Written by Zachary Jacquest, Staff Writer
During the 1990s, e-commerce was on the rise. Despite the capabilities and features of these new technologies, there was a common fear amongst all of the consumers of the new technology, that being the data collection practices these devices and sites use, as well as their effect on an individual’s user privacy. This worry was especially prevalent in parents who had children of ages 13 and under. After a website was discovered to have violated a few parts of a few of the rules that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had in place to protect the privacy of children, it was decided that a new act needed to be put in place in order to have better protection against violations. This began the drafting stages of what we now know as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.
The formal function of COPPA is to prohibit unfair or deceptive acts of practices in connection with the collection, use, and/or disclosure of personal information from and about children on the Internet. It also works to give parents control over what information websites can collect from their kids. The FTC has the authority to issue regulations and enforce COPPA. The FTC-designated “safe-harboring” was also introduced in order to encourage companies and industries to do their own sort of self-regulation. As of June 2016, the FTC has seven approved safe harbor programs operated by TRUSTe, ESRB, CARU, PRIVO, Aristotle, Inc., Samet Privacy (kidSAFE), and the Internet Keep Safe Coalition (iKeepSafe).
Any violations of COPPA can result in some pretty major fines per each violation. The largest recorded fine issued by the FTC was to ByteDance due to their app TikTok not complying with COPPA, with the consequence being a 5.7 million dollar fine and being required to add a kids-only mode to TikTok. Probably the most notable and recent violation of COPPA was done by YouTube, which include violations of tracking the viewing history of minors in order to facilitate targeted ads towards the minors. As part of a settlement, starting in 2020, content creators on YouTube would be required to mark videos that were clearly meant for children as “child-oriented” and would use machines to locate and mark such videos if they were not already marked by the creator. If the content creator failed to mark the videos as “child-oriented”, they could be ned by the FTC for up to $42,000 per video that violated COPPA. The settlement terms were initially very fear inducing for most content creators, especially to people who typically post gaming videos due to a lot of games being seen as meant for kids, as if they marked the video as “child-oriented” they would lose the ability to have comments on the video, which took away a form of communication, and they would lose a lot of ad revenue on their video, which could severely cut any sort of income they could’ve made on the video. A lot of the fear these creators had were dispelled once the FTC specified that these acts and threats would only be towards channels that were specifically meant for children and would have little to no effect on general audience channels.
While COPPA was made due to fear of the masses on data collection, there are a lot of people who generally disagree and criticize COPPA for being too restrictive or vague on a lot of aspects. While the act can be very powerful and fear inducing, there are a lot of grey areas in which exemptions and immunities could be granted. It is ultimately up to the FTC, and even the U.S. Supreme Court in some cases, on what qualifies as a COPPA violation and how to handle it. The act created a huge stir in the YouTube space but it ultimately ended up not being as menacing as it initially seemed. This, however, was not the case for some companies as some were ned in the millions of dollar range. The protection of information about minors, especially younger ones is extremely important to a lot of people, but being too restrictive with such massive fines is also a major fear for people … so it is unknown how violations of COPPA will be handled going forward or if the act will ever be updated in the future. All we can do is wait and see.