Privacy

Following the European Commission notifying Meta of its preliminary finding that the social network’s advertising model violates European law, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) Vice President Daniel Castro issued the following statement.

Over the last several years, public opinion on technology and the use of data has shifted from excitement to skepticism to fear.

The evolution of children's media and advertising reflects societal shifts from nostalgic Saturday morning cartoons to today's digitally connected landscape. Debates over targeted advertising to children, echoing past concerns, highlight new challenges in privacy and consumer protection, shaping ongoing legislative discussions around online safety and economic feasibility.

Governor Kathy Hochul has announced a three-pronged proposal that, while well-intentioned, would take too much control away from parents and add to the state-by-state patchwork of legislation that complicates compliance and creates confusion for consumers.

Age-appropriate design codes come from a noble place—the desire to protect children—but have serious flaws and threaten to do more harm than good. Instead of ID-based age verification, Congress should require device makers and platforms hosting age-restricted content to establish a “child flag” system—so everyone is assumed to be an adult unless they are marked as a child.

ITIF President Rob Atkinson appeared on TechFreedom’s Tech Policy Podcast to discuss the new book he co-authored with David Moschella, Technology Fears and Scapegoats.

By improving privacy protection and facilitating secure collaborative research, privacy-enhancing technology could complement data-sharing policies and enable analysis of sensitive medical data and support biomedical innovation.

Technologies and tech companies are accused of creating a myriad of societal problems. Technology Fears and Scapegoats exposes them as mostly myths, falsehoods, and exaggerations. It issues a clarion call to restore the West’s faith in technological progress.

There are fundamental flaws in this proposed regulation. If the Biden administration does not revise or rescind these problematic provisions, it will create new trade and cybersecurity issues for U.S. cloud providers and put the U.S. cloud computing industry at a competitive disadvantage.

In many regards, the proposed American Privacy Rights Act is a reasonable bipartisan compromise, though its draft language still has plenty of opportunities for fine-tuning and three provisions in particular that would have serious negative economic consequences if passed into law.