Children's Online Privacy Protection Act Research Articles

The Guardian of the Digital Era: Assessing the Impact and Challenges of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act

This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the United States, tracing its historical evolution since its enactment in 2000. The analysis encompasses key amendments, legal challenges, and adaptive changes made to COPPA, shedding light on its impact on safeguarding children’s online privacy. Assessing both the positive effects and challenges faced by COPPA, the study explores its influence on online platforms, businesses, and advertisers. Furthermore, the paper discusses the legislation’s adaptability in response to emerging issues, including technological advancements and critiques, and examines potential future developments needed to enhance its effectiveness. The conclusion synthesizes key findings, highlighting the broader implications for the protection of children’s online privacy and suggesting areas for further research.

Foreign experience of personal data protection in social networks

The article analyzes the protection of personal data based on foreign experience. Social networking has been identified as one of the most prominent cultural phenomena to emerge in the Web 2.0 era. They keep users connected and facilitate the exchange of information between them.
 The European Union has adopted a new personal data protection system called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Its main goals include providing individuals with tools to control their personal data, implementing modern standards for the protection of personal information, developing the digital space of the European Union to safeguard personal data, ensuring strict compliance by all parties, and providing legal support for the international transfer of personal information.
 United States legislative documents related to aspects of data protection and privacy were analyzed, namely: California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA); Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA); Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA); State data breach notification laws.
 It is noted that China has a comprehensive legal framework that regulates the protection of personal data, and includes the following legal acts: Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) and Data Security Law (DSL).
 Conclusions were made that the urgency and importance of protecting personal data in social networks is due to rapid technological progress, the growth of cyber security threats and the spread of these platforms. By protecting personal data, people can maintain privacy, prevent abuse, maintain user trust, reduce risk, and comply with legal obligations. The issue of ensuring mobility and interoperability in social networks gives particular importance to the protection of personal data, as it relates to this particular data, and not just to technology, as it may be in the telecommunications sector. This requires additional thought and measures to ensure privacy and data security. Therefore, when developing legal protection mechanisms for online social networks, it is necessary to take into account and solve problems related to the protection of personal data.

Bill would ban kids under 13 from joining social media platforms

A new federal bill unveiled last week would establish a national minimum age for social media use and require tech companies to get parents' consent before creating accounts for teens, reflecting a growing trend at all levels of government to restrict how Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms engage with young users, CNN reported April 26. The proposed legislation by a bipartisan group of U.S. senators aims to address what policymakers, mental health advocates and critics of tech platforms say is a mental health crisis fueled by social media. Under the bill, known as the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, social media platforms would be barred from letting kids below the age of 13 create accounts or interact with other users, though children would still be permitted to view content without logging into an account, according to draft text of the legislation. Tech platforms covered by the legislation would also have to obtain a parent or guardian's consent before creating new accounts for users under the age of 18. The companies would be banned from using teens' personal information to target them with content or advertising, though they could still provide limited targeted recommendations to teens by relying on other contextual cues. Most major social media companies already bar kids younger than 13 from their platforms, the result of a federal children's privacy law known as COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act). But enforcing the restriction has been a challenge.

Under the Law: The kids have lost their cookies

As schools have ratcheted up their online remote instruction, questions about student privacy have become more significant. Robert Kim discusses current litigation related to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the use of education technology. Cases against Google have alleged that the company improperly collected student data without consent. Other cases have been brought against schools that use technology to monitor student activity at home.

Comparative Study of Children’s Personal Data Protection Regulation on COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) and Children and GDPR

Background: Personal data is the most fundamental right for everyone including children. Children are the most vulnerable subjects when it comes to the processing of personal data, it is because they do not have awareness and understanding of the risks of misuse of personal data. Regulations regarding the protection of children's personal data in Indonesia are already contained in the draft of personal data protection law but with very limited guidance. Through this comparative study, researchers wanted to compare the United State's COPPA(Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) with the Children and GDPR by the United Kingdom. Both of these regulations are very detailed in regulating the protection of children's personal data. This study will provide a clearer picture of children’s privacy protection regulations so that it can be used as a reference for Indonesia's draft of personal data protection law in regard to the rights of children's privacy. Method: This comparative research uses qualitative descriptive methods with library research and approach. Result: There are fundamental differences regarding the form of guidance, the definition of child, the perpetrator processing of the child's personal data, and things that are included in the child's personal data. Conclusion: The application of children's personal data protection is adjusted to the values and cultures of the country.

