Youth privacy law today shares the logics and pathologies of the U.S. Supreme Court's jurisprudence about parental rights over children. We argue that this reliance is both misplaced and harmful. Parental rights emerged from litigation where parents fought for the right to impart their religious beliefs and traditions to their children as they wished, whether in the home, school, or community.
However, vast structural differences exist between the contexts in which parents pass on religious beliefs and those in which parents aim to protect children's data from corporate exploitation. This origin story also has destructive effects. Youth are denied the privacy that they need to thrive and forge relationships, including with their parents. Only an ever-narrowing class of interests benefit from parental rights, and those interests have little to do with children's well-being. As it has evolved in the law of children, the parental control model results in contests over the authority of the state, parents, and children (with children hardly ever in view).
We offer a different path. First, rather than framing youth privacy law as a triadic struggle about who makes decisions about children, we urge scholars and policymakers to widen the aperture to include a fourth player, tech companies, whose power eclipses that of the state, parents, and children. Second, rather than focusing simply on decisionmaking authority, youth privacy debates should ask: Who benefits and who loses? Whose interests are being ignored or worse damaged? What political agendas are being empowered or disempowered? These questions can help us develop youth privacy laws that serve the dignitary, developmental, and autonomy goals of children.
- Publication Type:Journal Article
- Publication Date:1.5.2026