Richard Selleck: Kids safe online means putting parents first
"Michigan can lead on this issue, but only by getting it right," columnist M. Richard Selleck writes.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not of Ottawa News Network.
Every parent understands the assignment: protect your children, prepare them for the world, and give them enough independence to grow without leaving them alone to face risks they cannot yet understand.
Technology has made that assignment harder.
The internet can educate, entertain, and connect our children. It can also expose them to harmful content, manipulative platforms, and companies collecting more personal information than most families realize. Parents are expected to manage all of this while the technology, the risks, and the rules change constantly.
That is why lawmakers are right to take online safety seriously.
But taking a problem seriously does not mean every proposed solution is a good one. A law can have the right intention and still produce the wrong result. It can promise safety while creating new privacy risks. It can claim to empower parents while quietly transferring authority to government agencies, app stores, or technology companies.
That is my concern with portions of Michigan’s Kids Over Clicks legislation and similar app-store age-verification proposals being debated nationally.
These proposals could require families to provide sensitive personal information simply to access ordinary apps and online services. That information would then have to be collected, verified, transmitted, and stored somewhere.
Parents should ask a simple question: What happens when that database is breached?
A password can be changed. Biometric information cannot. A child whose identity is compromised may live with the consequences long before he or she is old enough to drive, vote, or open a bank account.
That is not a theoretical concern. It is the predictable consequence of building systems that collect more information than they need.
We should not have to sacrifice our children’s privacy in the name of protecting their safety.
There is a better approach.
The federal Parents Over Platforms Act recognizes that parents need practical tools to oversee their children’s online activity without imposing sweeping content restrictions or creating unnecessary repositories of sensitive data.
It also reflects how families actually use technology.
Children may share a tablet. Parents and children may use different profiles on the same device. One household may have several children of different ages, each with different needs and different levels of independence.
A workable policy must account for that reality. It should give parents meaningful control without treating every family, every child, and every device exactly the same.
Most importantly, it should preserve the role of parents.
Parents know their children. We know their maturity, their habits, their challenges, and the boundaries they need. Government can establish safeguards, and companies should be held accountable, but neither should replace parents as the primary decision-makers in their children’s lives.
That is the standard lawmakers in Lansing should use as they reconsider Kids Over Clicks and other online-safety proposals.
Does the policy meaningfully protect children? Does it minimize the collection of sensitive data? Does it work for real families using real devices? Does it strengthen parents rather than write them out of the process?
If the answer to those questions is no, the Legislature should go back to the drawing board.
Protecting children online is too important for slogans, shortcuts, or policies that create one danger while attempting to solve another.
Michigan can lead on this issue, but only by getting it right. That means protecting children, protecting their privacy, and trusting parents to remain at the center of the decisions that affect their families.
— M. Richard Selleck resides in Holland, Michigan.
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