For years, plausible deniability was the online ad industry’s de facto workaround for dealing with children’s privacy.
The concept of “actual knowledge” under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act quietly set the bar. As long as an operator wasn’t provably aware that it was collecting personal information from children under 13, it could keep treating that traffic as general audience.
Sticking your head in the sand was a semi-viable strategy. Not a good one, but a lot of folks did it, because they were incentivized not to look too hard, says Julie Rooney, chief privacy officer and deputy general counsel at OpenX.
But that’s getting a lot harder to pull off with the FTC’s recent update to the COPPA Rule – the enforcement deadline passed on April 22 – and as more states chime in with their own youth privacy laws.
“We’re seeing a huge wave of new rules aimed at children and teens,” Rooney said, “and the common theme is that not knowing who’s in your audience isn’t good enough anymore.”
