Online Child Safety

Enabling online child safety with convenient, high-assurance, and anonymous age and relationship verification, parental consent and controls, and AI safety monitoring.

Members

Affiliates

2024

Since

Child Safety

Vertical

Opportunity

The Initiative

Online platforms are legally required to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for minors — but every current approach fails on privacy, usability, or both. The Online Child Safety Initiative builds the infrastructure to solve this: anonymous age verification, privacy-preserving parental consent, and AI safety monitoring — without creating surveillance systems or collecting new personal data.

The Online Child Safety Challenge

Lawmakers across the United States and around the world have enacted — or are actively advancing — a wave of online child safety laws that require online service providers to verify users’ ages and, in the case of minors, obtain verifiable parental consent.

These laws apply broadly across digital platforms, including social media (in 45 U.S. states and at the federal level, such as the Utah Minor Protection in Social Media Act), app stores (in 11 states & federally, including the Utah App Store Accountability Act), and adult websites (in 24 states and federally, such as the Utah Online Pornography Viewing Age Requirements Act).

The Achilles’ heel of such laws — and the challenge for the online providers they cover — lies in the limitations of current mechanisms for verifying identity, age, and parental consent. All of these suffer from a variety of flaws — including being inconvenient, error-prone, costly to implement, and posing significant risks to privacy, security, usability, and compliance.

As a result, despite broad bipartisan support (the Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate by a vote of 91-3), enforcement of child online safety laws has been largely ineffective, fiercely opposed by online providers, and often blocked by courts based on usability, privacy, or First Amendment grounds.

Meanwhile, 41 states have sued Meta, and 14 have sued TikTok, alleging that they knowingly enrolled children without parental consent, failed to implement adequate age verification systems, designed their social media platforms and algorithms to be addictive to increase advertising revenue, all while concealing the resulting harm to children’s mental health and well-being. These lawsuits rely on consumer protection, fraud, and negligence statutes (which have no First Amendment shield), as well as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which requires verifiable parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under age 13, and mandates age verification for websites or services primarily directed at that age group.

How It Works

WebShield’s patented breakthrough innovations enable convenient, high-assurance, and privacy-preserving mechanisms for age verification and parental consent:

Quantum Privacy for bulletproof end-to-end privacy and cybersecurity.
Proof of Trust to enforce data and governance rights across parties.
Unified Trust Model for global regulatory compliance at scale.

What This Looks Like for a Family

A 12-year-old wants to sign up for a social media platform. Today, the platform either asks for a birthdate (easily lied about), demands a government ID (privacy nightmare), or does nothing. With Privacy Networks, it works differently:

The child’s parent has already set up age and consent rules in their family’s Personal Privacy Network. When the child tries to sign up, the platform requests age verification through the Privacy Network. The parent receives a consent request. The parent approves, sets time limits and content restrictions. The platform receives a verified “under-13, parental consent granted” credential — without ever learning the child’s name, the parent’s name, their address, or any other identifying information.

If the child tries a different platform the next day, the same process works — the parent gets another consent request, and can set different rules for that platform. One system, every platform, full parental control, zero data collection.

This is what the laws require. Current technology can’t deliver it without compromising privacy. Privacy Networks can.

Get Involved

Parents, educators, child safety advocates, technology companies, and policymakers — help build the infrastructure that protects children online without compromising anyone’s privacy.

Two ways to participate. Apply to join the Accelerator to protect children from harmful online content, empower parents with privacy-preserving tools for age verification and consent, and support businesses in complying with child safety regulations. Or record your contributions through QPN Catalyst — no signup required.

Team and Affiliates

Members · 41

Marsali S. Hancock
EP3 Foundation CEO and President

Dr. Alex J. Carlisle
National Alliance against Disparities in Patient Health, Chairman and CEO

Michael Rich, MD, MPH
Founder and Director, Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Childrens Hospital

Iwan Streichenberger
President & Co-Founder, Mindshine Technologies

Jonathan Hare
WebShield CEO, President, and Co-Founder

Peter Knez
Palm Global Technologies, TEAL Chairman & CEO

Simran Chana

Cambridge Frontier Technology Lab Executive Director

Patricia Hammar
PKH Enterprises CEO

Pawel Czech

Co-Founder New Native, EP3 Foundation

Lan Jenson
CEO of Adaptable Security (ADA)

Gözde Erbaz
CEO and Founder RobinCode CyberRobin.org

David Bickham, Ph.D.
Research Director, Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital

Thomas Sam Shomaker

Dean, University of Hawaii John A Burns School of Medicine

Virginia Bartlett
Pearson, Former VP, Privacy & Data Protection inBloom Inc Former Chief Privacy Officer

Teri Schroeder

Chief Executive Officer at ISAFE Enterprises LLC

Denise Tayloe
CEO & Co-Founder, PRIVO | Children's Online Privacy Expert | Evangelist | Keynote Speaker

Joshua C. Rubin
President & CEO, Learning Health Community

Michael Kleeman
Senior Fellow and Director Institute for, Global Production and Innovation, University of California, San Diego

Dr. Sandra Elliott
Founder and CEO, Elliott Street Consultancy LLC

Holly Hawkins
Principal, Global Advertising Policy, Amazon

Michael Kaiser
President and CEO at Defending Digital Campaigns

Scott Gallant
Founder and Principal Consultant, Keyed Systems

Marcelo de Andre
ProNatura International, Earth Capital Chairman

Paul Lee
QPulse & Ecuiti CEO & Founder

Gerry Stegmaier

Partner, Reed Smith LLP

Bjorn Hjelm

Senior Identity Architect, Yubico, OpenID Foundation

David Worrall

Founder, Qu-Aid, Technical Advisor, Quside

Marc Singer
McKinsey & Company Senior Partner Emeritus

Stan Trepetin, PhD, CISSP, CEH, GIAC (GWEB)
IT Security Leader

Rich Muth
WebShield CTO and Co-Founder

Lee Barrett
Commission Executive Director, DirectTrust

Soli Zadeh
Director of Ecosystem Development, EP3 Foundation

Jack Lewin MD
Administrator, Hawaii State Health Planning & Development Agency

Matthew Holt
Executive Director, EP3 Foundation

Steve Lund
Cerbrec, SureMark Digital, EP3 Foundation

Dinesh Patel

Managing Partner, Patel Family Investments

Rich Moyer

Milliman MedInsight Chief Product Officer

Vandana Bhardwaj

Milliman MedInsight Principal & SVP Strategic Innovation

Ramsey Hanna
Partner, Reed Smith

Affiliates · 21

WebShield

Center on Media & Child Health

NADPH

Cambridge Frontier Technology Labs

Hawaii SHPDA

University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine

New Native

Global Grid for Learning

Privo

Code.org

LabLab.ai

Digital Wellness Lab

Senzing

Milliman

Compliant Minds

Hedera

CENTRL

DirectTrust

Quantropi

Quside

SureMark Digital