Federal Trade Commission Issues Revisions to Protect Children Online
By Karla Robinson
August 7, 2012
August 7, 2012
- The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is getting an update in light of the expanding social media scene, extensive ad networks and new tracking technology.
- The rules apply to third party advertising networks and developers of apps or plug-ins when dealing with a child-oriented website or service. If a site and/or service directly targets children under 13 as their main audience, it is required to treat all visitors as underaged. The rules do not, however, affect information collection required for maintaining a network or offering a service.
- The new rules allow sites/services to “age-screen all visitors in order to provide COPPA’s protections only to users under age 13,” the FTC states.
- According to the FTC, “an operator of a child-directed site or service that chooses to integrate the services of others that collect personal information from its visitors should itself be considered a covered ‘operator’ under the Rule.”
- The update also expands the meaning of personal information to include geolocation data and “‘persistent identifiers’ that recognize a user over a period of time which are used for purposes other than ‘support for internal operations,'” according to the FTC.
- “This rule is aimed squarely at tracking cookies that are capable of not only delivering advertising within a site but can also be used to track people across sites to deliver targeted information,” notes SafeKids.com.
- Despite good intentions, the COPPA revision still has some setbacks like its potential impact on small businesses. Also, “…it discourages companies from offering services to people under 13 or even allowing pre-teens to use services that could benefit them,” SafeKids.com writes. “Because COPPA doesn’t apply to people 13 and over, there are a lot of great services aimed at teens and adults but since kids do want to use many of these services, they wind up lying about their age, often with parental consent or involvement.”
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