Even ‘Child-Friendly’ Apps Routinely Share Data

Even ‘Child-Friendly’ Apps Routinely Share Data

Children’s Right to Privacy on the Internet in the Digital Age

As access to the internet has become easier and more widespread in recent years, children have also started getting both increased and easier access to the internet, whether at home or at school. This access, coupled with a decrease in supervision while on the internet, implicates certain questions in regard to children. Questions involving data privacy rights are relevant to both adults and children in the digital age, but there are certain concerns that arise uniquely for children.This Note will focus on one piece of legislation that concerns data privacy rights for children—the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) (16 C.F.R. § 312). The main question that this Note will seek to answer is whether COPPA is adequate in protecting children’s data privacy rights. Part II will explore the history behind COPPA and explain what it actually is, defining key terms as used in the legislation as well as explaining certain provisions. Part III will discuss problems that have arisen under COPPA recently, analyzing lawsuits that have occurred under COPPA as well as the legislation’s shortcomings which have been highlighted in recent events. Finally Part IV will offer possible solutions to these problems, explaining what other scholars have suggested as solutions to these problems as well as other suggestions.

COPPTCHA: COPPA Tracking by Checking Hardware-Level Activity

User privacy is an extremely important concern for mobile applications. Recently, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has penalized multiple mobile application developers, such as TikTok and BabyBus for violating privacy regulations. Privacy concerns are more critical for children, who do not comprehend the risks associated with transmitting private information like geospatial location. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is an online privacy regulation platform to monitor data usage by mobile applications designed for children. Existing research on detecting whether an application complies with certain privacy regulations is performed either by analyzing the application binary or by dynamic monitoring of network at runtime. However, as explained in related work, both methods have their respective demerits. We propose COPPTCHA, a Hardware performance counter (HPC)-based technique to detect whether a children's app abides by the COPPA regulations. HPCs are special purpose registers found in all processors that measure system level events. Since the proposed method is hardware-based, it is difficult to undermine it compared to software-based COPPA compliance detection. COPPTCHA has no hardware overhead, since HPC data collection is integral to all industry standard processors. The HPC readings of applications running on a smartphone are classified using machine learning based classifiers to detect COPPA compliance. Our experiments employing a Moto-G4 smartphone shows that COPPTCHA can detect COPPA-violating apps with ≥ 99% accuracy.

RIGHT OF ONLINE INFORMATIONAL PRIVACY OF CHILDREN IN MALAYSIA: A STATUTORY PERSPECTIVE

The advantage of digital era with unlimited access to the Internet is enjoyed by most people globally including the young and children. However, policy-makers concern with the advancement of Internet and propagate the idea of shielding and segregating the children from the harm that may cause from access to the Internet, including breach of online privacy of the children. Children are not sensitive with their online privacy or do not know how to protect their online privacy. Hence, some countries have enacted specific legislation to protect the privacy of the children such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the United States of America or introduced self-regulatory initiatives on online child privacy like in the European Union. At the international level, the Convention on the Rights of the Child was introduced in 1989 by the United Nation to protect the children. In Malaysia, the government introduces the Child Act 2001 and the Sexual Offences against Children Act 2017 to protect the children. However, how far these two Acts protect the online privacy of the children in Malaysia? Thus, the article seeks to examine the legal protection of children online informational privacy in Malaysia. The article adopts doctrinal research methodology which is mainly library research approach. The article finds that the current regimes of laws do not adequately protect the online privacy of the children in Malaysia. It is suggested that amendment or enactment of the laws to that effect be made.

“Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?” Examining COPPA Compliance at Scale

Abstract We present a scalable dynamic analysis framework that allows for the automatic evaluation of the privacy behaviors of Android apps. We use our system to analyze mobile apps’ compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), one of the few stringent privacy laws in the U.S. Based on our automated analysis of 5,855 of the most popular free children’s apps, we found that a majority are potentially in violation of COPPA, mainly due to their use of thirdparty SDKs. While many of these SDKs offer configuration options to respect COPPA by disabling tracking and behavioral advertising, our data suggest that a majority of apps either do not make use of these options or incorrectly propagate them across mediation SDKs. Worse, we observed that 19% of children’s apps collect identifiers or other personally identifiable information (PII) via SDKs whose terms of service outright prohibit their use in child-directed apps. Finally, we show that efforts by Google to limit tracking through the use of a resettable advertising ID have had little success: of the 3,454 apps that share the resettable ID with advertisers, 66% transmit other, non-resettable, persistent identifiers as well, negating any intended privacy-preserving properties of the advertising ID.

