A bit of backstory on a book chapter

Remember “virtual worlds”? Maybe some of our adult children do from 2009, when Congress asked the FTC to do a report on their impact on children, and my friend and colleague Phyllis Hurwitz Marcus was an attorney there and led that FTC project.

Virtual worlds were an early expression of the metaverse—Phyllis and her team surveyed 27 of them, including Second Life, IMVU, Habbo, Gaia and There (for tech history buffs, Appendix A has the full list). Anybody else remember those? :) [Here's a 2008 blog post of mine on the subject.]

Fast-forward to 2021 and Phyllis, now an attorney in the private sector, reached out to me to see if I would talk with her and our editor Kalinda Raina about writing the only chapter on #onlinesafety in the International Association of Privacy Professionals' (IAPP's) new book on children’s online privacy worldwide. Phyllis wrote the all-important chapter on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, better known as #COPPA. 

A big reason why I said yes was, well, Phyllis had called! It was also an opportunity to look back on the near quarter century of online safety history I’d witnessed and offer that, including the struggle Congress had in writing legislation that would fly with the US’s highest courts, which themselves struggled with the historically unprecedented clash between protecting children and free of expression at the same time. Please read the part of my chapter on the laws that represented those struggles—CDA, which a legislative aide in then-Senator McCain's office later told me they drafted to test the Supreme Court and which brought us Section 230), COPA (once dubbed "son of CDA" and was survived only by the COPA Commission), CIPA (which US public schools and libraries know all about) and of course COPPA (which Phyllis Marcus tells you all about in the IAPP book!)—for more on all this (let me know if you'd like a PDF). [And see this on a book about the latest struggle that shows child safety, privacy, and rights are getting increasingly mashed up.]

But the chapter's certainly not just about laws. I also had the privilege of interviewing experts such as Charlotte Willner, founding executive director of the Trust & Safety Professional Association (TSPA.org), about the state of content moderation (and why it’s so very hard to get it right), experts on the state of its technology, and researchers, children’s rights lawyers and NGO leaders in other countries on the state of online safety in their regions of the world. So you'll find historical context plus a snapshot of public perceptions and expert perspectives on the state of online safety, by region, around the world, in 2021 (it takes so very long for books to get published!).

It truly was a labor of love to write. Here's looking at all of you in so many fields, NGOs, governments, institutions, and companies working on child online safety—and, importantly, children's rights—all over the world. I hope readers will find it as useful as I know they’ll find all the chapters on children's privacy in schools, homes, digital games, and laws. Let us know! 

Thanks to Kalinda for her able editing, Phyllis for thinking of me, and my other fellow authors: Cari Benn, Sunghee Chae, Vincent Chang, Lorna Cropper, Benjamin Gaw, Kento Hirata, Alex Hutchens, Matt Jackson, Sara Kloek, Richard Lawne, Phyllis Marcus, Cathal McDermott, Hayley Miller, Shanti Mogan, Indranil Rudra, Emily Tombs, Amelia Vance, Casey Waughn, Carla Weitcamp, Lilien Wong, Gil Zhang (sorry no links—I couldn't find everybody here in LinkedIn and didn't want to link to only some).