How a Georgia Lawmaker is Tackling Kids’ Online Safety

Intro 0:01

Welcome to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security podcast. Like any good marriage, we will debate, evaluate, and sometimes quarrel about how privacy and security impact business in the 21st century.

Jodi Daniels 0:21

Hi, Jodi Daniels here. I’m the founder and CEO of Red Clover Advisors, a certified women’s privacy consultancy. I’m a privacy consultant and certified informational privacy professional, providing practical privacy advice to overwhelmed companies.

Justin Daniels 0:35

Hi, I’m Justin Daniels. I am a shareholder and corporate M and A and tech transaction lawyer at the law firm Baker Donelson, advising companies in the deployment and scaling of technology. Since data is critical to every transaction, I help clients make informed business decisions while managing data privacy and cyber security risk. And when needed, I lead the legal cyber data breach response brigade.

Jodi Daniels 0:59

And this episode is brought to you by Ding Red Clover Advisors. We help companies to comply with data privacy laws and establish customer trust, so that they can grow and nurture integrity. We work with companies in a variety of fields, including technology, e-commerce, professional services, and digital media. In short, we use data privacy to transform the way companies do business together. We’re creating a future where there’s greater trust between companies and consumers. To learn more and to check out our best-selling book, Data Reimagined: Building Trust One Byte at a Time, visit redcloveradvisors.com Well, we have a special episode today. Justin, do you want to give some context? Because you,

Justin Daniels 1:40

I think you should give

Jodi Daniels 1:41

no, I think this one’s you.

Justin Daniels 1:45

Well, we had Atlanta AI Week last week, and you and I were there, and I was able to reach out through your newsletter.

Jodi Daniels 1:58

Yes, my newsletter reading,

Justin Daniels 1:59

yes, to Georgia. State Senator Sally Harrell, and her and Shawn Still, her co-sponsor of a variety of online bills to protect children in the state of Georgia, were able to come to the conference, and we had a panel, and it’s been years since I’ve been moderating a panel where no one was doom scrolling and everyone was riveted to everything they had to say.

Jodi Daniels 2:31

It’s true. If you were there, the front row also nodded at just about everything that you all said. I wish I had a camera, it was great to watch them, so today we have Georgia State Senator Sally Harrell, and then we’re going to have a future episode where we’re going to have Shawn Still. So we’ve kind of taken the AI week, and if you didn’t get to be there, and depending on when you were listening, this was in April of 2026 in Atlanta, we’re going to have – we’re bringing it to the podcast in two parts,

Justin Daniels 3:01

pretty much.

Jodi Daniels 3:02

Yes, so just like you got to introduce last week, you get to introduce this week.

Justin Daniels 3:08

Okay, so as we just said, we have Georgia State Senator Sally Harrell with us today. Hi Sally.

Senator Sally Harrell 3:15

Hi there.

Justin Daniels 3:17

So a little background about her, she was elected to the Georgia State Senate in 2018 representing DeKalb and Gwinnett counties here in Georgia. Prior to serving in the Senate, Senator Harrell earned a Master of Social Work and worked as a nonprofit executive. Recently, Senator Harrell co-chaired a legislative study committee on kids online safety. She and her husband are proud parents of two young adult children.

Jodi Daniels 3:42

Hi, welcome to the show.

Senator Sally Harrell 3:44

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jodi Daniels 3:46

And just in case we have any Atlanta listeners, I do highly recommend Sally’s newsletter. It is super fun. I enjoy reading it. Well, we always like to start with understanding how people got to where they are today, so can you share a little bit about your career evolution?

Senator Sally Harrell 4:05

Sure, so you’re wanting to know why is crazy, why I’m crazy enough to go into politics with politics being the way they are these days. Well, it really started with my social work career, so that background is in mental health and child development as a social worker, and in social worker school, and they teach you to consider not just what’s wrong with somebody’s mind in terms of challenges they’re facing and trying to figure their way through this world, but you look more, more at the systems that they live in, but not just what’s wrong with their mind, but what’s wrong with the systems. Why aren’t the systems working for them, the family, the schools, the neighborhood, the state, the country? And so we pick either whether we want to go what’s called the micro route, which is kind of helping people one at one at a time, 3k Counseling, or the macro route, which is helping people by changing policy. So, I ended up going the macro route, and in one of my classes, I actually was asked to go to the state capitol and pick a bill and follow it through its process, and that pretty much I caught the bug. I’ve been in politics ever since.

