2023 featured a proposed update to the COPPA, or the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act which included limitations on the nudging of kids to stay online and reductions in the data collection of children while using their parent’s devices.
The last update was in 2013 and dealt with social media and mobile devices (how quaint). This one will feature additional protections to ensure that children are not targeted by their online behavior.
For starters, businesses would have to set behavioral advertising as disabled by default, unless they were to get parents’ separate verifiable consent to disclose information to third parties, including third-party advertisers.
System operators and businesses will not be able to send push notifications to encourage kids to use their services or games more often. Operators using kids’ information to send these push notifications would also be required to flag that use in their COPPA-required direct and online notices.
Most importantly, whether parents understand it or not, the 2023 proposed update would “strengthen COPPA’s existing standards by making it clear that operators can hold on to kids’ personal information only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purpose for which it was collected—and they for sure can’t hold on to it indefinitely or use it for any secondary purpose.”
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Cybercrime has become the largest loss of money due to private criminal activity on Earth, causing an estimated $10 trillion in damage from identity theft, data breaches, and so forth in this year alone.
To this end as well, the new COPPA rules would require separate, written data security policies for the handling and storage of kids’ information.
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Since it’s enforced by a federal regulatory agency and not a Congressional action, there was an open comment period, during which the FTC received almost 200,000 comments, demonstrating at least to some degree the urgent desire for more stringent controls on childhood data handling by the American public.
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