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We founded Dreamwidth in 2008 with several guiding principles in mind, among them protecting your privacy and giving you as much control as possible over your data. Given those principles, we wish we could support California's AB 2273, the Age-Appropriate Design Act, a bill signed into law in September 2022 that California passed to put restrictions into place for children's online data privacy and protection. It's an important issue, and too many companies out there don't put enough attention towards protecting their users.

Unfortunately, the law as California wrote it is not a data privacy act: it's a backdoor censorship bill that threatens anonymity online, will require privacy-and-anonymity-conscious sites such as Dreamwidth to collect more identifying data about our users than we want or need to, and will force sites to remove or restrict access content the state of California feels is "harmful to children" independent of their own editorial judgement. Like the Communications Decency Act of 1996, overturned in the landmark Supreme Court case Reno vs ACLU (521 US 844 (1997)), we feel the law uses vague and undefined terms to impose prior restraint on the protected speech of adults. Its age-verification requirements will force us to violate your privacy and place an undue burden upon your use of the site by requiring us to use invasive measures to verify your ages: proposals for how sites should verify the ages of their users include requiring copies of government issued IDs (which would end anonymity online) and forcing sites to adopt unvalidated and scientifically bogus facial recognition technology to estimate user ages (which, in addition to ending anonymity online and being a breathtaking overreach, shuts out everyone who doesn't have access to a device that can capture image or video, blind people who struggle with lack of visual cues during the facial recognition process, and everyone whose age that technology mis-estimates).

Worse, though, the law also allows the state of California to determine, through an unaccountable administrative process, what content is "harmful to children" and force sites to age-lock that content. That will force us to designate a large amount of legal, protected speech as available only to accounts that have verified their age as being over 18. Given the terrible, hot-button political environment today, and using examples of laws that have already passed or are in the legislative process in other states about what sort of content is "harmful to children", that provision could require us to age-lock an entry written by a Black Dreamwidth user talking about experiencing police violence, a Muslim user talking about experiencing discrimination at work because of her choice to wear a hijab, a trans user talking about seeing their doctor for gender-affirming health care, a user talking about the process of accessing abortion services -- or even an entry that I post with an offhanded reference to my wife bringing me candy that went on half-price sale after Valentine's Day. There's a long history of content by marginalized people talking about their lives being considered "harmful for children", and we have no interest in furthering that disparate impact at the government's directive. We offer you the ability to age-lock your content for you to have more control over who can see it, and we object most strenuously to the idea that the government should force us to force you to use that ability when you don't want to.

There's been no shortage of terrible online content regulation bills that we strenuously oppose lately, so why are we telling you about this one? Because we were invited to provide a third-party declaration in support of the motion for a temporary injunction to stop the law taking effect in Netchoice v Bonta, the legal effort to invalidate the law as unconstitutional, in order to demonstrate to the court all the ways the law as written will impose a significant undue burden on small sites like us and on our users and to provide some examples of how the law will have a significant disparate impact on marginalized groups. We're proud to contribute in some small way in the fight against this terrible overreach of a bill. As a small site with a legal budget of, like, $3.81 and the lint I turned out of the pockets of my hoodie, we're thankful to industry advocacy group Netchoice for leading the fight (and giving us the chance to stand up with them) and to the kickass lawyers at Davis Wright Tremaine, who have been a delight to work with throughout the process of turning my tl;dr rant about why this is a terrible bill into something that we hope the court will find helpful.

You can read our declaration, which was filed today with the motion asking the court to stop the law from going into effect. The full docket for the lawsuit is available via RECAP, including the motion for injunction.