Jodi Daniels 5:20

That’s a really interesting background, and I have a gabillion other questions and interests on the social work side, but today we’re, we’re not going to cover that part. It might be a really interesting sidebar, though.

Justin Daniels 5:32

Indeed, so Sally, why don’t you take us back to how the whole opportunity to write the resolution and create the study committee came about

Senator Sally Harrell 5:42

right, so in the state legislature, and remember we’re talking about the capital in downtown Atlanta, not the one in Washington, DC. It’s the state legislature is is a part-time gig. We meet only 40 years, 40 days out of each year, basically January, February, and March, and so all the laws and the entire state budget are dealt with within that period of time, and then the rest of the time we’re expected to live and work in our communities like regular people. It’s something called a citizen legislature rather than being a full-time professional legislator legislature, so to create a study committee, you actually have to pass a resolution. So I introduced a senate resolution to create a study committee that basically dealt with how to keep kids safe and healthy online, and that had to pass the senate, which it did, and then it had to be selected by the lieutenant governor. The lieutenant governor actually leads the senate, that’s that’s his job. So we had 19 senate study committee resolutions that were passed, but only seven of them got picked, and mine was one of them, because there is so much concern from parents, and there was a policy person in the Lieutenant Governor’s office who had a child who was about, he was struggling with the with the question of when do I get my daughter a smartphone, and so he was highly sensitive to these issues and interested in them, and had actually authored a bill himself previously. So, study committees are used during the months, or they meet during the months when we’re not in session. So, we call them interim study committees, and I wrote the resolution on purpose to be co-chaired by two people rather than one, and those two people had to be a representative from the minority party and the other one the majority party to guarantee that the leadership would be bipartisan, a Republican and a Democrat, because I had read news articles about how this issue of keeping kids safe online was perhaps the only bipartisan issue left out there. Everything else had gone partisan, and I wanted to keep it that way. So that’s when the Lieutenant Governor selected Senator Shawn Still, who represents Gwinnett County, to co-chair the committee with me,

Jodi Daniels 8:23

so can you take us a little bit through now that you know study committee is formed, it’s you and Shawn. What happens next?

Senator Sally Harrell 8:33

So it was a big job for me because I was responsible as the author of the resolution to planning about five meetings that could last anywhere from three to five hours, so it was really like planning many conferences. I started trying to find people locally who could, who could present as, as experts, and I actually had a difficult time finding people locally, so fortunately I had attended some national conferences on this issue, and had met people working on this issue nationally, and so I was able to pull from that expertise all across the country, and it turns out that there’s kind of a small core group of people nationally who are working on this. They tend to be people who used to work for big tech, who got frustrated with how things were going, and they left, and they started nonprofits to spread the word about how big tech is making decisions where they are knowingly putting children at risk? So I tapped into that network, so it was, it was, it was a lot of work. I structured it by subject, each, each, each meeting had a different subject and. And the experts were were wonderful. One of my main experts was from the Anxious Generation team. There was a book that came out about a year prior to the study committee called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Height, who was already a very famous author, but he wrote a book on this issue, and how the generation of kids who were raised, first generation of kids who were raised on smartphones, are it’s documented that they, that the risks of anxiety and depression has skyrocketed. Well, Jonathan Height has put together an entire team of experts, and they were instrumental in providing expert testimony, and and connecting me with experts across the country.

Jodi Daniels 10:52

Everyone should read that book, it’s eye opening. So I highly encourage everyone here to go and read that book as well.

Senator Sally Harrell 11:01

It really is eye-opening, as a parent of the what I call the guinea pig generation, that the kids, my two kids, were the first generation to get these smartphones in middle school. It is the book that I had been waiting to read. It is the book that I looked for when I was parenting kids through middle school and high school, and it didn’t exist yet, and, and when I read it, I was finally like, yes, somebody gets it, somebody understands this is going to turn into something, and it has

Jodi Daniels 11:33

indeed.

