Today, I filed a regulatory comment in the FTC’s COPPA Rule Review on behalf of the International Center for Law & Economics. Building on prior work, I argue the FTC’s 2013 amendments to the COPPA Rule should be repealed.
The amendments ignored the purpose of COPPA by focusing on protecting children from online targeted advertising rather than protecting children from online predators, as the drafters had intended. The amendment to the definition of personal information to include “persistent identifiers” by themselves is inconsistent with the statute’s text. The legislative history is explicit in identifying the protection of children from online predators as a purpose of COPPA, but there is nothing in the statute or the legislative history that states a purpose is to protect children from online targeted advertising.
The YouTube enforcement action and the resulting compliance efforts by YouTube will make the monetization of children-friendly content very difficult. Video game creators, family vloggers, toy reviewers, children’s apps, and educational technology will all be implicated by the changes on YouTube’s platform. The economic consequences are easy to predict: there will likely be less zero-priced family-friendly content available.
The 2013 amendments have uncertain benefits to children’s privacy. While some may feel there is a benefit to having less targeted advertising towards children, there is also a cost in restricting the ability of children’s content creators to monetize their work. The FTC should not presume parents do not balance costs and benefits about protecting their children from targeted advertising and often choose to allow their kids to use YouTube and apps on devices they bought for them.