Latest news with #DataSharingAmendments
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How will big tech comply with Utah's first-in-the-nation child protection laws?
Utah reasserted its place at the tip of the spear in the battle against Big Tech this legislative session with a pair of pioneering bills aimed at protecting parental consent and user data. Gov. Spencer Cox signed the state's first-in-the-nation App Store Accountability Act into law on Wednesday and praised the state's similarly unprecedented Data Sharing Amendments as a game changer. Critics of the proposals predict they will end up in the same place as Utah's earlier efforts in 2023 and 2024 to mandate social media safety features for minors which courts have paused out of constitutional concerns. Advocates argue that the Beehive State's latest attempt to rein in software giants is lawsuit-proof because of its focus on contracts instead of content. The new laws, they say, will give Utahns important tools to prevent exploitation at the hands of companies that profit from private information and unhealthy screen time. SB142, App Store Accountability Act, mirrors legislation introduced by Utah Sen. Mike Lee at the federal level that was proposed by a coalition of child protection groups led by Utahn Melissa McKay. The new law will require app stores to verify whether a user is an adult, using the same information required to set up an app store account. Minor accounts must be affiliated with a parent account and will be placed in one of three age categories: child (under 13), younger teenager (13-16) or older teenager (16-18). App stores will be required to obtain verifiable parental consent if a minor attempts to download an app or make an in-app purchase. The consent process must inform parents of the app's age rating and a description of how the app will use and protect their child's information. 'This was kind of a radical new concept,' McKay said in an interview with the Deseret News. 'It took us a long time to realize it doesn't matter what we do as a coalition ... these companies aren't fixing themselves.' Under the new law, app developers will be required to verify a user's age category and parental consent status with app stores once a year or whenever the app's terms of use agreement is updated. The law also creates a new right of action for parents of harmed minors to sue app stores or developers if they violate these provisions by enforcing contracts against minors without parental consent, by misrepresenting the app when asking for consent or by sharing personal age verification data inappropriately. 'While we need to embrace technology as part of our future and as something important in our society, we also need to protect children,' said Aimee Winder Newton, director of Utah's Office of Families, in an interview with the Deseret News. 'And that's what's so great about Utah, is we recognize that protecting children is No. 1.' During the 2025 legislative session, the bill received the support of app developers, like Meta, Snap Inc., and X, who were happy to see the responsibility for verifying identity moved to one central location and called for other states to implement Utah's solution. 'Parents want a one-stop-shop to oversee and approve the many apps their teens want to download,' the three companies said in a joint statement. 'This approach spares users from repeatedly submitting personal information to countless individual apps and online services.' But the country's main app store companies, Apple and Google, were strongly against the bill and put forward their own proposals that would have made age verification between stores and developers optional. In a blog post following the bill's passage, Google's public policy director, Kareem Ghanem, said the bill introduced new privacy risks for minors by informing every developer of users' ages without parents' permission. Meanwhile, Apple also suggested that Utah's law forced app stores to unnecessarily collect and distribute 'sensitive personally identifying information.' Caden Rosenbaum, a senior policy analyst at the Utah-based Libertas Institute, told the Deseret News that the bill simply recodified current contract law while potentially compromising internet anonymity and expanding government interference in the private sector and in the home. 'In an ideal world, the government would not be in the business of parenting. I think that is the fundamental disagreement here,' Rosenbaum said. 'There are relevant issues that we need to discuss and we shouldn't be just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks when it comes to the way that we do it.' Rosenbaum questioned the bill's ability to survive constitutional scrutiny. But the sponsor of the legislation, state Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, said he doesn't expect the law to receive the same fate as the state's previous attempts to regulate minors' experience on social media. Unlike those policies, SB142 is difficult to attack on First Amendment grounds, Weiler said. But the bill was given a delayed implementation date of May 6, 2026, to give the social media companies 'time to react.' Several other states, including Texas, are likely to pass legislation based on Utah's this year and could receive legal challenges first because of earlier implementation dates. On the final night of the legislative session, Cox praised Weiler's bill while also giving recognition to HB418, sponsored by Rep. Doug Fiefia, R-Herriman, which he has yet to sign. 'This was a top priority of our administration,' Cox said. 'I can't underscore how big this is; I don't think people really understand what this could do if we could get it done in other states and as a nation.' HB418, Data Sharing Amendments, reaffirms an individual's right to control the data social media companies collect on them by requiring companies to provide or delete this data upon request. It will also mandate that social media companies remove barriers that prevent users from sharing their own data, like followers, posts and messages, from one platform to another to prevent companies from guarding user data. Once signed, the law will require social media companies to develop 'accessible, prominent, and persistent' methods for getting consent to share personal data with any third-party. The Division of Consumer Protection will be empowered to fine bad actors up to $2,500 for each violation or to bring a legal motion to enforce the law. 'This bill isn't about punishing businesses, but it does challenge exploitative business models that rely on unchecked data harvesting,' Fiefia told the Deseret News. 'There are still plenty of sustainable, responsible ways to innovate and succeed without compromising individual rights.' For countless Utah parents, legislative efforts to hold social media accountable are 'very encouraging,' according to Jenna Baker, a Heber City resident studying for a masters in public health. As the mother of four children between 7 and 16, Baker said watching the impact of social media on the country's youngest and most vulnerable has been 'heart-wrenching.' 'It's so disheartening because I wonder how many tragedies could have been avoided if we would have had this conversation 15 years prior,' Baker said. Baker said she hopes the new laws are just the beginning for public policy that seeks to help parents manage a problem that looks much more like a public health crisis than a moral panic over new technology. While the responsibility for a child's experience on a phone ultimately comes down to the parent, Baker said that additional tools to level the playing field with huge corporations are long overdue. 'It's now like, how do we pick up the pieces and move forward so that our youth have a brighter and more healthy future?' Baker said.