Justin Daniels 11:34

So, why don’t we start with talking about one of the major achievements of the study committee around the legislation about cell phone bans for kids while they’re in school,

Senator Sally Harrell 11:47

right. So, even before the study committee, there was a bill that was started in the House by Representative Scott Hilton of Gwinnett County to enact a bell-to-bell cell phone ban for grades K through eight, I had thought about introducing this legislation, but represent Representative Scott Hilton did, and to my surprise, that that bill just raced through the legislature and passed and was signed into law, and will go into effect in Georgia this coming fall, so the we spent one whole committee meeting on just education in general, and we looked, we had people come in who have already implemented this, the cell phone ban in high school, we had one principal who was particularly good, who had, who had implemented it, and it had been highly successful. So the committee did recommend that we extend the bell to bell cell phone restriction to to high school, and it did pass this year and is waiting for a governor’s signature, so this has happened all across the United States. In fact, Georgia was kind of an anomaly that we didn’t include high school, we were just, we’re always a little cautious in Georgia, but that’s good, and but over half the states have enacted these laws, and so it’s just one of those examples that we’re, it’s showing that that society knows this problem, society recognizes there’s a problem, and society wants to do something about it, and one thing that was key was that we, we had some research done that surveyed teachers across the state. They surveyed over 3000 teachers, and over 90% of teachers said that they supported the law, and those who had already implemented it said that they could just return to teaching again.

Jodi Daniels 14:01

Now, in my world, I am helping companies with privacy laws, and that has evolved now to AI laws, and we have a patchwork approach of state privacy laws, and a little bit of a state patchwork of AI laws, and then there’s been a White House executive order on AI, which initially was designed to try and quell this state patchwork. How did that White House executive order on AI impact the legislative session?

Senator Sally Harrell 14:32

Yes, that’s an issue I followed closely during the study committee, because before the president’s executive order there were numerous attempts to put those, those restrictions to restrict states from being able to regulate AI into various pieces of legislation. It always ended up failing in the end in Congress, but then the president, after the study committee met, did pass the executive. Of order that limited states in terms of being able to regulate AI and actually kind of put a couple threats out there that if you do try to regulate AI then we’re going to have the Justice Department sue you and we’re going to withhold broadband technology money so this was when I heard this in, I think it was late December. I was very concerned that this would limit our ability to pass legislation, and one of the most concerning areas that we studied as a study committee was the development of AI companion chat bots, and a lot of parents don’t even really know what these chat bots are and what they do, but their children are interacting with them. It’s estimated that 75% of minors have interacted with an at companion chat bot, but the parents don’t really know it. The parents are always behind, that’s always that’s just the way it’s been since the smartphones came out. It’s the way it is now, but we had several parents that testified whose children started interacting with can’t companion chat bots, and the chat bots actually talked them into killing themselves. This testimony was excruciating to listen to these painful stories from parents, and then to be able to see exactly what the interaction was between the child and the companion chat bot, and that the companion chat bot really did tell the kid to, you know, hide the suicide plan from the parent and to ultimately take one’s life in order to cross that digital divide and be able to actually interact with the companion chop bot in some other realm. It was absolutely terrifying, and I know the committee members, they were just devastated by by this, and really felt like the companion chat bot issue, which is an AI issue that it’s it’s it’s a crisis that that we need to deal with. So I immediately, when session started in January, went and spoke with the policy director for, or the chief of staff for the lieutenant governor, and he said it, because of the executive order, it didn’t look good that we were going to be able to do anything, that the timing was just terrible, because the executive order asked, or it mandated that a task force be put together for the next three months, which coincided with the three months of the legislative session to kind of analyze all of the patchwork of laws across 50 states to see what laws were out there, and then they would decide which laws were onerous and which ones weren’t, so we had no idea which direction they were going to go with this, and what, what laws they would think would be a problem, and so I basically got told that things would be put on hold until next session.

