The FTC said the changes to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998, which go into effect July 1, will give parents greater control over the personal information that websites and online services may collect from young children.
The changes to COPPA follow a two-year debate over how sweeping the government changes should be to protect the privacy of children under the age of 13 without restricting the procedures of a flourishing online economy that hinge on such information for advertising.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the FTC has let app stores like those run by Apple and Google off the hook. Such stores will not be held responsible for privacy violations by the games and software sold there.
Facebook and other social media sites will only have to meet child online privacy regulations if they have “actual knowledge” they’re collecting information through a website or app that targets children.
The updates to the COPPA Rule reflect careful consideration of the entire record of the rulemaking, which included a public roundtable and several rounds of public comments sought by the agency, said FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz.
“As all of us recognize, time works changes, and the Internet of 2012 is vastly different from the Internet of more than a decade ago, when we first issued the COPPA Rule,” said Leibowitz. “Since then, we have seen the rise of Smartphones, tablets, social networks, and more than a million apps. And while all of these advances have enriched our lives, enhanced educational opportunities, and grown our economy, they also exacerbate the privacy risks to children.”
“The Commission takes seriously its mandate to protect children’s online privacy in this ever-changing technological landscape,” he added. “I am confident that the amendments to the COPPA Rule strike the right balance between protecting innovation that will provide rich and engaging content for children, and ensuring that parents are informed and involved in their children’s online activities.”
Leibowitz said those who breach the revised Act will be subject to fines as high as $16,000 per incident.
The final amendments are:
- Modify the list of “personal information” that cannot be collected without parental notice and consent, clarifying that this category includes geolocation information, photographs, and videos;
- Offer companies a streamlined, voluntary and transparent approval process for new ways of getting parental consent;
- Close a loophole that allowed kid-directed apps and websites to permit third parties to collect personal information from children through plug-ins without parental notice and consent;
- Extend coverage in some of those cases so that the third parties doing the additional collection also have to comply with COPPA;
- Extend the COPPA Rule to cover persistent identifiers that can recognize users over time and across different websites or online services, such as IP addresses and mobile device IDs;
- Strengthen data security protections by requiring that covered website operators and online service providers take reasonable steps to release children’s personal information only to companies that are capable of keeping it secure and confidential;
- Require that covered website operators adopt reasonable procedures for data retention and deletion; and
- Strengthen the FTC’s oversight of self-regulatory safe harbor programs.
Of those that did offer disclosures, the links provided were often long, technically-worded privacy policies “filled with irrelevant information,” the report found. Other apps, it said, gave ambiguous information about their practices.
The report also found:
- Fifty-eight percent of the apps reviewed contained advertising within the app, while only 15 percent disclosed the presence of advertising prior to download.
- Twenty-two percent of the apps contained links to social networking services, while only nine percent disclosed that fact.
- Seventeen percent of the apps reviewed allow kids to make purchases for virtual goods within the app, with prices ranging from 99 cents to $29.99.
Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob Diner Dash app also received some flack this week. The company pulled the game from Apple’s iTunes app store after a privacy advocate group complained it had violated children’s privacy rights.
Post from: SiteProNews
FTC Toughens Up Children’s Online Privacy Rules
