SALT LAKE CITY—Today, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed two bills from Utah’s legislature into law. While passed with good intentions from lawmakers, SB 152 and HB 311 are unconstitutional and will force businesses to collect more — not less — of people’s sensitive personal data, including teens.
“Protecting teens online is a worthy goal, but these Utah bills are both counterproductive to this end and unconstitutional. Utah will soon require online services to collect sensitive information about teens and families, not only to verify ages, but to verify parental relationships, like government-issued IDs and birth certificates, putting their private data at risk of breach. If people don’t have or are unwilling to submit the required documentation, they would lose access to critical information channels,” said NetChoice Litigation Center Associate Director Nicole Saad Bembridge. “These laws also infringe on Utahns’ First Amendment rights to share and access speech online—an effort already rejected by the Supreme Court in 1997.”
Saad Bembridge continued: “This law requires massive data collection on all Utahns, creating a honeypot of sensitive information that can be captured and misused by malicious actors.”
HB 311 and SB 152 are problematic because they:
- Violate the First Amendment by banning anonymous speech;
- Violate the First Amendment by infringing on adults’ lawful access to constitutionally-protected speech; and
- Endanger children by requiring them to share their sensitive, personally identifiable information, which creates risks that it will be captured and misused by malefactors.
Please contact Krista Chavez at press@netchoice.org with inquiries.