Somini Sengupta has written an interesting article in The New York Times that should be of interest to all education companies who do business in the United States.
The proposed changes to COPPA, whose focus is protecting the personal information of children, particularly those under the age of 13, aim to extend coverage to the use of social media and smart phones as well as online games. Some of the changes will cover the use of cookies, geolocation data and even facial recognition software.
Interestingly, the F.T.C. has also proposed changing the two step parental consent email process, something that may (and I stress) may please some companies, however the devil here will be in the detail.
This proposed changes comes as the Consumer Reports State of the Net Survey indicated that 7.5 million children under the age of 13 had used Facebook in the previous year (in breach of Facebook’s Terms of Service).
Watch this space.
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