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FTC Regulates Kids' Privacy Online
If you have the time you might also want to read the actual rule and public comments. Most online news services have covered it; Wired has a lengthy analysis sourced to an anonymous Republican staffer, but News.com has one without the Republican political spin. Fundamentally, the act regulates those commercial websites that target themselves to children (12 and under) and collect personal information about them - if you aren't commercial, or don't target yourself to children (even if you collect personal information from people) or just don't collect personal data from the kids, you aren't affected. Nevertheless, it is a significant step in privacy regulation - businesses must contact parents before collecting such information from an individual that they have actual knowledge is a child (for instance, by asking their age), but have no duty to ask the age of the general population. Thus most websites, even commercial ones that collect personal information, will have no change in day-to-day operations - they target themselves to a general audience, don't care about their visitors' ages, and need not take any steps under the new regulations.
Sites which do target kids for marketing will have to get parental permission before doing so. Parents also must be offered the option to prevent their kids' information from being shared with third-parties - to prevent the sale of that data, in other words. Parents can also opt-out entirely on behalf of their children and the site must honor their request. In school situations, teachers can give the requisite permission for their students so school activities won't be hampered.
The law and rule are likely to put a significant damper on online marketing to kids aged 12 and under. Specialized kids' sites will have to get parental permission to collect the data that is their primary reason for existence, and presumably many parents will prevent these sites from selling it. How well will they be enforced? That's uncertain. According to EPIC, the FTC has received hundreds of privacy-related complaints and has investigated only three.
"Self-regulation" of privacy concerns is an obvious failure. TrustE, the leading light of the businesses trying to prevent consumer protection on the internet, spends more time covering up privacy breaches by its members than investigating complaints... Will targeted government intervention have any better effect?
The FTC didn't issue the act; it simply wrote regulations that Congress authorized it to write under the act.
(Which explains why the FTC didn't do anything about the previous complaints: because it didn't have the statutory authority to do so. Without the statutory authority, it's illegal for the FTC to do anything [not that they wouldn't, of course, but the bureaucracy's doing something illegal is a little harder than doing something with Congress's blessing].)
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
There is no foolproof system to ensure that you are who you say you are online - as the old saying goes "on the net, nobody knows you're a dog".. or for that matter a cybernetic being running a news for nerds site (how else does he put in 20 hours a day?!)...
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Maybe I'm missing something, but the FTC seems to be thinking it terms of selling a child's address along with marketing data, rather than just reporting demographics to marketers. I don't think prevening demographics collection was the intent of the FTC. Regardless, I'm still opposed to this. Although it's not as bad as most examples, it still takes responsibility over children away from their parents and gives it to the rest of the world. If a parent gives their child unsupervised access to the internet then they should trust their child enough to either make those judgements on their own or ask a parent's permission on their own ("this is important Timmy. Never give anyone on the internet your address or phone number with out Mommy's permission").
Of course, there's a big difference between someone that wants to kidnap children, and a web site aimed at kids. But there's still the same possibility that things could happen. Example: If a web site aimed at kids asks an 'innocent' question such as "Do you go home to an empty house after school?" and the answers were matched up with the address and name, that could lead to robbery and maybe kidnapping if the right person got a hold of the info. There's also the idea that many kids might inadvertantly answer "yes" to something that they should say no to , which can open a number of doors either being advertizing or personal or property threat, which might have been stated in a way most children would not understand.
This bill basically seems like a natural extention of what most media does with stories that revovle around children: the names are protected to prevent further harm.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
No offense, but if your schools are actually hiring people like this, it's time you wrote a letter to the school board. If nothing else, take your child to a private school or just enroll him/her in another school altogether. Public schools are funded with your tax dollars. You can bet you have a say in how they're run.
In any case, your "somebody should speak up about this" comment seems better directed towards yourself than to any of us. They held quite a lengthy public comment period where you were more than welcome to voice your opinion.
Funny how people always have things to say after the fact, but nobody is willing to give a rat's ass about stuff like this while it's in the planning stages (when it counts). THIS is what's wrong with our government today, not "idiot" or "evil" politicians.
I'm working on a kid's website for a client, and the FTC regulations aren't making my work any easier.
The client knew that these regulations have been coming for a while, so we have been actually dealing with these issues for the past two months.
Implementing the parental consent process has actually been quite easy. The hard part is trying to figure out out how to spin things so that the parents want to sign the consent form! Granted, it's kind of hard to put a spin on using kids for market research data.
The strategy we ended up using was the same concept drug sellers use - give the kids a free hit or two on the web site, but to keep using it, they have to register. Hopefully by then, they are addicted.
I'm not sure if I morally agree with the purpose of the web site (no it's not evil or anything, but I don't like tricking kids/parents into revealing their shopping habbits online), but it pays pretty well!
