COPPA means Privacy for Children

COPPA means Privacy for Children!

by Mike Banks Valentine

A major issue for small to medium sized business online is PRIVACY if they collect information from visitors to their site. New laws are being passed that require site operators to maintain the privacy of surfers that provide personal information to site owners. A law called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) can lead to fines of $15,000 for non-compliance PER VIOLATION. Sites that collect information from children under 13 are required by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to get "verifiable parental permission" before collecting ANY information from kids.

The approach adopted recently by many online businesses doing the CYA dance to avoid hefty fines imposed by the FTC for COPPA compliance violations is to "lock-out" children under 13 from all accounts.

Online privacy and safety for children is advanced significantly by COPPA, but because there are few obvious solutions to the protection of data collected online (witness DoubleClick debacle recently) massive "free" services (like Hotmail) find themselves facing fines for sharing information with third party advertisers about children.

So far, the answer has been to "dump the kids" from those online services that don't cater specifically to children. Those small businesses that count on kids for major portions of their audience, like game sites and homework services could quickly be put out of business by the law.