Consent for processing children’s personal data in the EU: following in US footsteps?

ABSTRACTWith the recent adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union (EU) assigned a prominent role to parental consent in order to protect the personal data of minors online. For the first time, the GDPR requires parental consent before information society service providers can process the personal data of children under 16 years of age. This provision is new for Europe and faces many interpretation and implementation challenges, but not for the US, which adopted detailed rules for the operators that collect personal information from children under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) almost two decades ago. The article critically assesses the provisions of the GDPR related to the consent of minors, and makes a comparative analysis with the requirements stipulated in the COPPA in order to identify pitfalls and lessons to be learnt before the new rules in the EU become applicable.

Privacy and Children's Data - An Overview of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act

Privacy law in the United States is a complicated patchwork of state and federal caselaw and statutes. Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, prepared this briefing document in advance of the Privacy Initiative's April 2013 workshop, Student Privacy in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem, to provide a high-level overview of two of the major federal legal regimes that govern privacy of children’s and students’ data in the United States: the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). This guide aims to offer schools, parents, and students alike a sense of some of the laws that may apply as schools begin to use cloud computing tools to help educate students. Both of the relevant statutes – and particularly FERPA – are complex and are the subjects of large bodies of caselaw and extensive third-party commentary, research, and scholarship. This document is not intended to provide a comprehensive summary of these statutes, nor privacy law in general, and it is not a substitute for specific legal advice. Rather, this guide highlights key provisions in these statutes and maps the legal and regulatory landscape.

Technology To Support Data Collection and Management in the Public Schools

Abstract With the demands of paperwork in the field of speech-language pathology, school professionals are looking to technology to become more efficient. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004) requires that experts collect data for a variety of purposes, while the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) provide protection of privacy and confidentiality. Speech-language pathologists are considering mobile- and tablet-based applications (apps) for data collection and management because these devices are portable, affordable, and available. In this article, I will explore considerations and resources for app selection related to data collection and management.

POCKET: A tool for protecting children's privacy online

Children's privacy in the online environment has become critical. Use of the Internet is increasing for commercial purposes, in requests for information, and in the number of children who use the Internet for casual web surfing, chatting, games, schoolwork, e-mail, interactive learning, and other applications. Often, websites hosting these activities ask for personal information such as name, e-mail, street address, and phone number. In the United States, the children's online privacy protection act (COPPA) of 1998 was enacted in reaction to widespread collection of information from children and subsequent abuses identified by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). COPPA is aimed at protecting a child's privacy by requiring parental consent before collecting information from children under the age of 13. To date, however, the business practices used and the technical approaches employed to comply with COPPA fail to protect children's online privacy effectively. In this paper, we describe the design of an automated tool for protecting children's online privacy, called POCKET (Parental Online Consent for Kid's Electronic Transactions). The POCKET framework is a novel, technically feasible and legally sound solution to automatically enforce COPPA.

Filing] Comments of Adam Thierer - Mercatus Center - FTC Coppa 2011 Ammendments

It goes without saying that the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is complicated law and rule. When considering the rule and proposals to amend it, it is easy to get lost in the weeds and ignore the bigger picture. That would be a mistake. There are broader, more important questions that need to be asked as part of the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to expand this regulatory regime. These questions involve not only the costs of increased regulation for online business interests, but the impact of expanded regulation on market structure, competition, and innovation. More importantly, these questions cut to the core of whether the public (including children) will be served with more and better digital innovations in the future. There is no free lunch. Regulation - even well-intentioned regulation like COPPA - is not a costless exercise. There are profound trade-offs for online content and culture that must always be considered. Whatever one thinks about the effectiveness or sensibility of the COPPA regulatory model for the Web 1.0 world, it is clear that the regime is being strained by the unforeseen realities of the Web 2.0 world of hyper-ubiquitous connectivity and user-generated content creation and sharing. The digital genie cannot be put back in the bottle. While COPPA may continue to have a marginal role to play in this rapidly evolving world, that role will likely be increasingly limited by the inherent realities of the information age.

