FTC's relief remedy

By: Karim Mostafa Online papers collecting data from kids now know the rx
A sigh of relief was how Susan Mernit responded last week to the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) final ruling on how to implement the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998.
Mernit, executive director of React.com and Yucky.com, works closely with children online as they interact with the Web version of her kids-oriented newspaper supplement. For her, the ruling had the potential to limit that interaction ? and online limitations could have crippled print as well for a kids' product with more than 200 newspaper partners.
The FTC ruling requires commercial Web sites to get verifiable parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing
personal data from children under the
age of 13.
The FTC released its final ruling on the COPPA Oct. 20 and "newspapers, although not directly impacted, need to be aware of it," said Rene P. Milam, assistant general counsel and director of legal affairs at the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). "Online newspapers that collect data from children will have to alter their practices." The NAA plans to notify members this week about compliance requirements, she added.
Robert Larson also was relieved that the final ruling was slightly more lenient than expected. As education editor at the New York Times Learning Network, Larson worked hard to meet the standards of both the Better Business Bureau and TRUSTe by removing e-mail submissions from the site. (TRUSTe, an independent, nonprofit privacy initiative dedicated to building users' trust in sites, has developed a third-party oversight "seal" program to alleviate users' concerns about online privacy.) Now he can reinstall a one-time e-mail feature so a student can send a question to the site's featured reporter and get an answer.
The FreeZone Network, Thomson Target Media's online kids' venture into which Curiocity was folded last summer, has been doing offline parental consent for close to two years, which complies with the new FTC ruling. "We already have the structure and protocol built-in to protect kids' privacy," said Patricia Lindsay, executive director at FreeZone, a site with 400,000 registered users. "What we're doing is protecting kids from viewing inappropriate content, as well as protecting them from giving out personally identifiable information."
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(copyright: Editor & Publisher October 30, 1999) [Caption]