Privacy

Join ITIF for a discussion on recently introduced chatbot safety bills up for debate in Congress, including the GUARD Act and CHATBOT Act, and what policymakers, parents, and platforms could do to protect children without bans.

As new technologies such as AI expand both user-directed and provider-driven personalization capabilities in digital systems, policymakers should ensure that personalization strengthens transparency, accountability, and user control rather than constrain its development.

The UK should resist the urge to regulate in haste. Protecting children online is essential, but protection should mean smarter design, stronger safety tools, and greater parental control, not blanket bans that remove technology from young people and choice from families.

Critics say the SECURE Data Act is a unified Republican effort. Yet its core provisions mirror privacy protections passed by Democratic and Republican majorities in 21 states. So, while it would preempt state laws, it also draws heavily from those laws, reflecting a bipartisan, multistate consensus on how to protect consumers while enabling innovation.

Canada’s privacy regulators are restricting the use of public online data for AI training, but this approach could undermine AI innovation. Canada should instead adopt a harm-based framework focused on concrete privacy risks.

Canada’s cloud debate is asking the wrong question—control, not domestic ownership or server location, is what determines security and resilience in practice.

Canada is considering banning social media for teenagers, but the evidence suggests this approach is misplaced. Harm is not driven by access alone, but by specific online experiences, and a blanket ban would do little to address them.

The TRUMP AMERICA AI Act combines AI regulation with children’s online safety legislation in a single bill, creating overbroad, ill-suited policies that increase compliance burdens and ultimately weaken both innovation and effective protection of minors. These issues should be addressed separately with targeted approaches.

To protect individuals while preserving the open information ecosystem that supports innovation, policymakers should focus on outputs rather than training inputs, encourage transparency norms for autonomous AI agents, and create a safe harbor for responsible use of publicly available data.

Watch now for an expert panel discussion examining how the rapid growth of state privacy laws is influencing the debate over federal privacy legislation.