Statement on wrapping Eyes on the Board Act into Kids Off Social Media Act

This week the Senate Commerce Committee will mark up a new version of the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, renamed the Kids Off Social Media Act. This new version is far worse than the original bill, which bans kids under 13 from social media in a wrongheaded and overreaching attack on their digital and human rights. The bill now under consideration has been combined with Sen. Cruz’s Eyes on the Board Act, which requires schools to certify that they are spying on children in order to receive federal funds.

The Kids Off Social Media Act is now doubling down on an already problematic provision in the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), an over 20 year old law that requires content filtering for schools that want to take advantage of E-Rate discounts for internet services. Civil society organizations have long criticized overbroad interpretations of CIPA’s “monitoring” requirement that have been used to install invasive spy software that can even surveil students in their homes.This spy software collects data on and makes inferences about students’ browsing habits, messages, and documents. It can even view or listen to activities in a child’s home. Increasingly, schools are expanding this invasive monitoring to students’ personal devices. 

The following statement can be attributed to Matthew Lane (he/him), Senior Policy Counsel at Fight for the Future

“The Eyes on the Board Act should be called the Spies on our Children Act for how it doubles down on CIPA’s unintended spying provisions that have let unscrupulous tech companies sell dangerous and discriminatory spyware to be used against kids in schools. Sen. Schatz has taken an attack on free expression and made it more dangerous by adding these mandatory spy provisions. 

This culture of denying students privacy is not what Congress intended. In debates leading up to CIPA’s passage, it is clear that deploying a panopticon against children and families was not the plan. Twenty years ago, today’s surveillance capabilities were the stuff of science fiction.

However, the Kids Off Social Media Act and its partial predecessor, the Eyes on the Board Act, explicitly remove all hope that we can stop tech companies and schools from invading the privacy of students and their families. Instead, all schools will be required to certify that they’ve installed invasive monitoring software in order to receive E-Rate discounts. This will chill student expression and disproportionately impact low income and marginalized students, who rely more on school-provided internet and devices. Worse, such invasive surveillance threatens to out LGBTQ+ students and make accessing lifesaving resources and community more dangerous.

Students deserve better than a law that never envisioned the invasive surveillance they now face. We need to protect students from the unintended consequences of CIPA’s “monitoring” provision, and there is a clear opportunity to correct this mistake. Cruz’s Eyes on the Board Act, the Kids Off Social Media Act, or whatever congress calls it will be a blow to students and families’ digital and human rights no matter what you name it—we should spy on students less, not mandate that schools do it in order to receive desperately needed resources. This bill shouldn’t make it out of committee, and hopefully Senate Commerce Committee members understand how bad it is to mandate spying in exchange for federal funds.”