Endless Frontier Act
Floor Speech
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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam President, one of the benefits of vaccine rates going up is that school districts will no longer have an excuse to keep kids and teachers at home for virtual learning. But if I know kids--and as a mom and a grandmom, I can assure you, I understand the kiddos-- getting them back in the classroom won't get them away from the screens.
These big tech companies in China and the Silicon Valley have done their jobs well. For many American kids, devices are integrated into their everyday lives. There is no escaping that 4-inch plate of glass in their pockets. It has become a part of their culture.
Now, this addiction to tech doesn't sit well with many parents and watchdogs. We have all heard arguments that in order to break this addiction, we need to somehow change the culture and persuade young people to break their own ties with Big Tech. I have a different argument: It is Big Tech that needs to change its culture.
As we all know, many of these companies are little more than glorified ad agencies. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and TikTok have all been successful because of their advertising strategies. Their job is to get eyeballs on content and keep fingers scrolling up and down the screen. This means that with every shiny new update, their advertising algorithms have also gotten an update.
The more complex and pervasive these tracking figures become, the harder it is for users to understand what data these companies are collecting and how that data is going to be used. Not even tech-savvy adults can keep up with the legalese in those updated privacy policies.
I think if I went around this Chamber and asked ``When is the last time you read the terms of service on an app update?'' I am willing to bet the answer for most of us would be ``Well, it was a long time ago,'' or it could be maybe even never.
Big tech companies have taken advantage of that, and they have created within their sphere a culture of pushing boundaries. It is do first, apologize later, and never ever respond to questions about their policies with a straight answer.
This Congress, I reintroduced the BROWSER Act as a way of pushing that culture toward a more consumer-friendly consent model. It would require tech companies to add opt-in and opt-out features to their data collection policies and inject some transparency into the relationship between the user and the service provider. It is a great place to start and a key element of my virtual new protection agenda.
Regulation hasn't kept up with innovation--that much is clear--but neither has demand for corporate responsibility and transparency. It is time to change that, and I encourage all of my colleagues on each side of the aisle to take a look at the BROWSER Act.
But what about those kids? Tech companies are increasingly catering to young demographics, which means the kids are exposed to more of the online world every day, which, depending on what corner you find yourself in, is a productive educational experience, or it could be a life-and-death situation
Now, the science tells us that, physically, children do not have the cognitive ability to understand the advertisements and data collection scenarios that they are being thrown into. Their brains are simply not developed enough. But the security moms out there are keeping an eye on all of this, and they will tell you they do not need an anatomy lesson to know when their child is in over their head. They see their children following trails left for them by predators, and they are bothered. They see their daughters falling apart over body image and self-esteem issues made worse by photoshopped images. They see the violence and the sexual content in music and movies that is created for adults, but children are being exposed to this.
They have a really bad feeling about the expanding role of technology in their child's life. The stats and the scandals we are seeing every day back up their concerns.
According to Common Sense Research, 98 percent of children in this country--98 percent of children in this country--under the age of 8 have access to a mobile device at home. In 2011, just over half of the children had that kind of access. This means that 98 percent of children under age 8 are subjected to unprecedented levels of surveillance, data collection, and advertising attacks, even in supposedly kid-friendly apps.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, got caught tracking children on their school-provided devices outside of school hours. Amazon got caught collecting recordings from children's Echo Dot Kids devices. Parents and regulators have raked Google, TikTok, and Facebook over the coals for pushing products to children that would increase social media addiction.
In 2020, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a recordbreaking 21.7 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation, and 21.4 million of those reports came from electronic service providers. If you are looking for the danger, there it is.
During yesterday's meeting of the Commerce Committee's Consumer Protection Subcommittee, Baroness Kidron had it right when she said that Facebook has not earned our trust, and I would encourage my colleagues working with me on this issue to apply this fact to Big Tech in general.
These companies are entangled in our daily lives and in the lives of our children, and they have no incentive to loosen their grip on our attention by making things easier to understand. Therefore, we have no incentive to assume they are acting with the interest of their customers in mind.
Remember that terms of service agreement we talked about earlier? Well, imagine standing by and asking a child to read, understand, and make an informed choice about whether to click the ``accept'' button. This is preposterous. We need to bring the parents back into the conversation and inject accountability and transparency into the process.
Last Congress, I introduced the SAFE DATA Act with my colleagues, Senators Wicker, Thune, and Fisher. This bill contained a requirement that companies not transfer data collected from children between the ages of 13 and 16 without the explicit consent of their parent or guardian. This Congress, I hope my colleagues, Democratic and Republican, will be willing to work with me on similar legislation that truly targets this problem of child exploitation online.
We will never change the culture of Big Tech--the culture Big Tech has created for itself--if we don't take steps right now to deincentivize the monetization of children's attention and browsing habits. This is a bipartisan issue.
The Zuckerbergs and the Dorseys and the Pichais of the world who have come to testify before the Commerce Committee--they understand this. It wasn't a pleasant experience for them, but I do believe they have gotten the point. They need to understand that when it comes to privacy and safety mistakes, there is no safe harbor to be found here in the U.S. Senate, especially when it concerns the exploitation of our precious children.
What we have going on is going to be even more unpleasant when these security moms start upping the ante and start cutting off the flow of all that valuable underage data that is produced by their children online that is being data-mined by these big tech companies and then sold to advertisers, sold to the highest bidder. That is the breaking point we are rapidly approaching.
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