BBB National Programs Blog

As a parent, it can be difficult to keep up with all the ways your child uses technology. From board books to iPads, weekend cartoons to YouTube, even traditional schooling has had to adapt to online classes. Trying to stay on top of what your child is watching, what ads they are seeing, and what is happening with their data can be overwhelming, but understanding COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, can help.

In today’s digital world, we carry around networked supercomputers that would make the machines that launched a rocket to the moon look laughable.

As political leaders around the world struggle to address the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s of little surprise they are turning to new technologies to stop the spread. The efficacy of those technologies is being tested every day, and winners and losers are already being identified.

While almost all contact tracing strategies rely on traditional means, many employ modern communications technologies: sensors, Bluetooth, GPS, thermal recognition, facial-recognition, and geofencing.

Though governments and corporations have marshalled impressive resources to develop these strategies, contact tracing powered by smartphones comes with inevitable challenges, regardless of the technologies used and the categories of contact data generated.

Imagine that you have been placed in charge of setting up a contact tracing system using the smartphones already in the hands of the public. As we explained in our first piece in this series, one of the main goals of this system is to alert those who may have come into contact with others infected with coronavirus.

SARS-CoV-2, commonly known as coronavirus, hit the world by storm, altering the lives of people from the American midwest to Shanghai. As the world unites to “flatten the curve” and guard the surge capacities of hospitals, a common term that has emerged is “contact tracing.” Contact tracing is broadly defined as monitoring individuals that have had contact with a person infected by a disease to ensure that they get treatment and prevent further transmission.

On May 28, the 2020 CARU Conference officially kicked off with a keynote from the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Andrew Smith, Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection. Andrew joined moderator Alice Cahn, Founder of Cahnworks and a legacy name in children’s media, for a virtual fireside chat about the changing landscape of child-directed content over the last few years.

The FTC has just announced that they have reached a settlement with children’s app developer, HyperBeard, for unlawfully collecting data from children, users under 13, and using it to target them for behavioral advertising, otherwise known as interest-based advertising.

Children’s privacy is a hot topic in the media these days. It may seem like a new concern but we at the BBB National Programs’ Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) have been keeping an eye on it since the beginning. CARU was established decades ago to promote responsible advertising to children at a time when advertising was mainly on television. The self-regulatory program and its guidelines were designed to adapt to changes in the marketing and media landscape – offline and online - so when concerns about online data collection practices arose, CARU was able to get a jump on it even before lawmakers could pass the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in 1998.