New York's Stop Online Predators Act, sponsored by Senator Andrew Gounardes and Assemblymember Nily Rozic, will be included in the Governor's State of the State agenda. The legislation requires online platforms to utilize commercially reasonable age assurance to determine users' actual ages and mandates privacy-by-default settings for children, turning off open chat functions unless a parent switches them back on so adult strangers cannot privately message minors. The bill responds to evidence that more than 300 million children worldwide are victims of online sexual exploitation and abuse, with annual reports of child sexual abuse material reaching a record high of over 36 million. Roblox alone, where over 40 percent of users report being under 13, documented over 13,000 instances of child exploitation in 2023 and responded to 1,300 law enforcement requests.
Disabling open chat by default stops all contact, wanted and unwanted, unless a parent opts back in—a blunt toggle that penalizes compliant families and does nothing to detect the adult predator who contacts a child on a different, unregulated platform or persuades the child to move the conversation off-platform entirely. Guardii's anti-grooming detection, operating in real time within the direct-message environments where exploitation occurs, can distinguish a grooming attempt from legitimate peer or mentor contact and block the former while allowing the latter, surfacing the threat to the parent or authority without requiring every child to obtain advance parental permission for every conversation. That precision—threat-pattern detection rather than demographic exclusion—is the operational model privacy-by-default cannot deliver.
