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Feature Phone

New York seems to be on the right track by considering a ban on smartphone for school kids. I never figured why access to such devices was needed for people under the age of 18. Ability exchange calls and texts should alleviate safety concerns. J started out with a feature phone and that worked well enough for all concerned. She graduated to a smartphone in time but by then she had plenty of real-life things to occupy her time with and there was no marked difference in behavior with the new phone. 

The smartphone-ban bill will follow two others Hochul is pushing that outline measures to safeguard children’s privacy online and limit their access to certain features of social networks.

The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (Safe) for Kids act addresses algorithmic feeds. It would require social media platforms to provide minors with a default chronological feed composed of accounts they have chosen to follow rather than algorithmically suggested ones. The bill would also mandate that parents have more wide-reaching controls like the ability to block access to night-time notifications.

If the bill passes, companies that breach the regulations would face fines of $5,000 per violation, and parents could sue for damages.

Not sure if parental controls will be that easy to implement. Kids are pretty clever about working around them. One way to make this work is for a kid to get a state issued license to use social media. The restrictions on acceptable use can be encoded into the license itself so no workaround are possible. Any such heavy-handed oversight can be a slippery slope and can creates opportunity for all manner of abuse and unforeseen consequences. The alternative is status quo which feels much worse right now.

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