Tomorrow in Washington DC there will be a Congressional subcommittee hearing on children’s online privacy, titled “Protecting Children’s Privacy in an Electronic World”. Among those who will appear to provide expert testimony are Stephen Balkam of the Family Online Safety Institute (Symantec is a board member); Hemanshu Nigam of SSP Blue (previously from MySpace and Microsoft); Mary Koebel Engle of the FTC; Alan Simpson of Common Sense Media; Morgan Reed of the Association for Competitive Technology and Dr. Kathryn Montgomery, Director, PhD program, School of Communication at The American University.
The stated purpose of this hearing is to “examine existing protections for children’s online privacy and their adequacy in an increasingly electronic and mobile world. In particular, the Subcommittee will examine the provisions of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Federal Trade Commission’s recent proposal to revise its COPPA rule.”
You may recall the purpose of COPPA was to prevent websites that serve children from collecting private information without the consent of the child’s parent. In effect how this works is when your under-13 year old child creates an account at a kid-oriented site, an email is sent to the parent to provide consent. Other methodologies may be in use but this is a common one. Additionally, sites that don’t specifically cater to children are supposed to prevent the collection of private information when they are aware the user is under the age of 13 and parental consent hasn’t been provided.
In April last year the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reviewed COPPA and has suggested a few changes. One of them is to expand the definition of what constitutes private information to elements such as IP addresses that users might not even know they are passing from their computer to a website. But the questions listed by the subcommittee to guide tomorrow’s discussion seems to indicate more is open for review such as the threshold age of 13 (should it be changed?); what tools are available to parents to protect their children’s privacy? Does COPPA need review in light of technological improvements since its inception?
At the site provided in the link above, you can read the subcommittee’s background paper, and the testimony provided in advance by each of the experts who will attend tomorrow. We know that kids regularly lie about their age to join the 13 plus world of social networks. A study by a major consumer advocacy magazine found an estimated 7.5 million underage kids on a major social network. And with the advent of easy to use touch screen mobile devices, it’s common to see toddlers using games designed for adults.
Can we and should we divide our online world into kid and adult spaces? Do we also need attention paid to the privacy needs of all of us to manage who has what information on us, where they store it, how long they keep it, etc? What do you think about the current COPPA regulations? How would you change things or do they need to change at all? Make your voice heard, however you feel!