Utah legislators have apparently concluded that their so-called child protection do-not-e-mail registry may increase the risk of kids’ e-mail addresses falling into the hands of online predators.
The state’s lawmakers are considering an amendment to the Utah’s child no-e-mail law that would require warnings to parents that children’s e-mail addresses on the no-e-mail registry may be at greater risk of being misused by employees of companies that access the data.
Marketers and the Federal Trade Commission have said multiple times that child no-email registries may provide online predators with a source of verified children’s addresses.
Dubbed HB 417, the proposed amendment to Utah’s child-protection law would require the state’s Division of Consumer Protection to send parents who register their kids’ e-mail addresses the following confirmation message:
“No solution is completely secure. The most effective way to protect children on the Internet is to supervise use and review all e-mail messages and other correspondence. Under law, theft of a contact point from the Child Protection Registry is a second degree felony. While every attempt will be made to secure the Child Protection Registry, registrants and their guardians should be aware that their contact points may be at a greater risk of being misappropriated by marketers who choose to disobey the law.â€
Just in case anyone is missing the big picture here, let’s recap the last few months of child-no-e-mail registry laws:
Despite warnings from marketers and the FTC that child-no-e-mail registries may make kids’ e-mail addresses more vulnerable to online predators, Utah and Michigan passed laws establishing these registries last summer.
Then, while Iowa, Georgia, Connecticut, Hawaii and Wisconsin consider passing similar laws, it turns out the company running Utah and Michigan’s registries, Unspam, has in its contracts clauses that exempt it from liability if companies using the registries misuse the data.
This is entirely possible since every online pornographer in the land is supposed to use the registries and there is no way Unspam can screen everyone.
Now, Utah is working on amending its law to tell parents in a fine-print, after-the-fact way that the kind of abuse marketers and the FTC have been warning lawmakers about all along could, indeed, happen.
Way to go, Utah.
