The 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has special provisions on child protection. It contains special requirements for websites that allow children under the age of 13 to access them. These websites cannot allow access if they do not have parental permission. They must have a parent’s permission before they can collect, use or disclose a child’s personal information. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sees the need to revise the meaning of personal information. The present state of technology should by now include Geo-location data and other identifiers, such as cookies.
When it comes to covering teenagers, there is also a divided opinion as to the extension of coverage under COPPA. In order to broaden its privacy legislation, privacy advocates are saying that Congress should include special protection for teens. There are at least two state representatives who proposed a more radical legislation. They want to bar websites from tracking all children when they surf online.Also, the idea of a “web eraser” was brought up. This older proposition required businesses to provide a mechanism that allows teens to erase their online tracks. With this mechanism, all of the personal information a teenager would leave when they browse would be deleted as soon as they logged out of the site. This is extremely useful, especially in social networking sites, where teens give out most of their personal information.
Teenagers usually make online mistakes by providing too much personal information in the sites that they visit. They are surprised when these mistakes haunt them months, or even years later. A privacy advocate group sees this as their basis for saying that kids need more protection than they have right now.
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