The Federal Trade Commission is recommending updates to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which sounds timely, wise, and worthy. But it is doing so blind to the impact and unintended consequences of its regulation. COPPA requires that sites serving children under the age 13 must give parents notice and get consent if they collect and use personally identifiable information — which is broadly defined — about a child. Under the proposed changes, parents may no longer use email to grant consent but must jump through hoops — printing, signing, and scanning or faxing forms or holding videoconferences with the site’s employees. The unintended consequences of COPPA are many, but the most obvious is that children have learned to lie about their age. On the Internet, everyone is 14. (MORE: Should Kids Be Allowed on Facebook?) On a conference call organized by the Future of Privacy Forum, an industry group, I asked Mamie Kresses, senior attorney for the FTC’s Division of Advertising Practices, whether there had been any study about how truthful children are reporting their ages online. They have no such research, she said. I asked whether the FTC had any data about how often parents use the means of notice and consent COPPA provides. None, she said. The most disturbing unintended consequence of the regulation, I think, is the chill it likely puts on serving children online. In the early days of the web, I started the Yuckiest Site on the Internet — about goo, bugs, and science — to serve young readers at the local news sites I ran. After COPPA, my employer decided the risk in serving young people and even inadvertently recording a child’s name or targeting an ad was too great. We don’t know how many sites have not been started to serve children online. Isn’t this the group we should be serving best? I asked Kresses whether the FTC had done research on the extent of a chill. No, she said. Finally, I asked whether the FTC had revisited the reasons for … Continue reading Do We Really Need to Protect Children From the Internet?