Online Child Safety Law Blocked After Calif. Argued Face Scans Not That Invasive
Freeman writes:
A California law requiring a wide range of platforms to estimate ages of users and protect minors from accessing harmful content appears to be just as unconstitutional as a recently blocked law in Texas requiring age verification to access adult content.
Yesterday, US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman ordered a preliminary injunction stopping California Attorney General Rob Bonta from enforcing the state's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), finding that the law likely violates the First Amendment.
"The Court finds that although the stated purpose of the Act-protecting children when they are online-clearly is important," Freeman wrote, "the CAADCA likely violates the First Amendment."
"Specifically," Freeman said, "the age estimation and privacy provisions thus appear likely to impede the 'availability and use' of information and accordingly to regulate speech," and "the steps a business would need to take to sufficiently estimate the age of child users would likely prevent both children and adults from accessing certain content."
[...] Regulators' attempts to age-gate the Internet have drawn criticism, and courts have repeatedly found that these laws likely run afoul of the First Amendment. But perhaps more troubling, here, Freeman found that CAADCA not only risked restricting speech, but also did not appear to address or mitigate the harms to children identified by the state. Even worse, after California argued that businesses gathering information from children by requiring face scans or other biometric data to estimate user ages was "minimally invasive," Freeman concluded that enforcing the law could cause more harm than good. "Such measures would appear to counter the State's interest in increasing privacy protections for children," Freeman wrote, explaining:
"CAADCA's age estimation provision appears not only unlikely to materially alleviate the harm of insufficient data and privacy protections for children, but actually likely to exacerbate the problem by inducing covered businesses to require consumers, including children, to divulge additional personal information."
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