Why parents help their children lie to Facebook about age: Unintended consequences of the ‘Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act’

Facebook, like many communication services and social media sites, uses its Terms of Service (ToS) to forbid children under the age of 13 from creating an account. Such prohibitions are not uncommon in response to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which seeks to empower parents by requiring commercial Web site operators to obtain parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. Given economic costs, social concerns, and technical issues, most general–purpose sites opt to restrict underage access through their ToS. Yet in spite of such restrictions, research suggests that millions of underage users circumvent this rule and sign up for accounts on Facebook. Given strong evidence of parental concern about children’s online activity, this raises questions of whether or not parents understand ToS restrictions for children, how they view children’s practices of circumventing age restrictions, and how they feel about children’s access being regulated. In this paper, we provide survey data that show that many parents know that their underage children are on Facebook in violation of the site’s restrictions and that they are often complicit in helping their children join the site. Our data suggest that, by creating a context in which companies choose to restrict access to children, COPPA inadvertently undermines parents’ ability to make choices and protect their children’s data. Our data have significant implications for policy–makers, particularly in light of ongoing discussions surrounding COPPA and other age–based privacy laws.

A Call to Action: The Privacy Dangers Adolescents Face through Use of Facebook.com

AbstractAdolescents today will spend the equivalent of 23 years of their lifetime on the Internet; 10 years of that span will be spent on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Research has been conducted that suggests teens are largely unaware and unconcerned about protecting their privacy online. They are also unaware of the future implications of creating a digital footprint in today’s online legal environment. In fact, industry reports suggest teens openly divulge risky behavior on their social networking web pages. Currently in the U.S., adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 are treated as adults in terms of information privacy law. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) law currently restricts data collection from children under the age of 13, but does not restrict data collection from teens 13 or older. Conventional wisdom suggests businesses, policy makers, educators, and parents should be informed of social networking uses that will have a negative future impact on a...

COPPA 2.0: The New Battle Over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech

Online privacy, child safety, free speech and anonymity are on a collision course. The 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) already mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, but many advocate expanding online privacy protections for both adolescents and adults. Furthermore, efforts continue at both the federal and state levels to institute new regulations, such as age verification mandates, aimed at ensuring the safety of children online. There is an inherent tension between these objectives: Attempts to achieve perfectly “safe” online environments will likely require the surrender of some privacy and speech rights, including the right to speak anonymously. These tensions are coming to a head with state-based efforts to expand COPPA, which requires “verifiable parental consent” before certain sites or services may collect, or enable the sharing of, personal information from children under the age of 13. Several proposed state laws would extend COPPA’s parental-consent framework to cover all adolescents under 18. This seemingly small change would require age verification of not only adolescents and their parents, but - for the first time - large numbers of adults, thus raising grave First Amendment concerns. Such broad age verification mandates would, ironically, reduce online privacy by requiring more information to be collected from both adolescents and adults for age verification purposes, while doing little to make adolescents safer. In practical terms, the increased scale of “COPPA 2.0” efforts would present significant implementation and enforcement challenges. Finally, state-level COPPA 2.0 proposals would likely conflict with the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Despite these profound problems, COPPA expansion has great rhetorical appeal and seems likely to be at the heart of future child safety debates - especially efforts to require mandatory age verification. There are, however, many better ways to protect children online than by expanding COPPA beyond its original, limited purpose.

Protecting Children While Silencing Them: The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and Children's Free Speech Rights

In 1998, Congress passed the first law protecting the privacy of individuals on the Internet. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) restricts the online collection of personal information from children aged 12 or younger. Under the law, Web sites that maintain chat rooms directed at children must either condition a child's participation on the consent of a parent or guardian or monitor the chat room and censor references to personal information. This article examines whether COPPA's chat room restrictions infringe on the free speech rights of children. The examination finds that aspects of the chat room restrictions are constitutionally suspect because it is questionable whether the parental consent requirement is narrowly tailored.

Legal considerations for online advertising to children

Outlines legal issues in Internet advertising to children in the USA, European Union, Australia and Canada; the Internet is now dominated by mainstream international companies which market to children. Outlines the COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) in the USA, plus the work of CARU (the Children’s Advertising Review Unit). Moves on to the European Union’s Data Protection Directive and Communications Data Protection Directive, and the guidelines of the FEDMA (Federation of European Direct Marketing Associations). Concludes with the Australian Privacy Act and the guidelines of the Canadian Marketing Association.