States Tackle Data Privacy, Kids’ Safety As Sessions Wrap Up

Connecticut, Texas, Oregon and other states with legislative sessions that end this month have pushed through laws that broaden existing data privacy statutes to sweep up more companies and categories of information and measures that seek to join the growing push to restrict kids’ access to online platforms.

Here, Law360 looks at several bills recently approved by state legislatures that may have flown under the radar.

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The Texas measure faced opposition from the R Street Institute, a nonpartisan public policy research organization that urged Abbott in May to veto it.

“As we advised in testimony to the Texas Senate in March, we are concerned that ‘instead of empowering parents, S.B. 2420 merely imposes a government mandate to replicate protections that are already easily available to them’ and that ‘it erects barriers to accessing speech and content for all mobile device users and creates novel data privacy and security problems,'” the group said then.

The organization elaborated that, no matter how the law is enforced, Texas residents would be “forced to hand over a great deal of sensitive personal data” to app stores in order to verify their ages and give permission on behalf of underage users, putting consumers at heightened risk that this information would be misused or stolen.

“It would be impossible for app stores to implement the level of age verification required by S.B. 2420 without collecting more data on all of their users than they do presently,” the group asserted, “and even the best age estimation services commercially available have error rates that would force many users to produce further evidence such as a state ID in order to verify they are not a minor.”