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From our coverage of the September 2000 Digital Kids conference, the largest annual gathering of people in commercial Web publishing, marketing, gaming, e-tail, and other businesses targeting kids...
"Privacy and safety do come together under COPPA," said cyberlawyer and online-privacy specialist Parry Aftab, executive director of Cyberangels.org. She was speaking about how Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which went into effect last April, is more than its title indicates.
An important session at the Digital Kids conference updated us all on regulation for kids' Web publishers and marketers. Besides COPPA and some new consumer-education programs (see our 9/22/00 issue for descriptions of two of the latest), there are some new technologies Web sites are using to keep kids safe. They include: drop-down message text (also called "pre-programmed chat," where a child picks from phrases the site provides), "session cookies" (technology that keeps kids from clicking back in the registration process so they can't lie about their age), and random ID (where a child picks or is assigned a new screen name each session - no permanent one by which s/he can be identified). For examples, CartoonNetwork.com uses the former and Sesame Workshop's Sticker World uses the latter. Yahooligans! (Yahoo! for kids) now has the first kid-safe instant-messaging service. And the FTC, charged by the US Congress to enforce COPPA, has teamed up with Lycos's kids' site, Lycos Zone, to create a cartoon video to help kids themselves maintain their privacy online. It's the kids piece of the FTC's ongoing public-awareness Kidz Privacy Campaign.
Kids' Web publishers say there are advantages to greater kids' privacy regulation: parents' trust ("It has always been important to us that parents feel CartoonNetwork.com is a safe place to be," said CN's Jim Samples) and a parameters for kid-safe publishing ("Legislation is good," said Yahooligans!'s Catherine Davis, "we now have a framework. Just as in the offline world, you have to get parents' permission if you want to talk to kids"). What's tough about COPPA for Web publishers is the cost of compliance. One figured quoted early on by Ms. Aftab in an FTC hearing was $75,000+ - a large figure for a young company. Zeeks.com had to turn off chat, finding it too expensive to provide under the COPPA rules (see TheStandard.com article linked to below for more on this). Regulation must be one of the pressure points in the industry consolidation we're seeing.
Here are two reports from other media outlets:
- "The High Cost of COPPA" from TheStandard.com
- "Kids' Sites Cite COPPA Woes" from Wired News
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