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New York Fines Viacom, Mattel and Hasbro For Tracking Kids Online (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: Companies that operate popular kids websites like nickjr.com and barbie.com agreed to a $835,000 settlement and to change their practices after an investigation found the sites were enabled with technology that tracked kids' internet activities. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced his office reached settlements with Viacom, Mattel, Hasbro and JumpStart Games after an investigation into the companies found violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The investigation, called "Operation Child Tracker," found that websites operated by the companies enabled third-party vendors, such as marketing and advertising companies, to track children's online activity -- which violated federal law. Federal law prohibits the unauthorized collection of children's personal information on websites aimed at children under age 13. Viacom will pay $500,000; Mattel will pay $250,000; and JumpStart will pay $85,000. [Hasbro will not pay a penalty because it is part of a "safe harbor program" through the Federal Trade Commission that already requires more disclosures of web activity, Schneiderman said.]
So setting my birth date to something like 2010 is all I need to do to keep those web and app trackers off my back? awesome!
It is called stalking. Just because you do it via the internet doesn't mean jack.
TPP will let them use non us court to over rule this.
Because think of the children.
Fucking horseshit. I don't want to be tracked. It shouldn't matter how old I am.
Clearly these companies haven't been paying attention. They could have just blamed the Russians and all would be fine.
TPP is Evil and wants to track your kids and do unspeakable things to them.
Here endeth the lesson.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
when the same discussion was had over advertising to kids on TV laws to curtail it got shut down hard. I guess everything is scarier if you add "The Internet" to it.
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What is the reason for this law?
Why is there an age limit?
Because adults are old enough to give consent, and children aren't. Do you really want the government/nanny state holding your hand all your life?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Hasbro getting that get out of jail free card lol. Yey for them more ponies for me.
But we are never asked for consent.
Fucking horseshit. I don't want to be tracked. It shouldn't matter how old I am.
COPPA doesn't say you can't be tracked. It says personal identifying information cannot be collected and stored. So if someone is under 13, a website cannot ask for their full name, their home address, their phone number, etc.
The reason this doesn't apply to adults, is because if adults don't want them to have this information, they (presumably) have enough maturity and judgement to NOT GIVE IT TO THEM.
But we are never asked for consent.
You are often asked for your real name, address, email, phone number, etc. If you type that information into the little text box, and click "submit", then you are consenting. If you click "Login with Facebook" then you are consenting.
If you are under 13, they are not allowed to ask for that information, and you are not allowed to have a Facebook account. My daughter has had a Facebook account since she was 8, but she lied about her age.
Well be happy then because this is not about all children, just the spawn of the rich and their being exposed from a young age as being real arse holes. Consider the real track record of career con artists politicians and their real child hold history being exposed. So order to protect the corrupt spawn, all children are given some limited whishy washy protection. So for example were the forced to delete the information and was this proven by auditing all their information storage onsite and offsite, or did they not bother with that and threatening executives with custodial sentences should they fail that audit.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
What if kids use an Android phone and now you *can't* turn off tracking? Can Google be sued? Google is passing location info to apps, so that is "online." And I would say this is partly offline tracking as well, and much more sinister than simply tracking kids in order to serve them adds. This is your child's physical location.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Viacomm 2015 gross earnings $6.18 billion.
$500,000 fine.
Mattel 2015 gross earnings $2.8 billion.
$250,000 fine.
For an individual earning $100,000 gross income that equates to roughly to $8 and $9 fines respectively*. That will really teach them to think twice about breaking federal law by enabling tracking of children through their sites. What a joke.
* that's assuming the individual is taxed at the same rate as the corporations. Which they aren't. So the relative amount is even lower.
When a site is presumptuous, and says I have to give them that info before they will cough up a download link, or let me see a page, I give them fictitious shit, usually with subtle hints that I don't like what they are doing, like "no@youdontneedthis.org" or something similar.
If they only want to give me the the link via email, I give them the shit email sewer I use for spam, and then never go back to them again afterwards.
If they blast me with cross site tracking super cookies, I blacklist them with no script and ghostery.
I know they take notice of this, because many have started complaining to me that they needs the ad monies. They can get the ad monies from me if they stop using cross site tracking. I don't mind cookies inside their site, or curated ads that don't fire off malicious scripts from north Korea. It is when they are a combination of lazy and entitled, where they just out any old shit ad from any advert whore network, pushing any old JavaScript and any old image type (no really, when you embed an .emf and a .tiff, it is obvious what you are doing, and it is not serving me an ad.) I feel the need to remind them that they need to be more considerate themselves.
I don't want them to warehouse data about me. At all. Ever.
This is not hard, but the insatiable hunger for more and more personal data to use in big data analytics needs to stop, and these clowns don't want it to. They are so used to just collecting it, that the idea that it us illegal to collect from children never dawned on them.
It is a stark wakeup call to the extent of the problem.
Governments all over the world prefer to have the monopoly on violence, why not on spying, too?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What's the difference between tracking kids and tracking adults? When did tracking become a legal equal to fucking?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why should somebody over 18 be tracked? I send a Do-Not-Track Bit and want the companies to respect it.
> they (presumably) have enough maturity and judgement to NOT GIVE IT TO THEM.
[citation needed]
If consent is that easy for you, i do not want to be your girlfriend.
Just because i give you my name, that doesn't mean i give you any right to use it for something. You need to ask me, what you may use it for. Then we can get to an agreement. What do you think, why there are long and unreadble ToS? Because without, the companies would NOT be allowed to use your name, even when you enter it on their website.
I'm not arguing against the spirit of these laws, but it's easy to break them without being nefarious. Including google analytics on a site, common practice in the web industry, with the track demographic data checkbox checked is enough to break these laws.