State do-not-email laws: No help

It has to be tough being a lawmaker these days - especially one concerned about online kids' safety - as everybody struggles to keep up with tech-literate kids and their favorite technologies. The great majority of child-protection ideas aired in hearings and promoted by lobbyists are undoubtedly well-meaning, if not always useful. But there's one type of "child-safety" legislation that can actually increase the risk of what it claims to fix: the do-not-email laws that have created email address registries in Utah and Michigan and that are under consideration in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, and Iowa. Who says? The US Federal Trade Commission in its "National Do Not Email Registry: A Report to Congress." The FTC concludes: "Any Do Not Email Registry that earmarked particular email addresses as belonging to or used by children would raise very grave concerns…. The possibility that such a list could fall into the hands of the Internet's most dangerous users, including pedophiles, is truly chilling." For the reasons why and for some parenting ideas where young online communicators are concerned, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.