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Kids' Privacy News: Some Good, Some UnclearFebruary 2000 Â Beginning April 21, when the Federal Trade Commission's final rule implementing the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act takes effect, educational publishers on the Web will take part in what many call a turning point in federal regulation of the Internet. Since the passage of COPPA, organizations such as ours and Kids in the Know (which includes us and other education-minded members) have offered significant input to the FTC. And for the most part the rule - requiring commercial Web sites and online services to get parental consent when collecting personal information about children 12 and under - has evolved into a final version that's livable for those who look upon the Web as a learning tool. (For more details on parental consent, see next article.) The big gray area remaining is how COPPA will play out in classrooms and school libraries. As it now reads in the Federal Register, the rule "does not preclude" schools from acting as parents' agents in granting consent. Many schools (not all) do seek parents' blanket permission for Internet use at the beginning of the school year. But the rule says online operators who have informed a school of their privacy practices "can presume that the school's authorization is based on the school's having obtained the parent's consent." "As it's drafted now, we've got kind of a black hole where no one's responsible," says Aleck Johnson of Leslie Harris & Associates, a consulting firm working with the Consortium for School Networking on the issue. "Operators are allowed to assume that if a school tells them it's OK to collect personal information, it's OK. Schools, however, are not required to then turn around and get parental consent." Schools may simply choose not to act in a parent's stead; it's unclear what an operator should do, in that case. And there's no procedure currently in place to distinguish a school's consent from a parent's. The FTC has stated that it will provide guidance to the educational community in a future clarification of the rule. Through Leslie Harris & Associates, the Consortium is gathering a task force of its members - both educational associations and commercial operators - to test out hypothetically how the new regulations will work in a school environment. Its comments will be filed with the FTC, which has requested the Consortium's input, in March. To offer input to the CoSN task force, e-mail coppa@cosn.org. | ||||
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