Roman Forestor

Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act

In your own words, define COPPA:

I would define COPPA as an act the requires companies to seek parental consent before obtaining a child’s personal information online.  Such information includes birthday, location, address, SSN etc, and is designed specifically to protect children under the ages of 13 years of age.  Companies are required to obtain parental consent before obtaining any information from a child and are also required to provide any information obtained about the child to the parents upon request.  They are also required to remove any information obtained at the request of the parents after review.  1 So what is our role as teachers and parents?

2.  I look at digital citizenship as a responsibility that is more on the parent, and teacher than the corporations.  As parents and educators we are responsible for instilling sensible boundaries for our children, and instill the values of anti-bullying etc.  Monitoring our children's electronic usage is a major parental responsibility.  Teacher have a responsibility of not only monitoring student technology usage, but also instructing students on the proper uses of technology for research and discovery.

http://www.coppanow.com/

As a parent of two small children seeing a company being fined $950,000.00 dollars for the repeated collection of varying personal information from children is concerning.  I can remember when I created the email address for my child to keep up with her pen pal who now lives in Italy, Google was very careful to ask me questions while I registered the email address.  The email is in her name, but that, and her birthdate are the only things connected to the email.  I restrict what can be sent to her and the only place she can access the email is on my phone.  She doesn’t know the password and all emails are composed by me based on what she wants to ask her friend about.

3. InMobi was fined for misrepresenting what their advertising software was doing.  While they claimed that the software was only tracking the consumers location in connection with the device’s privacy settings, the software was in fact overriding the settings of the device and tracking the consumer location without the consent of the user.  Where they really got into trouble with COPPA is that many of the apps used to gather this data were specifically designed to target children without obtaining the required consent of the parents.

4. As a result the company will be required to obtain consent from all users before obtaining any of their personal information.  They will be required to delete all information they have obtained up to this point.  They will also be required to honor the consumer’s privacy settings, and will be required to create a comprehensive policy ensuring they will do so that will be audited every two years for the next twenty years.

5. As a parent I can see how easy this can happen.  I have set our devices to require fingerprint ID before purchases can be made and follow what my kids do on our devices very carefully.  I can see how easy it would be for a child to make a mistake and allow information out.  There really is as much responsibility on the parent as their is on the company to make sure they aren’t obtaining information they shouldn’t have.  As a parent, I am responsible for following my kids activities and following up with the companies to ensure they have not taken any information from my child that they are not entitled to.