In an internet where you’re more likely to interact with bots than actual humans online, while children become more technologically savvy everyday and can navigate phones better than they can bikes, social media platforms are looking for ways to balance keeping people’s privacy top of mind while ensuring the safety of their underage users. Unfortunately, these two parameters often come in contradiction with one another, and the lack of government oversight means there’s little incentive for these companies to pursue anything more than keeping the status quo.
That is until recently, when a social media platform’s ill-kept privacy files surfaced on the public internet and an increasingly litigious group of people decided to take matters to court. Now, in an attempt to work proactively to keep underage users safe online and also ensure the privacy of everyone’s collected data, companies are pursuing new methods to verify the age of their users online. But the lack of federal regulation is also fueling this paradoxical directive and fostering the conflict: social media companies can collect the data of users of all ages, to keep children safe.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a statement this week allowing social media companies to collect children’s personal data without parental consent in the name of age verification, carving out an exception to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA), which decisively names children under 13 as untouchable for data collection, until now. Considering that COPPA was designed to protect sensitive data, the FTC is all but giving social media companies carte blanche to collect any information it deems necessary in the name of age verification.
