Children Online: Pornography, Age Assurance, and Privacy

Children deserve protection from sexual exploitation, commercial pornography, manipulative design, and data extraction. Adults retain lawful access to speech without giving a website their legal identity or creating a record of what they read.

The Innovation Party puts the first duty on systems. Child-directed services should minimize data, use protective defaults, restrict behavioral advertising, give parents usable controls, preserve age-appropriate child privacy, and face independent audits of engagement and recommendation features. A service cannot profit from attracting children and then disclaim knowledge when the same design exposes them to predictable harm.

Commercial services whose primary business is distributing material legally obscene to minors may be required to perform age assurance. Compliance must disclose only whether a person meets the age threshold. The content provider should not receive a legal name, government identifier, face template, address, or reusable browsing record. The law should permit several independently tested methods, including device-held or third-party tokens, and require prompt deletion, security, accessibility, appeal, and liability for misuse or breach.

Constitutional permission is not a design standard. In Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Supreme Court upheld Texas's age-verification law under intermediate scrutiny. That ruling allows a state to act; it does not require identity retention or excuse a system that children evade easily. NIST and the FTC are now evaluating and encouraging age-assurance technology. Federal standards should measure accuracy, demographic performance, bypass rates, data flow, retention, and breach risk before one method becomes a legal gate.

Parents direct a child's media life within the child-safety floor. Adults govern their own lawful reading. Public rules should target commercial distribution to minors and exploitative product design, not ordinary political, health, artistic, educational, or LGBTQ speech through a vague label. No universal internet ID. No centralized reading history. No secondary use of identity or biometric data. No immunity for a business that creates the risk and externalizes the privacy cost.

Protect childhood without building a list of what every adult reads.