FTC Strengthens Children’s Online Privacy Rules

To keep up the pace with fast growing and evolving digital ecosystem and trends, FTC has adopted some amendments to COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) that will give more control to parents to safeguard child’s privacy online.

The Digital world is changing rapidly and Digital marketers are adopting new age technology tactics to collect more and more information from user. Content gathering in this Big data landscape need to be controlled. Digital Marketing Strategies now a days are getting more and more CRM / data driven.

the final amendments to COPPA 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.

According to FTC’s News release, 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.

Source: News release from FTCÂ