Scott Severtson
Applications Developer
Scott Severtson
Senior Architect, Digital Measures
Disney, Nickelodean, they have money, employees, etc that will allow the to comply with this act. It is the small guy who loses by government intervention such as this. Imagine a person trying to market a product made for ADD elementry school children--any information he collects via the Internet is now subject to more paperwork than it is worth to him.
That same principle applies to those newcomers who would wish to provide games and entertainment for 11 year olds. Any information they gather would be subject to miles of red tape, and a small company simply cannot afford to send time dealing with that.
I can already hear people screaming over this, because it sounds as if the first waves of profound censorship is making its way unto the Net. Actually, I think it's quite different. This is not about censoring Internet content, it's about giving the parents the legal means to censor the Internet themselves.
As such, it's a little like NetNanny. It means parents have some form of control over what their children do. Well, that works wonderfully well for me. Think of the Internet as a giant video rental store. The idea is not to censor some movies, but to make it clear to everyone what each section contains.
And so, we have the little doors leading to the pr0n section. That's cool by me. As a matter of fact, if parents feel they're controlling what their children will see on the Internet, they might losen up and stop calling the Internet a den of depravation.
Protect your children the way you see fit, I don't care. Just don't try to protect me.
Caveat: unfortunately, this system sounds as if it's impossible to implement. How do you tell if a person is below 18 from an anonymous email? I've seen 30-odd year-old people spell like crap, so that's not even a consideration. And heck, everyone, adult or children, visits a children site at some point. (Best example: I have my own page on the LegoManiacs webpage.) So controlling everyone won't work either.
So, it just makes it mandatory to include some sort of silly button saying, 'I am over 18'. Yeah, porn sites have been doing that for ages.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Yes, kids don't necessarily have the skills to avoid marketing traps, but neither do a lot of adults. Why do you think people bother advertising? It's cos they know 99.999% of the population thinks with it's wallet half the time. (The other half doesn't involve the brain, either.)
The legislation is clearly drawn up by someone who has some excellent thoughts and ideas, but is clueless as to how to implement them. The same has been true of most Internet regulation. Some sound ideas, mixed with flawed logic, shoddy reasoning and liquid lunches, half-baked, and left to sit in a mildew-infested cupboard.
IMHO, this is why this kind of regulation should be done IN CO-OPERATION with ISP's and computer specialists. THEY are the ones who know what would work and what wouldn't, and what would be acceptable to the population as a whole.
Legislation by force of arms achieves nothing, least of all it's intended goal, and gets everyone so hostile to the idea, there isn't a hope of anything sensible being implemented for years to come.
Which is more important? The egos of the legislators (in Congress, or wherever), or getting effective, workable, useful legislation where it's NEEDED, in the WAY that it's NEEDED, to achieve the things that are NEEDED?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Usually I'm against anything the government does to "regulate" content of any medium, but this doesn't look like a content filter. However the article doesn't really state exactly what they are targeting...if the site requires you to enter demographic info before you can look at the site, then it does amount to content filtering. Personally I wouldn't want to look at any page that requires a lot of personal / demographic information up front, however.
But lets face it, most kids aren't smart enough to know any better until they reach a certain age. If I had kids I wouldn't want them giving away our address, email addresses, household income, etc. This age is different for everyone, which makes it important for parents to have the FINAL word on what their kids can or can't see, or what information to give out as is the case here. If a site falls into the category outlined in this bill, it could prompt the kid to have his parents enter a password, or some similar security measure. Hopefully parents would be able to disable a security measure like this, if they don't want to deal with it every 5 minutes and/or when the kid reaches an age where the parents think the kid is ready to decide for him/herself.
Somehow I doubt the gov't will allow this level of personal control, however. This bill is also vague, as are most bills related to technology, particularly relating to the internet. Thus if they try to sue a company over this, the bill probably won't stand up very well in court. It's too vague as to what specifically requires controls and how to go about implementing them, and what passes as a decent implementation.
This article reminded me of something that happened earlier this year. Many years ago, I created a web page on Geocities (this was back when Geocities didn't suck). After the creation of the COPPA (last year), Geocities made a parent's permission required to create a web page on it for children under 13. I didn't really care, because I was over 13 at the time they made the announcement. Then, in February (I think), Geocities sent me an email saying that because I was under 13 at the time I had started my web page, they would require information from my parents or my page would be deleted. They wanted things like my address, my phone number, and other things that weren't required to sign up initially. I wrote Geocities an angry letter, knowing very well that nobody actually reads the email that gets sent to them. Not that I actually cared. My web page was fairly popular, but I was fed up with Geocities anyway (the slow speed, the lack of support, the pop-up banners, etc.) So I let them delete my page.
I believe that the COPPA is not neccesary. If parents don't want their children visiting particular web sites, they should be monitoring their children's Internet usage. Parents shouldn't be required to give web sites a lot of information just to let their children visit the sites.