Slashdot Mirror
'Eraser' Law Will Let California Kids Scrub Online Past
gregor-e writes "The first-of-its-kind 'eraser button' law, signed Monday by Governor Jerry Brown, will force social media titans such as Facebook, Twitter and Google let minors scrub their personal online history in the hopes that it might help them avoid personal and work-related problems. The law will take effect on January 1, 2015."
A new California law will require local bars to eliminate any alcohol consumed by minors from their bodies on demand. Supporters say this new law will reduce the amount of drunk-driving and poor decisions made by drunk minors. It might help them avoid personal and work-related problems.
If they let minors do this, why not everyone?
Minors can enter into contracts. There are just different rules.
http://nationalparalegal.edu/public_documents/courseware_asp_files/domesticRelations/FamilyRelationships/Contracts.asp
TL;DR: Yes, yes, no, probably not.
I am not a lawyer, I am certainly not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I just read a lot of laws, and have far too many lawyer friends for my own good...
aren't they giving permission to publish it online? Can they really revoke that permission later?
Per the conditions of your site's Terms of Service (you do have them, don't you?), the content your users give you may or may not be retained, retransmitted, adapted, or whatever else. By using the site, your users agree to that and grant you permission. Those terms govern what you can do with what you're given. For example, Slashdot's terms say that by commenting, you're giving them permission to publish your comments indefinitely, in pretty much any form they want. Under Slashdot's terms, that permission cannot be rescinded.
Minors are special. Despite the apparent common opinion here, they can enter into a contract... they just usually can't be forced to uphold their end of it. As far as copyright permission goes, this means you probably are already under a legal obligation to remove it if they want, because they can choose to void the contract giving you the permission... but to make you do that, the minor would have to realize the intricacies of contract law, realize that they still have exclusive copyright over their posting, and figure out how to contact you to request removal.
California's law requires an accessible way to remove (or request the removal of) a minor's own posting, that stops whatever's deleted from being published further. It's practically irrelevant, since most sites already have such a function... the problem is that it's hard to find, and people don't use it nearly as quickly as they should. The law only requires that such a function be "clear". Good luck with that.
Aren't there First Amendment issues here?
The First Amendment has no real part in this. The First Amendment is between you and the government, only. It does not come into play in contracts between you and a web site operator, unless the operator is a government entity itself. That might involve the First Amendment, but I doubt it will be a significant issue.
am I legally obligated to maintain that site forever
The law doesn't have any time limit built into it, so time limits will be up to the courts to decide, but the law also doesn't require you to actually erase the data. You're only forbidden from retransmitting it, so if your site has a self-service delete button, that's probably fine. If you take your whole site offline, nobody can get to it, so that's probably fine, too. Bringing it back later with all the old content intact is riskier. The exact type of site also matters, because the law only comes into effect if you know that minors are using it. A forum dedicated to the latest teen heartthrobs would obviously fall into that category, but a forum for discussing do-it-yourself RV repairs probably wouldn't.
I highly recommend reading the actual text of the law. The first part is prohibiting certain advertisements toward minors, but the erasure part starts at section 22581. As with all legal text, realize that it's written to cover as much as possible, so try to ignore the repetition and it becomes much easier to read.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The following is why this law is bogus. I know politicians have been trying to change this, but they have no actual, legal authority to do so:
Historically, and continuing to the present the courts -- on up to the Supreme Court -- have ruled that when any kind of "transaction" is taking place, it takes place in the state of the place of business of the vendor. (That's why states can't charge a company sales tax unless the company has "a substantial physical presence" in that state.)
This legal precedent goes back more than 150 years, to the days when mail-order began to become big business. And note: internet sales (memberships, subscriptions, etc.) ARE nothing but mail-order. The only thing that has changed is the method of payment (credit card, Paypal, viewing online advertising).
The point here is: when you visit a website, legally the website is not coming to you, YOU are going THERE. It cannot, as a practical matter, work any other way because there is simply no way a given website can know all the local laws everywhere.
So if you have a website in Poughkeepsie, Gov. Jerry Brown has no legal authority to tell you what you can and cannot do with your website. He can tell you that you can't make sales in California. But other than that, he can't dictate what you do. Legally, Californians are visiting YOU, not the other way around.
Can somebody here write a cgi script (soon to come in handy) to detect which IPs are from California and ask for confirmation that they are indeed at least 18 years old?
That's simple, but I'm against "one size fits all" CGI "scripts" (since they don't exist), and also my CGI is not scripted, it's compiled C code. It's quite an easy bit of logic: In addition to the age verification for 13 year olds, simply also ask their state of origin. If they check the box:
[_] I am a resident of California, or am connecting ultimately from California (regardless of proxy).
Then you simply add five years to the output age from your date checking.
That way, you can be sure they're old enough to use your services. What I've discovered about my website visitors is that those who are not my target demographic for games forums (18-35) are octogenarians with severe potty-mouths! Some said this method was suspect, so I allowed the users to enter the actual year of their birth instead of drop-down boxes. The results were Astounding! Those that are not 18-35 are now 80% likely to be Ancient Ones who've lived for over two thousand years! I'm not an ageist, so I don't discriminate against those timeless immortals by denying them access. XxHalo343xX celebrated her 2013th birthday the same day she signed up, far be it from me to spoil her special day.
Additionally, a far rarer but greatly more mind-blowing fact is that there are time travelers among us from as early as 2038! Now, I'm not racist or sexist and I see no reason to block the chrono-displaced due to a mere CGI program oversight, so we welcome these visitors as well. I'm sure the regulations for operating a time machine ensure far more responsibility than merely deciding to say stuff on the Internet... Despite our prying, they remain tight lipped about the future, revealing only that global warming will cause another ice age, and that the PRISM leaks were caused by one of their ilk: Snowden? It seems so obvious in retrospect! Where else would you live during an ice age? Besides, I'm of the opinion that rather than inconvenience the entire space-time continuum, parents could simply be actual parents and monitor their kids' time-traveling activities if they're concerned.
It light of my recent discoveries I plan to change the date-based age verifier with a single simple checkbox:
[_] I am at least 13 years old, Not an enemy of the (current) USA, am 18 years of age if hailing from present-day California, and want cookies.
Surely you don't need a "contest" to write code that verifies if a single boolean value is true?
if ( 0 > false && G_theCheckBox > -1 || true < 0 ) { /*...*/ }
Blam! You're welcome. Even handles both negative and positive values of 'true' and 'false'!