The Maryland Age-Appropriate Design Code is meant to safeguard children’s privacy and prevent geotracking and the selling of personal data, according to State Delegate Jared Solomon. “This is really about the algorithms and the way companies are manipulating people with those algorithms,” he says.
Meetali Jain of the Tech Justice Law Project says companion chatbots are offered as a solution to loneliness and that some users are as young as 13. She calls the trend fascinating as well as dangerous.
We talk to a mom who’s feeling the stress of regulating her children’s social media use. Ravi Iyer, a technologist and psychologist, says the industry should better accommodate parents’ preferences.
“Adolescents are glued to their phones around the clock,” reports Eva Telzer of the University of North Carolina. In our new series “The Infinite Scroll,” Telzer says that later in life, many wish they’d had help disconnecting.
While the algorithmic feed helps creators get discovered, deeper, long-form content is what motivates fans to invest their passion and their dollars, says Brielle Villablanca, head of communications and creator advocacy at Patreon.
Monica McGill, CEO of the Institute for Advancing Computing Education, supports early training in programming and data science because “it basically touches everybody’s work.”
The onus for enforcing the stringent rules will be on the tech platforms. One of the challenges involved is reliably and securely assessing users’ age.
