Democrats and Republicans in Congress are converging over a bill that would provide new online safety tools for parents.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Nivasafo. We've become used to data from our online activities getting collected, packaged, and reused,

but the reality is that for parents, getting access to their kids' data to look out for online harms

can be quite challenging. There are monitoring apps out there, but they can't see everything. That's because of

the walled-off nature of social media and messaging apps. In Congress, there's a bipartisan push

to change that, a bill called Sammy's Law. It's named after a teen who died of fentanyl poisoning

in 2021. He purchased drugs on social media. Will Aramis, who writes about tech at the

Washington Post, has been monitoring the bill's progress. According to Samuel Chapman, who's

family's father, some of the major platforms, including Snapchat and Meadows platforms, which include

Instagram, do not allow access to these third-party apps to

things like private messages. And he said that some of these big companies are actually even

walling off access to the user's main feed. And so the issue is that he had no idea. His son was

corresponding with the drug dealer, and there was no way of knowing.

Even if you had this sort of filtering software installed, it doesn't have access to private

messages on Snapchat. Now, there are good reasons why Snapchat doesn't want to give just any old

app access to every user's private messages. He's hoping that this legislation would create

the kind of ground rules necessary for people to be able to trust that these apps are doing what they say they do, which is monitoring for specific harms and not, say, spying on people or collecting their data for other purposes.

And what are those ground rules as set forth in the bill?

One of the things that's been a challenge with getting kids online safety legislation passed

is getting the left and the right to agree on a bill that they don't think the other side will use against them.

So on the left, there are concerns about online safety bills that would regulate certain types of harmful online content

because they fear that those harms will include things like information about reproductive health,

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