As policymakers continue to debate youth online safety regulations, a new FPF report assesses the role of data-driven personalization and its implications for emerging policy and product design

WASHINGTON, D.C. — (June 10, 2026) — The Future of Privacy Forum — a global non-profit focused on data protection, AI, and emerging technologies —today released Personalization and Youth Online: Assessing Benefits, Risks, and Safeguards, a comprehensive report examining the role of algorithmic personalization in young people’s digital lives and its implications for emerging policy and product design.

Personalization—the use of personal data to tailor content and services to individual users—sits at the center of today’s most contested debates about youth and digital technology.  It appears in nearly every digital service young people use—influencing the content they see, how information is ranked, which recommendations are surfaced, and what prompts or ads are presented. While it offers a host of functional and protective benefits, the practice has also become a recurring regulatory focus of efforts to protect minors from online harms, including by targeting the specific product features and design elements through which personalization operates.

“Personalization is an incredibly nuanced topic; the same mechanisms that may be associated with risks may also enable benefits such as adaptive learning, community discovery, and age-appropriate protections that make the online experience safer for young people,” said Daniel Hales, Policy Counsel for the Future of Privacy Forum and co-author of the report. “Understanding the tradeoffs that come with any risk mitigation strategy is critical, so you don’t inadvertently limit the benefits of personalization along with the harms.”

In an effort to help policymakers and companies effectively evaluate these tradeoffs, the report examines the intersection of personalization and youth online experiences in five parts: key definitions and common use cases; key benefits of personalization in youth online experiences; common risks of harm; an assessment of more than a dozen emerging mitigation proposals and the associated tradeoffs; and an analysis of the emerging policy and regulatory landscape.

Examples of the mitigation strategies examined in the report include:

• Alternative approaches to curating content, such as feeds that display content chronologically, by popularity, or by categories and preferences a user has explicitly selected. While these approaches may reduce data-intensive curation, the report notes that they may have unintended effects, including the potential to inadvertently amplify spam and misinformation, and limit platforms’ ability to suppress age-inappropriate content.
• Data minimization rules applied without reference to the purpose of how the data is being used may curtail beneficial personalization alongside higher-risk applications. Purpose-based limitations, which restrict data use according to processing context rather than data category alone, may better preserve the protective uses of personalization while constraining its riskier applications.
• Risk mitigations related to conversational AI chatbots, including those designed to facilitate transparency, consent, responsible data practices, and safety-by-design. Each of these comes with its own tradeoffs; for example, on-device processing of sensitive data protects privacy, but can reduce model quality, which may ultimately push users toward less protective alternatives. Effective safeguards for AI personalization will require careful attention to which constraints reduce overall risk and which simply shift it. 
• Safety and well-being measures, including parental control and oversight, increasing digital literacy, measures to improve digital well-being, and control over personal data use. Many of these tactics will be most effective when paired with other measures; for example, increased digital literacy and making default wellbeing features like time-use limits and sleep and nighttime protections do not address the underlying design features that generate risk.

“Effective regulation must account for some precise questions: how personalization is implemented, what data it uses, and what purpose it serves,” said Holly Hawkins, Director for Youth Policy for the Future of Privacy Forum and the other co-author of the report. “While no single mitigation strategy is going to effectively address the full range of risks, we know that the most effective approaches share a common characteristic: they take a risk-proportionate approach to limiting higher-impact potential harms while preserving the functional and protective benefits of personalization for young people. We hope that this report can serve as a valuable resource to policymakers and companies who are attempting to find this delicate balance.”

The report’s release follows a growing interest from policymakers at both the federal and state levels in regulating personalization practices as part of efforts to strengthen protections for youth online. Both New York and California have passed laws prohibiting online services from providing algorithmically curated feeds to minors without parental consent; South Carolina and Nebraska’s age-appropriate design code laws require services to offer an opt-out of personalized recommender systems.

The full report, including an appendix tracking a sample of enacted and proposed youth online safety laws worldwide that address personalization, is available here. 

To learn more about the Future of Privacy Forum, visit fpf.org. 

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