April McClain-Delaney, Washington director of Common Sense Media. Its event was “just a kickoff in a series of dialogues” about having media as “a very important tool in education,” she said. CEO Jim Steyer wondered aloud “if there really is bipartisan consensus, why can’t we get something done” on kids’ privacy issues.