Jodi Daniels 18:35

Oh, that is quite the story. Yeah,

Justin Daniels 18:39

so Sally, in light of this environment that you are talking about preceding this legislative session, why don’t you, as you so eloquently did at the event last week, give us a little insight into, you know, how the sausage is made and the story around the design bill you championed, and what happened, and why it seems to be so difficult with these laws that make a lot of sense to everyone, that they just can’t seem to get passed,

Senator Sally Harrell 19:11

right? So, as a result of the study committee, I decided to zero in on regulating social media and gaming design, so what this means is we would actually say in law that certain features that we’re all used to in social media now, like infinite scroll, push notifications using data that you have given the companies by interacting with social media, allowing them to use that data to determine what information they feed you in an algorithm. All of those things we would name them specifically, and we would say you cannot use. Use these features, which are manipulative, which are addictive. If a minor is using your, your product, and I saw I went to, you know, a national conference. I learned about this. I saw that other states were beginning to move forward with this kind of legislation, and I realized that it kind of gets around the, the free speech issue, because, or hopefully it would, because all of these laws, any law that that passes that restricts social media and gaming companies go to the courts, the big tech, there’s, there’s actually an organization, a membership organization called Net Choice, that they’ve all joined, and Net Choice sues every law that’s out there that passes, and so you have to consider court challenges when you’re deciding which legislation to take forward, and design is design, design is not speech, and so I felt this was a way to go forward that could get around some of the free speech issues, plus I felt that it would ultimately change the product and make the product less addictive for youth, and so that would, that would end up fixing so many things, so I worked really hard on writing the bill. I got it all written. It was pretty extensive, 20 pages long. The committee that it was assigned to, I was a member of that committee, so that was good. And the committee chair told me that it, that she would allow a vote on the bill, but by the time I presented the bill two weeks later, it was clear that there would not be a vote on the bill. I was given 10 minutes to present the bill in a hearing. Now you have to understand this is a bill. I walked this bill around the chamber before I filed it, and I got 40 out of 56 senators to sign the bill, Democratic senators, Republican senators, almost nobody files a bill with 40 signatures on it, and I did not have to convince these senators all to sign it. All I had to say is this is a bill that regulates addictive features in social media and gaming for kids, and they were with me. They signed, so to have a bill that has that much support to just be turned off. All I got was a 10 minute hearing, that’s it, and it was over. I learned that the same thing was happening with the other senators, Republican, Democrat, didn’t matter, that they were also told that their bills would not go forward, and at the last minute, a brand new bill appeared from the majority leader, and it was clear that that was the only bill that was going to go forward, was the majority leader’s bill. Now that happened strangely enough, that happened to be a bill on companion chat bots, whereas my bill was on design had nothing to do with AI, so strangely we ended up passing an AI bill, and there’s more to that story as well.

Jodi Daniels 23:27

I would love to hear, however, much more to the story you can offer, because if you had that much support, there were other bills that were similar in support, and those only got this 10 minute hearing, and then this new one came along. How much can you share of of that behind the scenes situation?