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
A Utah representative's bold move to rein in Big Tech
When you join a social media platform, you sign over the rights to your digital identity. Every post, view and interaction is logged — much like client records stored in a filing cabinet, where they remain indefinitely. When deleting an app you don't get to take your data with you, and though the app may no longer be on your phone, the data isn't erased. In fact, the app continues to use and profit from it. But a bipartisan bill in Utah aims to change that. HB418′s purpose is to allow users the right to own, control and manage their data. In a way, it intends to 'clean up the mess that we caused by allowing tech companies to come in and control our lives,' the bill's sponsor, Rep. Doug Fiefia, R-Herriman, said. More than 35 years ago, President Ronald Reagan said, 'The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.' Fiefia added that Americans need to be wary of another power. Big Tech. 'The most dangerous nine words in modern history is 'we are Big Tech, and we're here to help,'' Fiefia told the Deseret News. For years, Utah has been a leader in using its legislative power to protect consumers, especially minors, from the impacts of technology, specifically social media. Fiefia's bill has garnered national attention from prominent figures such as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of 'The Anxious Generation'; Paul Allen, co-founder of and Frank McCourt, founder of Project Liberty. Its potential ripple effects on the country and its relationship with the tech industry have made it a focal point of national discussion. The bill, titled Data Sharing Amendments, passed the House on Day 31 of the 2025 legislative session with a 64-1 vote. Big Tech is a common nickname for the five most prominent and influential technology companies in the world: Google, Apple, Meta (formerly Facebook), Amazon and Microsoft. Most of these companies have more users than countries' populations, and they dominate the economic and social power of online communication. According to the Transnational Institute, Big Tech is the 'most profitable and valuable' industry globally, making billions in profits annually. Over time, these companies have monopolized the internet and shaped the market in their favor. 'We're completely locked into these social networks that have erected all these barriers,' Allen told the Deseret News, making it nearly impossible to compete with. 'They own us. They own our data, and we can't do anything with our social graph,' adding that HB418, if passed, would 'not just level the playing field, but give small startups a fighting chance to make a dent in this world with multitrillion-dollar corporations that have sucked up all the oxygen.' A tech pioneer himself, Allen founded in 1997, the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world. He was there when Mark Zuckerberg held his very first F8 developer conference back in 2007. 'Zuckerberg stood in front of an audience of a couple of hundred people and said, 'Any third-party software developer can now build apps on top of the Facebook platform. We will let you compete with us. We just want to own the social graph, and we want third-party app developers to launch this huge app ecosystem. We'll give you 100% of the revenue from the apps that you develop,'' he said. He shook Zuckerberg's hand, said he would launch his family apps on Facebook and went to work. Instead of going the traditional route and creating a website, Allen's team launched an app called 'We're Related' on Facebook. 'Within 29 days, we had a million users,' he said. 'Then it started adding a million a week.' Nearly three years later, Facebook removed tens of thousands of apps from its platform, denying Allen's app access to its 120 million users. As a result, he said, they lost $750,000 in monthly revenue and were forced to lay off 40 employees. 'We were the biggest family app on top of Facebook, and Facebook shut us out and kicked all the apps off of their platform,' he said. Because they were giving apps 100% of the ad revenue, Facebook management 'must have come in and said, 'Why are you giving away 30% of your ad revenue? Why aren't you taking 100% of the ad revenue?'' 'So I'm not a fan of a corporation that launches a platform, makes promises to almost 100,000 app developers, and then decides to change the rules and kicks them all off so that they can keep 100% of the ad revenue.' Before his political career, Fiefia worked in the technology industry for nearly a decade. He saw firsthand how these companies operate. 'To keep users engaged at all cost, big tech companies collect enormous amounts of data on us,' he said during the House Economic Development and Workforce Services Committee meeting two weeks ago. 'What we like, what we watch, who we interact with, and then use it to create algorithms that keep us hooked. That data is then sold to advertisers for billions of dollars,' he added. 'I quickly realized that we are not the customer. We are the product.' In a 2017 Axios interview, Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, called himself and other Big Tech creators out for knowingly 'exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology' and doing it anyway. He said Facebook asked, 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?' One way is through targeted advertising. One of HB418's most compelling attributes is it would fundamentally change the power dynamic between users and advertisers. 'Advertisers will still be a customer, but we also will be a customer,' Fiefia said. Social media platforms 'will have to fight for our attention, and if it's not safe for our kids (or) if we don't love their privacy standards or terms, if we don't love the values of this company, we can leave' and take our information with us. 'I think that's the control that we all yearn for as users.' With four children, Fiefia said his children won't be given a smartphone until after they turn 16. Social media will gradually be introduced afterward, but 'with strict guards.' 'If you look at leadership in most tech companies, their kids don't have access to social media,' he added, pointing out the hypocrisy. 