CDT: Calif. Law's Age-Verification Rule Poses Privacy and Security Risks
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should direct a lower court to enjoin California’s 2024 law (SB-976) restricting social media feeds for minors, consumer privacy advocates and free-market groups said in amicus briefs filed Thursday (case 25-146). As it urged the appeals court to reverse the U.S. District Court for Northern California, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) raised privacy concerns about requiring companies to conduct age verification.
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The 9th Circuit last month temporarily stopped California from enforcing the social media law while the appeal is pending (see 2501280074). Challenger NetChoice then pressed the appeals court for a preliminary injunction (see 2501300045).
CDT said “the limitations of current age verification technology create an unjustifiably high burden to accessing this protected content.” Age verification “requires all users to submit personally identifiable and sensitive data to gain access," yet current methods “are both insufficiently effective at their stated task and pose security and privacy risks to individuals that use them."
The impact of restricting algorithmic feeds by age would hurt people of all ages, especially marginalized youth, wrote the Chamber of Progress, LGBT Tech and the Woodhall Freedom Foundation. “Algorithmic feeds are indispensable to a safe and navigable Internet because they enable platforms to organize the constant flood of digital content, helping users find content of interest even if they do not know that a specific piece of content exists.”
Electronic Frontier Foundation and two library advocacy groups raised speech concerns with the California law, saying it “imposes extraordinary burdens on minors and adults’ ability to express themselves and to access speech on the most popular digital forums of our time.”
Similarly, the Cato Institute focused on possible free-speech problems with the law in another amicus brief.