COPPA attempting to update itself

I got up early over the weekend intending to finish up a spanking new guidelines template for eModeration.  But instead, my eye was caught by two stonking posts from two divas of moderation and online youth culture.  I just want to shout them out here and give a digest to anyone who didn't catch them when they were published last week.

Amy Jussel reports on her Shaping Youth blog  on COPPA coalition's new request to the US FTC and Izzy Neis gives a superb run down of the moderation issues of Live Chat for tweens & teens.

I'll try to summarise Izzy's post  later this week, but Amy's first.

I'm assuming anyone coming to this blog knows that COPPA is the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, with which websites collecting data from children under 13 must comply.  First enacted in 1998, it requires that parental consent be given for the registration of children onto websites.  However, thanks to the growth of mobile phones, interactive games, and more sophisticated tracking and targeting technologies. it is now seriously out of date.

“The Commission should enact new rules for COPPA that draw upon its current investigations into behavioral marketing and other current digital advertising practices,” said Jeff Chester, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy. http://www.democraticmedia.org/FTCkidsprivacy. “It’s time for the FTC to do a better job of protecting the privacy of children online, especially given the dramatic growth of new techniques for tracking and targeting them through mobile phones, video games, and virtual worlds. This review of COPPA by the Commission is a test case for the agency.”

The groups also urged the FTC to develop a separate set of privacy protections for children 13 and older. Although adolescents’ use of and response to media may differ from that of their younger peers, teens are no less vulnerable to marketing, the comments explained:

“Many teens go online to seek help for their personal problems, to explore their own sexual identities, to find support groups for handling emotional crises in their lives, and sometimes to talk about things they do not feel comfortable or safe discussing with their own parents. Yet, this increased reliance on the Internet subjects them to wholesale data collection and profiling.”

Commenters made it clear that the COPPA model of parental consent would not be appropriate for adolescents. However, they did call for a set of Fair Information Practices for teens in line with those developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“Policy should focus on protecting data, and regulating data collection and use, rather than discouraging teens from participating online,” the groups argued.

The coalition is asking the FTC specifically to:

• Extend COPPA’s privacy protections to mobile phones, online gaming consoles, interactive television, and other new digital platforms that are increasingly used by marketers to track and target children.
  
• Update its definition of “personal information” to reflect contemporary marketing practices in which persistent cookies, IP addresses, geo-location data, and even seemingly anonymous combinations of data such as age, zip code, and gender can be used to identify and target individuals.
  
• Use the criteria developed for its 2008 report to Congress on food marketing to clarify the definition of websites and online services “directed at children” in the COPPA rule. These criteria include audience demographic data (i.e., when 20 percent or more of a site’s visitors are between the age of 2 and 12), and content characteristics (e.g., child-oriented, animated or licensed characters or celebrities highly popular with children; language such as “kid,” “child,” “tween,” or similar words; models or characters who appear to be younger than age 13.)
  
• Close the loopholes on when and how a website can contact children multiple times without obtaining parental consent, and to investigate whether some marketers are circumventing COPPA’s intent by using this exception to the rules to engage in ongoing data collection and personalized marketing.
  
• Require major websites, ad networks, social networks and other online service operators to periodically inform the FTC about their data collection practices.
  
• Investigate the efficacy of Safe Harbor programs and require operators to reapply for continued authorization.

Thanks to Amy for highlighting this - you can read her original post here.