Florida lawmakers are taking a novel approach to kids’ online safety by proposing to bar minors from disappearing message apps and requiring companies to decrypt messages to comply with law enforcement search warrants and subpoenas.
The bill, which the Senate passed last week, follows passage last year of a first-in-the-nation Florida law barring youth under 14 from most social media platforms and requiring parental permission for teenagers 14 to 16 to have an account. That law is under legal challenge by the tech industry but still being enforced by Attorney General James Uthmeier (R), who recently sued Snap, Inc. alleging multiple violations.
This year’s legislation would amend that law to require social media platforms to provide a way to unlock encrypted messages on a minor’s account for purposes of assisting a law enforcement investigation. It would also give parents and guardians access to their child’s messages, and minors would be blocked from using self-destructing message apps and features available through platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram.
“There are bad actors online targeting minors, targeting our kids and our grandkids,” Sen. Blaise Ingoglia (R), the bill’s prime sponsor, said in a floor speech before the bill was passed. “Encryption used by social media companies make it more challenging, if not impossible, for law enforcement to retrieve the proof necessary to put these guys behind bars.”
A similar bill from Rep. Michelle Salzman (R) passed out of committee but has not yet been voted on by the full House.
The tech industry and privacy groups have pushed back forcefully and warned of more litigation.
Industry trade association NetChoice said an “encryption backdoor is fraught with privacy and security risks.” Chamber of Progress, another trade group, wrote in a letter to senators that the Senate bill would “compromise online privacy, risk cutting off at-risk Floridian youth from lifesaving resources, and threaten to violate First Amendment rights.”
“We agree with the need to build greater protections for young users, but this bill’s requirements would guarantee protracted litigation without advancing child safety,” wrote Kouri Marshall, Chamber of Progress’s director of state and local public policy for the central and southern U.S.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy and free expression advocacy nonprofit, similarly blasted the legislation as “dangerous and dumb” and warned that if it passes, social media companies will likely stop offering encryption services to minors altogether, “making them less safe online.”
This isn’t the first time state officials have targeted minors’ use of encrypted messaging services.
Last year, a coalition of civil rights and privacy groups asked a judge in Nevada to oppose Attorney General Aaron Ford’s (D) attempt to block Meta from providing minors in his state with encrypted messaging.
An earlier version of the Florida Senate bill would have barred end-to-end encryption on social media accounts, but Ingoglia said that would have created unintended security concerns. He said under the current legislation companies would have to engineer a way to decrypt individual messages.
The debate in Florida echoes a standoff between the British government and Apple over the U.K.’s demand that the company provide “backdoor” access to its encrypted cloud storage, the Associated Press reported.
Supporters of the Florida legislation counter that police and prosecutors are being stymied by encrypted messages during their investigations of online crimes against youth, such as sextortion, sex trafficking and drug-related deaths.
“[W]hen we send our subpoenas and our search warrants to these social media companies … we get back ‘no material exists,’ because they’ve encrypted it,” Amira Fox, one of the state’s chief prosecutors, said at a recent news conference.
On the Senate floor, Sen. Shevrin Jones (D) challenged Ingoglia regarding the provision allowing parents to see their kids’ messages.
“How does this requirement balance with minors’ … right to privacy, especially in situations where parental access could be either harmful or abusive to them,” Jones asked.
“The way we wrote this … is going to protect a heck of a lot more kids from future harm than having some parents spy on their kids in a nefarious way,” Ingoglia responded.
The Senate passed the bill 34-3.