Senator Sally Harrell 23:49

Sure, I can. I can share, and, and by the way, we did pass the bell to bell cell phone bill for high school, so, so we did pass that too. So, the really, there were two bills that came out of the study committee, but so this this chat bot bill, the first time I saw it in committee was also when we voted on it, so I only had a few minutes in committee to read over the bill before I had to cast a vote, I I cast a no vote, the only thing, the glaring thing that I could see immediately was that even though it, it regulated AI chat bots that are used by minors, there was no, there was no, no mention of age verification, and age verification is like the sticky subject in, in this, in for these bills, it’s the toughest thing to deal with, because when you, when you require some kind of age verification, you infringe upon the privacy of other adult users, and so, like, if you, if you require photo ID, you. You don’t just require a photo ID of kids, you require a photo ID of adults, and that definitely gets into privacy issues. So, age verification just wasn’t even mentioned, which to me was a glaring hole. So, for that reason, I voted against the bill, but after the vote, when I looked more closely at the bill, I realized there was really slick language in it that you wouldn’t necessarily see unless you looked very closely, and that slick language was that it basically said chat bots, companion chat bots that are used by minors have to have strong disclosures on the screen, saying this chat bot is not a human, and it can’t use the chat bot can’t use techniques of that create emotional issues, it can’t be sexually explicit, it can’t. I can’t remember the whole list, but it made sure that it didn’t interact with the minor in a manipulative way, and so I’m sorry, I lost my train of thought here. Oh, so if you looked really carefully at the language, it said these regulations apply to chat bots, unless the chat bot is embedded in a product like a social media platform, so the restrictions didn’t apply to social media, and I was like, wow, this is not okay, and this is an indication to me that this bill was written by the industry. So I started digging around and found out that there were like six of these bills filed all at the same time across the state, across the United States, and so that was an indication to me more that it was an industry written bill, and so I went to the majority leader’s policy person, and I pointed out to him that this bill exempted social media companies, so if the chat bot was part of social media, the restrictions didn’t apply, and his jaw dropped. He looked at me in the eye, and he said, “Sally, I haven’t been talking to industry about this bill. He had just gone out looking, found it, it sounded good, and he didn’t catch the language. Once I told him about the language, he knew I was right, and he prepared an amendment that he got another Republican to offer and me to cosign. Now we had to keep that amendment secret because lobbyists at the Capitol – this is probably true everywhere – are a bit incestuous with legislators, former legislators become lobbyists, and we have spouses of legislators who are lobbyists. Well, we just so happen to have a senator who has a spouse who works for Meta, that senator sat next, right next to the senator who had the amendment to take the exemption for social media out, which was probably a Meta amendment, and so he literally kept that amendment secret. He kept drawers in our desks, and he kept it in his desk drawer until right before the bill came up, so that nobody would see it, including his seatmate with a meta wife, and so the bill came up, and he whipped it out of his drawer, took it to the secretary of the senate to file, so that copies could be distributed, and and with probably with the meta lobbyists watching from the gallery, and we passed the amendment, so we ended up taking what was not a good bill and turned it into a good bill, but that’s just the senate side, then the bill has to go to the house side, so it turns out that language exempting social media got put back in on the house side, unknown, and the committee chair didn’t realize it’s such sneaky language, he just didn’t see it, and so I pointed it out again, and they were able to amend it on the house side, and so again we improved the bill, and that bill is now waiting for the governor’s signature. So it’s a good illustration of how you can take what could be a bad bill and through the legislative process turn it into a good bill, which, which is what we did, but you can see how you know. A tricky, it

Jodi Daniels 30:04

It does sound like very arduous and an incredibly tricky process.

Senator Sally Harrell 30:09

Yes, and I’m guessing that the reason the rest of the bills were stopped was because there was lobbying. We had good bills, we had bills, we had a bill that helps parents by making it so they have to approve any app downloads before a child uses them. We had a bill that puts platforms or products that minors use online under Georgia product liability laws. I mean, that’s probably the best thing we could do, that bill got stopped in its tracks. My design bill got stopped in its tracks. Other legislators who offered bills just kind of on their own, those bills got stopped in their tracks, and I know that’s because lobbyists were having discussions with key people above my level, and that’s the thing, is when I went to a national conference, and I, and I attended a panel that was full of people who used to work for big tech or Amazon, it was the previous Amazon worker who, who said that Amazon actually used language to talk about which legislators needed to be watered. I didn’t need to be watered. I’m too low. They go to the top and they water the top, but they actually talk about that, which, which, which leaders need to be which, which leaders need watering.

Jodi Daniels 31:38

That is an interesting phrase. Haven’t heard that one. It

Senator Sally Harrell 31:43

means dinners and wine. Oh,

Jodi Daniels 31:46

yeah. No, I get it. I, you learned that you learned something new every day. Yep.

Justin Daniels 31:51

So, Sally, one thing we didn’t talk about last week, but I’m just curious, for the benefit of our listeners, is what is the lobbyists or the big tech position on why we don’t want to have these laws that you’re talking about? What is the diplomatic way they’re trying to say why these things are not needed or necessary?

Senator Sally Harrell 32:19

Well, it’s about money, so you know, social media started as a way to connect people. It started with a good mission. If you remember the early days of Facebook, we were all excited about being able to keep up with our friends, especially maybe our friends who had moved away, and our feed was full of stuff from friends. I don’t see anything on Facebook from friends anymore, because the companies, they, they discovered that they discovered what they needed to do to keep you on your phone longer to increase engagement, and I guess just keeping up with your friends was a lower engagement than other things. I don’t know, it’s how they determine that algorithm. It’s the algorithm that’s that’s key. It’s the algorithm that we don’t know. We don’t know anything about what determines what comes up on our feed, that’s kept secret, but it’s been a constant decision from big tech companies to tweak that algorithm, so that we stay on our phone longer, and it’s an easy thing to measure, so because the longer we stay on the phone, the more engagement there is, the more money they make, because they turn all that data into, they sell it to marketers, and so it’s just money. It’s there. The longer we stay on our phone, the more money they make. It’s as simple as that.

