As our lives have become more and more online, keeping kids safe in the digital world has become harder. Nowadays big tech and big data are scraping as much info from us as it can and selling it to advertisers. Privacy rights are important for everyone, but especially for young people: they deserve to be able to grow up in a world where their past stays their past and big data isn’t creating a permanent marketing profile for kids at an impressionable age without their consent.
Because our digital world is changing so rapidly, we can no longer rely on laws that were written over 2 decades ago to properly regulate how marketers and tech companies handle children and teens’ data. This is why Restore the Fourth is endorsing the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, an amendment that will bring COPPA—originally drafted in the 1990s—into the modern age.
Key improvements CTOPPA makes to COPPA is:
- Protect teens, as well as children, online.
- Ban targeted advertising for minors.
- Prohibit the collection of data from 13-15 year olds without the users’ consent
- Create an “eraser-button” that will allow minors to delete personal data stored by big tech
CTOPPA will also help regulate the growing new industry of connected devices that are marketed to minors. IT will require manufacturers to clearly disclose how minors’ data is stored, used, transmitted, and protected. It will also require these devices meet “robust cyber security standards.” All of this will bolster digital privacy rights for children and teens specifically. It can be difficult for even adults to understand the privacy policy for websites and how their data is being used; so, as privacy activists, we need to be extra vigilant when it comes to how children and teens’ data is protected online. Passing this bill is the first step.
📝 Write a letter to your law makers telling them to support it here.
☎️ Call your law makers and urge them to support it at: +1 202-318-3323
11 replies on “Children and Teens’ Digital Privacy Matters Too”
It is time tech is regulated properly. It will take people from a variety of backgrounds to do that, but a priority should be to protect kids under 18 from the predatory actions of all kinds of corporations that are online. That should be a no-brainer, but alas, when it comes to money, our kids are seen as expendable. That should be unacceptable to everyone, but is not. We need Congress to step up. R.Sheets
We must protect the children. This is essential.
We need to protect our greatest resource & the future 🙏❗️
We shouldn’t have to ask for this; it is obviously vitally necessary.
Couldn’t agree with you more. 💌
In this era of surveillance via govt and big companies (social and otherwise), that watch and accumulate data on what we read and then target us accordingly…just plain wrong!
So signing for that beautiful big thing called PRIVACY. 🦋
Children are our future, protect them online. Keep them safe!
Keep kids safe
We are long overdue to deal with online privacy. The least we can do is protect the most vulnerable.
ey improvements CTOPPA makes to COPPA is:
Protect teens, as well as children, online.
Ban targeted advertising for minors.
Prohibit the collection of data from 13-15 year olds without the users’ consent
Create an “eraser-button” that will allow minors to delete personal data stored by big tech
Please protect the Children
Protect our teens and children online.