COPPA 2.0: The New Battle Over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech

Progress & Freedom Foundation Progress on Point Paper No. 16.11

36 Pages Posted: 21 May 2009 Last revised: 26 Oct 2012

Date Written: May 21, 2009

Abstract

Online privacy, child safety, free speech and anonymity are on a collision course. The 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) already mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, but many advocate expanding online privacy protections for both adolescents and adults. Furthermore, efforts continue at both the federal and state levels to institute new regulations, such as age verification mandates, aimed at ensuring the safety of children online. There is an inherent tension between these objectives: Attempts to achieve perfectly “safe” online environments will likely require the surrender of some privacy and speech rights, including the right to speak anonymously.

These tensions are coming to a head with state-based efforts to expand COPPA, which requires “verifiable parental consent” before certain sites or services may collect, or enable the sharing of, personal information from children under the age of 13. Several proposed state laws would extend COPPA’s parental-consent framework to cover all adolescents under 18. This seemingly small change would require age verification of not only adolescents and their parents, but - for the first time - large numbers of adults, thus raising grave First Amendment concerns. Such broad age verification mandates would, ironically, reduce online privacy by requiring more information to be collected from both adolescents and adults for age verification purposes, while doing little to make adolescents safer. In practical terms, the increased scale of “COPPA 2.0” efforts would present significant implementation and enforcement challenges. Finally, state-level COPPA 2.0 proposals would likely conflict with the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.

Despite these profound problems, COPPA expansion has great rhetorical appeal and seems likely to be at the heart of future child safety debates - especially efforts to require mandatory age verification. There are, however, many better ways to protect children online than by expanding COPPA beyond its original, limited purpose.

Keywords: COPPA, COPPA 2.0, COPA, internet privacy, free speech, age verification, authentication, identification, FTC, Long Tail, first amendment, Federal Trade Commission, user education, user empowerment, online privacy protection act, online safety, social networking sites, facebook, myspace, aclu, google

JEL Classification: L82, L96, D18, I2, I20, I28, O38, O33

Suggested Citation

Szoka, Berin and Thierer, Adam D., COPPA 2.0: The New Battle Over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech (May 21, 2009). Progress & Freedom Foundation Progress on Point Paper No. 16.11 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1408204 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1408204

Berin Szoka (Contact Author)

TechFreedom ( email )

110 Maryland Ave NE, Suite 409
Washington, DC District of Columbia 20002
United States

HOME PAGE: http://techfreedom.org

Adam D. Thierer

R Street Institute ( email )

1050 17th Street Northwest
#1150
Washington, DC 20036
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
616
Abstract Views
4,901
Rank
80,128
PlumX Metrics