Kate In Context

This week I've been reading about federal regulations on protecting children's safety and privacy online. I'm certainly not an expert in this topic, and I know there are a lot of aspects that could be discussed, so this post is just my two cents. As readers may remember, I was on the internet in the early days of Web 2.0. I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations has passed, so I'm comfortable saying that I definitely didn't always use my true age when signing up for an account. It was so easy to just choose a different year, and all my friends were already on these sites, so why not? The website certainly didn't try to deter me. I realized even then that the requirement to enter my birthday to make an account was to protect the company I'm making the account with, not me. If the requirement for account holders to be over 13 is so easy to get around, then the age of their users is obviously not what they're worried about. So what are they worried ab...

This week, I've been thinking about the nature of privacy on the modern internet. A common sentiment I hear from people who grew up before social media was commonplace is that they're grateful they were able to keep the silly mistakes they made in their youth private. When they were adolescents, privacy was assumed. Now, preserving privacy often requires active effort.  Technology has advanced rapidly in recent decades, and comprehensive regulation to protect data privacy in America has not kept up. In contrast, the European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, and since then more countries and jurisdictions have passed comparable regulation to protect their citizens' data privacy. As federal regulation has largely stagnated in America, individual states are left to pick up the mantle. Tech companies work with corporate interest groups to lobby the hell out of elected state representatives in order to weaken or even repeal existing regulat...