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Virtual Assistants Such As Amazon's Echo Break US Child Privacy Law, Experts Say (theguardian.com)
Mark Harris, reporting for The Guardian: An investigation by the Guardian has found that despite Amazon marketing the Echo to families with young children, the device is likely to contravene the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), set up to regulate the collection and use of personal information from anyone younger than 13. Along with Google, Apple and others promoting voice-activated artificial intelligence systems to young children, the company could now face multimillion-dollar fines. "This is part of the initial wave of marketing to children using the internet of things," says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocacy group that helped write the law. "It is exactly why the law was enacted in the first place, to protect young people from pervasive data collection."
The Molester
All data is valuable to these companies.
Combine one of these devices with Microsoft's pervy chat bot!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
...and the rest of us aren't?
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This is the continuing battle of convenience versus privacy. We want things convenient until suddenly you realize that "OK Google" and "Hey Siri" and now "Alexa" are listening to you all day and all night (even when you talk in your sleep) just to make sure that they catch the one time you call them.
folly
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. -Welsey Willis
This is the same established literature that advocated in favor of legalizing pedophilia?
Glad to see they care about the children.
How is this not simply the parents' choice? Kids aren't buying Echo units and installing/using them. It's parents. If they make the conscious decision to introduce such a device into their homes, and decide to use them, that's all there is to it. They have chosen to be a household that uses this device and its associated services. If they don't like the implications of that, they can simply choose not to put the device in a space where kids will interact with it, or choose not to use it at all.
People who are trying to make it more complicated than that are just looking for ways to get government more involved in what goes on inside the home.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm tired of your rug rats being factored into the common denominator around which all of us are governed.
YOU take care of your children. If you want to make more humans, the onus of protecting them is on YOU.
As a parent, are you not old enough (informed enough should be the metric, but our society is bewildered about age) to decide if your kids can use the device?
Oh, right, parenting. Not allowed to do that any longer, my bad. "It takes a village" (to pillage your informed personal and consensual choices, not to mention parenting.) Of course you're not old enough. We'll decide that for you. Move along. Move along.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
send the parents to jail.
Windows 10 not only violates this law (cortana aka clippy) but HIPAA also, so your doctors/dentists office is in trouble if they updated to Win10.
this is just the beginning, all the US tech firms are doing this creepy stalking shit, Android, Windows, iOS (apps) all of them are slurping your private data wether its your kids or your medical record & company trade secrets, perhaps MS are branching out to insider trading with your data.
their lawyers are either exceedling dumb or malicious or both.
hope they all get nailed to the wall.
Do not take the Guardian and the Center for Digital Democracy at their word.
Read the guidance contained in the second link of the summary. Specifically, read: "Who is covered by COPPA" here.
This is a general audience device and service, full stop. I don't have one, so I cannot say whether they even permit the associated account to be set up by a child 13 or under, or allow multiple user accounts with accounts for children 13 or under, but if I were to purchase one, set it up with my Amazon (or Google, for their device) account, and allow everyone in the house to use the device under that account, there would be no violation of COPPA.
The targeting and "actual knowledge" requirements cannot be deemed fulfilled simply because an advertisement shows a child and the service knows that children might be using the service.
FTA:
No, that is a general audience that happens to include children. Targeting children requires a service aspect specifically directed to children.
Notice that the one thing the article does not say is that the FTC has opened an investigation. Merely that the CDD "[is] going to recommend to the FTC that they give industry guidance of how the internet of things and COPPA should work together."
Very little to see here, then...
...and attorney fees for the 'public interest' lawyers who sue to force agencies to levy those fines. Follow.The.Money!
You mean to tell me just adding boilerplate text asserting you don't "knowingly" collect data from children does not provide immunity?
I call it perverse data collection. And not just in the case of children.
"It is exactly why the law was enacted in the first place, to protect young people from pervasive data collection."
Why just kids? Why not just make a law that protects everyone from pervasive data collection?
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Have you got RSI? That's the first post of yours I've seen with less than a thousand lines.
Why aren't we up in arms about all the data collection happening to any kid using a computer in the last 16 years? I don't think a cookie warning is an effective measure against that, either, but the warning means it's obvious the tracking does happen. If we can tell so much about an "anonymous" user from their google searches, can't we gather an awful lot of knowledge about a child without even knowing it's a child in the first place?
Maybe put the onus on advertisers and such to make sure it's not a child well before they even start tracking things. (Yes, I'm aware that would be very hindering to a lot of businesses, Google included. I'm still serious.)
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The lack of similar protections for adults makes me wish I were 13!
Won't someone think of the adults?!
The law does not actually protect kids in the sense of stopping data collection, it just requires that the collector of the data do several things that are very time consuming. EG, provide written summary and details of use of data to parents of the children 13 and younger that are the "users". It also only works if it can be shown that the market base OR user base of the product is primarily minors 13 and younger, which is exactly why so many websites expressly forbid 13 and younger in the ToS. Still, the law can apply in certain cases, despite the ToS.