Colorado’s deceptive “Protections for Youth on Social Media” bill would allow minors to hide their online activity from their parents.
HB26-1148, which Representatives Yara Zokaie and Jenny Willford introduced in the Colorado House of Representatives earlier this month, would require social media and online gaming platforms to adopt high default privacy and data protection settings for minors’ accounts.
Plenty of other child protection bills, including the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), would require social media companies to institute more protections for minors on their platforms.
Unlike other bills, however, Colorado’s “Protections for Youth on Social Media” bill would conceal kids’ data from parents and strangers alike.
HB26-1148 would require covered companies to obtain a minor user’s permission for any adult — including their parents — to view their profile, account activity, friends or location.
To protect minors’ “data privacy,” HB26-1148 instructs: [Covered businesses] shall not permit an individual, including a parent or guardian of a covered minor, to track the location of the covered minor without providing a conspicuous signal to the covered minor when the covered minor is being monitored or tracked (emphasis added).
To add insult to injury, the bill does not require social media or online gaming platforms to meaningfully protect children from obscene or inappropriate content. Covered companies do not have to verify the ages of users seeking to access mature content.
Instead, HB26-1148 specifies it should not be “interpreted or construed to … prevent or preclude a minor from deliberately or independently searching for or specifically requesting any media.”
In other words, HB26-1148 strips parents of any ability to monitor their kids’ social media activity while empowering minors to view any content and interact with any user they want.
Readers would never know the bill eviscerates parents ability to protect their kids online from its official summary, which writes only that HB26-1148 would require covered companies to provide minors with “the highest level of privacy.”
Parents familiar with bills like KOSA, which would require social media companies to adopt comprehensive parental controls, might reasonably assume Colorado’s bill would exempt parents from privacy protections meant to shield children’s accounts from strangers and internet predators.
Unfortunately, they would be wrong.
Colorado’s “Protections for Youth on Social Media” may not directly affect all families, but Colorado legislators’ proposal and deceptive description of the bill should remind all parents to read the fine print.
Daily Citizen is a news division of Focus on the Family that provides a faith-based perspective to counter the mainstream media’s anti-Christian bias.