'We talk about it like it's a normal thing, but we guard our kids from the technology that we're selling and that we're promoting.' Haidt's book, 'The Anxious Generation,' is a testament to the damage technology has done to children's mental health. In his statement supporting the bill, Haidt warned that 'social media companies know that they are facilitating and causing vast harms to our kids and have repeatedly failed to act. Many young people regret their time spent on social media, and feel compelled to use them because all of their friends are using them. Even as we work to reform and regulate existing social media platforms, users should have realistic and safer online alternatives.' Ravi Iyer, a social psychologist who helped in the research of 'The Anxious Generation,' told the Deseret News that HB418 is a step forward in a long fight to 'break these network effects' that are negatively impacting children's mental health. He shared a study that found 72% of teens feel social media manipulates them into spending more time on the platform than they would ideally want to. If HB418 were implemented, it would give 'a lot more choice about the experience that you want, and you can pick the algorithm you want, or your parents can pick the algorithm they want,' he said. 'We don't always have to feel locked into things that we don't enjoy, that we regret, that we have all these unwanted experiences with. 'The reason why these companies have gotten so big, even in the face of many people disliking their products, is because of these network effects,' a challenge that Fiefia's bill aims to tackle and a key reason for Iyer's strong support of its success. Hopefully, that will lead platforms to compete in a way that is of value to users, Iyer added. 'If we can get some way for consumers to move across platforms, then hopefully, they'll start competing for user value' rather than user attention. 'The tech industry's money is going to win a lot of the time, and I'm hopeful that, maybe this time, we can break through.'
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion: Why Utah's ‘simple' social media reform could set a dangerous privacy precedent
The way that it is framed, you'd think that Utah's HB418 is just a simple change to Utah's privacy law. They are just 'Data Sharing Amendments,' after all. But beneath that innocuous label lies a sweeping proposal that would make Utah the first state in the nation to require the most technically demanding and privacy invasive form of interoperability. Until last year, I worked at an economic research group located at Utah State University, focusing on data regulation. While I am not a native Utahn, it has become like a second home to me. In my professional capacity, I have testified before the Senate on data ownership, have written extensively on platform competition and explored the technical problems in trying to change social media technology through regulation. Utah has a commonsense privacy bill, one of the best in the United States. These amendments would severely undermine all of that good work. Interoperability is a slippery term. Most of the time, it refers to something relatively straightforward like data portability. Data portability is the ability to download your key demographic data, posts and messages so you can move them elsewhere. Utah already has this codified in law. But HB418 goes far beyond that and would force social media companies to 'open the gates,' giving outsiders access to personal user data as well as social graph data. As the bill defines it, social graph data comprises all the interactions with other users, including how they responded, reacted or shared content, as well as all of the metadata about the interactions. In other words, if you and I were friends, and I decided to exit Facebook, all of your comments would be included in the data stream as well. Implementing interoperability for social graph data would violate the privacy of users who never consented to such data transfers in the first place. Not even the European Union, famous for its far-reaching digital regulations, has taken this step for social networks, even though it has imposed interoperability rules on messaging apps like WhatsApp. In fact, when the EU debated similar rules for social media platforms, they ultimately decided it was too big a leap because of privacy concerns. Privacy has always been the crux of interoperability. It is also worth remembering that Facebook originally got into trouble over Cambridge Analytica because they allowed users to share exactly the data that this new bill would mandate. Given that they are obligated to not share this information under their settlement, it is not even clear how they could comply with this bill. Just as important, research on interoperability has found it is not a panacea for competition. In one of the few research papers that actually asked platform engineers what they thought of ported data, it was found that 'interviewees struggled to come up with new, competitive products they could build from, or meaningfully grow with, ported Facebook data.' There is a lot of research that suggests mandated interoperability tends to favor the incumbent, leading one business professor to dryly admit that interoperability is 'not always beneficial to the competition or customers.' Indeed, data is not as transformative as some assume. A paper published just last month concluded that 'sharing Google's click-and-query data with Microsoft may have a limited effect on market shares.' What matters more is being exposed to alternatives. In the end, Utah's HB418 isn't a modest tweak to privacy laws. It's an untested experiment that exposes users to unprecedented privacy risks while offering questionable benefits to competition or innovation. By mandating the sharing of intimate social graph data, the bill undermines established privacy protections, hands power back to entrenched incumbents, and paves the way for potential abuses that no modern regulation should tolerate. Instead of liberating consumers, this form of forced interoperability threatens to turn our digital lives into an open book, proving that when it comes to our personal data, interoperability is just not all it's cracked up to be.
