The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently been laser focused on protecting kids in the digital age, a fact that was underscored Wednesday when Commissioner Mark Meador came out strongly in favor of age verification becoming an online norm.

“Age verification offers a better way — it offers a way to unleash American innovation without compromising the health and well-being of America's most important resource: its children,” Meador said in a speech at an agency-hosted age verification workshop. “It is a tool that empowers rather than replaces America's parents — really, I don't know that we can afford to forego it.”

At least 25 states have enacted laws requiring verification of users’ ages to allow access to some online content. The issue is controversial — civil libertarians, tech giants and digital freedom advocates argue that age-gating imperils free speech and cuts vulnerable kids off from online resources.

Court rulings on the issue have been mixed.

NetChoice, a tech industry association, has won multiple lawsuits challenging state age verification laws. Meanwhile, in June, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring pornography sites to verify user ages.

The high court ruled that age verification requirements do not violate the First Amendment. The ruling is expected to increase the push for age verification of porn sites at the state level.

Meador framed the issue through the lens of child safety, citing statistics showing increases in self-harm among children in the digital era.

Since 2010, he said, suicide rates have spiked by 91% for adolescent boys and 167% for adolescent girls. Self-harm has also been rising — emergency room visits for self-harm among adolescent girls has increased by 188% during the same time frame, he said.

“This is a pretty suggestive pattern and what it suggests is that the more we've been connected digitally, the worse off we've become,” Meador said. “A bitter irony — the age of the smartphone and social media is, for too many children, an age of suffering.”

He added that new technologies, including AI, can ferret out kids seeking inappropriate content without compromising privacy.

“Behavioral age verification … strikes me as one of the best use cases for artificial intelligence,” he said. “Machine learning can help detect patterns in browsing and usage behavior that consistently indicate whether a user is too young to be on the platform.”

‘Mass monetization’ of kids’ data

Meador also took aim at tech companies’ data collection practices, alleging that they have preyed on kids to turn profits.

“Mass monetization of America's children is not the future we hoped for, nor are the predation and extremism that seem … increasingly to define our encounters online,” Meador said. 

“American families have enough on their minds right now — the last thing they need is to have their kids’ data harvested and monetized by multibillion dollar tech companies, or watch their kids suffer from premature exposure to the worst the internet has to offer.”

The Trump FTC has cracked down on companies that it says have illegally collected kids’ data in recent months. While adtech location data harvesting enforcements have notably waned, the newly constituted FTC has aggressively enforced the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA).

In December, the agency announced that Disney would pay $10 million to settle allegations that it improperly harvested personal data from kids' YouTube viewing history without notifying parents or obtaining their consent.

The Disney enforcement followed a September announcement that the FTC is suing the operator of an anonymous messaging app for its data collection practices involving children.

The agency alleged that the Sendit app did not notify parents that it was collecting phone numbers, birthdates, photos and social media usernames from children under 13.