{"id":1136,"date":"2012-10-25T00:35:16","date_gmt":"2012-10-25T00:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncjolt.org\/?p=1136"},"modified":"2020-06-04T20:54:06","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T20:54:06","slug":"ineffective-updates-efforts-at-updating-childrens-online-privacy-rule-leads-to-more-circumvention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/blogs\/ineffective-updates-efforts-at-updating-childrens-online-privacy-rule-leads-to-more-circumvention\/","title":{"rendered":"Ineffective Updates: Efforts at Updating Children\u2019s Online Privacy Rule Leads to More Circumvention"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wednesday, October 24, 2012, by Laura Arredondo-Santisteban
\nAs people\u2019s reliance on technology and Internet services for their daily tasks increases, pushes for greater Legislative involvement to take steps at protecting users personal information online have also increased. The Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA<\/a>), is just one of the various widely publicized online privacy measures, which was enacted to ensure that online website and internet operators were not taking advantage of children under thirteen\u2019s vulnerabilities by collecting their personal information.\u00a0 Currently, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is in the process of updating<\/a> COPPA and receiving written comments on the proposed updates in an effort to maintain up to date with technology\u2019s advancements.
\nCongress enacted the Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Act in 1998 and gave the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) authority to issue and enforce<\/a> the Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule<\/a>) by monitoring Internet compliance with the Rule and bringing law enforcement actions against violators when appropriate. Apart from seeking to protect children from divulging personal information online, the FTC states that the goal<\/a> behind COPPA and the Rule is to place parents in control over what information is collected from their young children online.
\nIn September 2011 the FTC announced in a news release<\/a> proposed revisions to the COPPA Rule for the purpose of ensuring that \u201cthe Rule continues to protect children\u2019s privacy, as mandated by Congress, as online technologies evolve.\u201d The revisions symbolized the first significant change<\/a> to the Rule since it was issued in 2000. The 2012 modifications<\/a> target the Rule\u2019s \u201coperator<\/a>,\u201d \u201cwebsite or online service directed to children<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cpersonal information<\/a>\u201d definitions.
\nIn updating the current COPPA Rule, the FTC indicated its desire to \u201ckeep current with technology advances<\/a>.\u201d However, its methods for ensuring that children\u2019s personal data remain protected have not evolved since its enactment in 2000. \u00a0Currently, there has yet to be developed an advanced form of age verification technology, which would make parental consent via email inadequate.\u00a0 Nor has the FTC, in its updates, revisited or redrafted COPPA\u2019s methods for obtaining verifiable parental consent<\/a>. Online operators, like Facebook, seeking to comply with COPPA and avoid its large fines have responded by drastically limiting their services to children.\u00a0 Studies have shown that what was has resulted from these actions, are many children lying<\/a> about their age to access certain sites, like Facebook, and often doing so with help from their parents.
\nIn a study<\/a> focusing on Facebook and parental practices regarding their children\u2019s access to the networking site, researchers noted that half of the parents surveyed reported that their children were on Facebook, and 72 percent of those parents whose children were on Facebook reported that their child joined Facebook when the child was younger than minimum required age of thirteen years. The study found that of those children who were under thirteen and on Facebook, 68 percent of the parents surveyed reported that they helped their child create the account and were notified upon the account\u2019s creation that the minimum age required was thirteen.
\nThe lack of cost-effective methods for obtaining parental consent as made it economically more beneficial for online and website operators of mixed audience sites to restrict their services to users below age thirteen. \u00a0Rather than providing parents<\/a> greater control over their children\u2019s online activities, COPPA has encouraged online operators to place limits on children\u2019s access to their online services as a tradeoff for protecting their privacy and safety. \u00a0In order to address this problem, policy-makers should shift away from privacy regulation models that are based on age and work towards developing universal privacy protections for online users as a whole. Critics<\/a> have argued that teens, and at times adults, are no less vulnerable to safety-risks posed by online marketers\u2019 use of their personal data. \u00a0With an increasing percentage of online marketing and advertising networks relying on passive data collection methods, people often remain unaware of the extent there personal information is being shared online.\u00a0 Although the FTC is in the process of updating its privacy protections for children under thirteen and expanding website and online operator\u2019s obligations, as long as the methods of obtaining \u2018verifiable parental consent\u2019 remain economically inefficient and difficult to apply, operators will continue to apply age restrictions to their online services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wednesday, October 24, 2012, by Laura Arredondo-Santisteban As people\u2019s reliance on technology and Internet services for their daily tasks increases, pushes for greater Legislative involvement to take steps at protecting users personal information online have also increased. The Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), is just one of the various widely publicized online privacy measures, …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7672,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions\/7672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}