Jodi Daniels 33:55

If you were to project next year, you started with a variety of large goals and bills got down to the few that we’ve talked about so far. If you were to have a crystal ball, what you think you might be able to think about and tackle next year? Any idea what that might be?

Senator Sally Harrell 34:12

We’re going to, we’re going to keep tackling the same things. One of the things that we kept getting told as committee members, there were five of us on the committee is stay strong, and we all did stay strong. We all took the lobbyist pressure, but ultimately it wasn’t our choice as to whether the bills continued. I believe we have excellent bills already written this year. It took a while to get those bills written, and so we didn’t have a lot of time to to work them through the process, but they’re already written now, so we just take the same bills and we try again, we’re not, we’re not going to quit.

Justin Daniels 34:56

Well, Jodi, I think, and Sally and I. Talked a little bit about this when we prepped, was there’s a whole nother thing that’s going on that’s going to influence what happens down in the Golden Dome, and you co-authored an article about that.

Jodi Daniels 35:13

You’re welcome to keep going.

Justin Daniels 35:15

So, for the benefit of our listeners, when you don’t have regulation and you’re hearing Sally talk about from a public policy angle how frustrated and upset people are getting, your default regulator becomes the jury box, and so what has happened in the last couple months is there were two huge rulings, one in New Mexico and one in California, which basically had legal theories on failure to warn and disclose about these addictive properties, and then another one about design features that were addictive, and those resulted in rulings that were against big tech, particularly Meta and Google, and so I think from my own personal perspective, if there’s more of these jury verdicts that come out because Open AI has been sued for the assisted suicide, Fanduel has just been sued for the addictive qualities of its design for its online gaming, then the big tech companies, if they get hit a few more times, they’re going to say, “Okay, we want to be regulated, which brings us back to the Golden Dome. But I guess, Sally, it also represents the problem that you were talking about, is they’re going to come with these pleasant sounding bills that, yes, we want to be regulated, that’ll have some of the stuff that you saw buried in it. So I guess, it’s almost like, you know, Sally, I guess, with all that in mind. How do we manage from your perspective innovation versus these very important policy considerations,

Senator Sally Harrell 36:52

right? And thank you for bringing up the court cases. I can only see those court cases as helping us and leading to more court cases, which is going to create more pressure. We want to work legislatively. We need to work in the courts, and hopefully it all – it’ll all come together, and parents will get the help they need. People, people compare this to big tobacco. I think the comparison is fair, except there was really nothing good about tobacco. There is something good about the potential of of social media in increasing connection, all those things that we thought it was going to be in in the beginning. So we do have to about balance protection and and innovation, and just one example to show how I’ve, I’ve come to that balance myself is, I don’t, some people would disagree with me, but I don’t really think we should ban social media for like age 16 and down, like some other countries have, because I know people who are out there who are working on products that can’t compete with big tech at this point, but they’re designing social media products in, in a, in a way that benefits kids. Like, there’s one woman I know who is designing a particular special social media platform for kids 13 and under, where she recruits and trains college young women to be mentors on the site. Well, if we ban social media age 16 and down, then her product, which has so much potential to help young girls, it doesn’t, it wouldn’t be able to exist. And you know, I remember 13, I would have loved to have, you know, known a young woman in college to help me along the way, because you don’t want your mom at that point, right? And so, and so, that’s why I don’t, I don’t support a complete ban. We have the, there is a potential to make social media and even gaming very positive things. You learn leadership skills in online gaming. I saw my son do that, but it shouldn’t have been so addictive. So, I, that’s where I draw the line, is I want the good of social media to have a chance to blossom,

Jodi Daniels 39:23

these issues we’ve been talking about exist in every state, and you had a really strong call to action to our audience when we were all together in Atlanta, and again, this is for everyone across the country. What would that call to action be?

Senator Sally Harrell 39:38

Right, so we are having to deal with this on a state to state level, it should be dealt with at the federal level, but the same thing is happening at the federal level that you saw that I told you happened at the state level. They’re going to the leaders, these bills at a federal level, they have the votes to pass if they would come to the floor, but the leaders won’t allow them to come to the floor because they’re being, excuse me, but bribed by social. By big tech, so at the state level things are a little bit more, more intimate with legislators and constituents, because we are here, we’re not in Washington, we’re here, we’re part of your community, we work with you, we go to the same grocery stores, I see people at the grocery store all the time, so it’s more intimate, and there’s more potential for accountability. I guarantee you that if people are not watching this issue, that the legislators, if they think they can get away with it, because nobody’s watching, they’ll just do what the lobbyists say. This is where the people come in. This is where those of you who are listening come in. Pay attention, talk to your legislators about this, get to know them, organize, because if we had a bunch of emails coming in, a bunch of calls coming in saying we want addictive design gone from children’s products. Then that would hold the legislators accountable, and they wouldn’t so easily just do what the lobbyists say. Now it’s hard to know what’s going on at the state capitol, because everything’s so condensed into a three month period, things move really fast. So, most issues that get advocacy going, they have a lobbyist down at the Capitol who then communicates to the people outside the Capitol. So, we need innovation, we need a way to organize the public, because I know parents are busy, you’re doing homework with your kids, your parenting, it’s difficult to put a lot of time into something, so we need some way of organizing the masses, organizing the masses, so that we can generate that, those emails, those phone calls, so that the legislators have the sense that they’re being watched, and so if you’re out there listening, and you have an idea. This is a time to step forward. This is the time to take leadership, because if parents are organized and communicating to the legislators, we can turn this thing around. And if we turn it around for our kids, we’re turning it around for our society, and we could even, we could even go a step further and remove addictive design for adults too.

Jodi Daniels 42:24

I love that call to action. I hope everyone listening does something with that.

Justin Daniels 42:33

So, Sally, given all that you’ve learned through your study committee, is there a best privacy or security tip you would like to share with our audience today.

Senator Sally Harrell 42:43

Well, to the parents out there, no single law is going to solve the problem. It can help, but it’s not going to solve the problem. So, the more most important thing you can do as a parent is to keep the line of communications open with your children, talk to them, talk to them all the time about online safety. Explain to them that anything they say or record and they put out there into the digital world is going to stay around forever, and can go anywhere it wants to go, and so talk to your kids about how, if they’re talking to one person, that one thing they say to that one person can go all over the school and encourage them to, you know, that’s privacy, right? Encourage them to be extremely cautious what they put out there.

Jodi Daniels 43:51

And when you are not managing study committees and spending time at the Gold Dome, what do you like to do for fun?

Senator Sally Harrell 43:59

Well, my husband and I are avid rock climbers, so you will see us at the climbing gym that’s not too far from our house that has 60 foot walls twice a week for about six hours a week, and then when we can get out on real rock, we do that as well, so yeah, climbing walls and politics, those go well together.

Jodi Daniels 44:26

They do, actually. As a kid, I, I loved rock climbing. Maybe one day I’ll, I’ll bring it back. It’s so much fun. Well, we are so grateful that you came to join us today. If people would like to connect and learn more, where could they find you?

Senator Sally Harrell 44:40

My website is SallyHarrell.org and I do. When we’re in legislative session, and when you have serious subjects come up, I write a newsletter called Sally’s Senate Snapshot. Jodi, that’s the one that you were reading that that informed you as to what I’m doing in this arena, and I think you told. Me, when we met the other day, that you liked my sassiness. This newsletter, I tell it the way it is. I tell it as an eyewitness. This is how politics happen in Georgia, and I don’t, you know, I just, I say it the way it is, and I try to make it fun to read. So, if you go to Sally harold.org immediately it comes up. Sign up for Sally’s Snapshot, and you put your email in there. That’s all you have to do, and I don’t share your email around with anyone else.

Jodi Daniels 45:29

Amazing. Well, thank you again. We really appreciate this. It’s such an important topic. So, thank you.

Senator Sally Harrell 45:33

Thank you so much for having me.

Outro 45:39

Thanks for listening to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes, and check us out on LinkedIn. See you next time. Bye.