The Children’s
Online Privacy Protection Act
Goals:
To help internet users understand and comply with the Children’s Online Privacy
Protection Act so that they can form their own opinions about this Act and how
to protect children while they web surf. To model
and teach legal and ethical practice related to technology use. To promote safe
and healthy use of technology resources.
Overview: The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was written in 1998 after some startling discoveries made by a federal investigation into the activities of children on the internet. It was found that 89 percent of the websites aimed specifically at children requested personal information such as name, home address, telephone number, favorite food, favorite sports team, etc. Out of all of these sites, only 1 percent required parental consent before sending the information. Children were pushed even harder to send this info by characters on the sites they trusted, such as the McDonald’s website. A character on the site would pop up and tell kids that Ronald McDonald was the ultimate authority in everything. Any child of an impressionable age is likely to believe these lies and never think twice about giving any personal info to Ronald. Luckily, things like this are now illegal.
The COPPA took effect in April of
2000. It is now illegal for any website aimed at children to ask for personal
information of any kind. If they ask children to provide this, they must first
state that kids have to ask their parents for permission. Whether kids really
do ask or not is another story. With so many children on the web today, it is
increasingly important to have acts like this one. Children are targeted with
advertising and scams everyday through television, magazines, classroom publications,
school hallway advertisements, radio and kid club junk mail. Taking the
internet out of that ever growing list can at least give them one place they
are partially sheltered from advertisers.
http://www.ftc.gov/ogc/coppa1.htm
Then, go to this website and get an explanation of the act. This site will tell you in plain English what each section requires and expects of any website aimed at children. It analyses every part of the act and makes it much easier to understand.
http://www.cdt.org/privacy/cdtanalysisofftc.shtml
Now, go to this article written by a professor at the
http://www.otal.umd.edu/UUPractice/children/
You can also skim this site if you want to see how many companies target children directly for advertising and how “cradle to grave” advertising is used.
http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/wp/commercialism/kids-online.html
Quiz: Click on the “Quizzes” section of Blackboard or
use this link
and take the COPPA Quiz. See how well you can score on the policies of the act
and if you would be capable of creating a children’s website. There may be more
than one answer for each question. Your score should be emailed to me, but will
not be added to your final point tally. (http://www2.mcdaniel.edu/slm/student/COPPAQ.htm)
Assignment: After you have finished the quiz, go to the discussion area in BB and write a thread under the “COPPA” heading that is at least 300 words long. Discuss how you think this act impacted the way that children use the internet and how websites are set up for them. Think about how parents feel when their child uses the internet and how this act may have helped or hurt them in their quest to keep their information private. This can be a very pertinent issue for you if you have young children at home. Let the quiz guide your discussion and include info you may have obtained from the articles I have linked on this site. Finish your thread with an honest opinion on the act and whether more should be done to protect our Nation’s children. If you want to gather more of an opinion on advertising to children, see the “Other Web Sites of Interest” section at the bottom of this page.
Submission: Submit to the discussion board and send your thread to my email as an attachment. Make sure to give your email the proper subject heading so that I do not discard it. The proper heading is: SLM521-lastname-activity.
Rubric:
|
Unacceptable |
Developing |
Accomplished |
A shallow, uninformed description of the impact the act has had and no personal opinion in the thread. |
Slightly
informed description of the impact this act has made on society. Opinion
given, but not very strong. |
Thread is very descriptive and well thought out. Opinion is very thoughtful and carefully developed. Real thought is put into the thread. |
Citings: Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: the Dark
Side of the All-American Meal.
Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
“Analysis of Rules Implementing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act” Center for Democracy and Technology
Other Web Sites
of Interest
Interested in scandals tied to McDonald’s? I only touched on
it in this activity, but this site takes it a bit further. It was written in
1986, but all of the info is still good. You can also read the book cited
above. The website is: http://www.mcspotlight.org/case/pretrial/factsheet.html
Do a Google search for McDonald’s and look at all of the different countries that they have websites for. Each on is a little different to cater to the culture of the country.
Want to know more about privacy policies in general? This paper is long and has several chapters, but you can skip the parts you don’t want to read. My favorite part is the percentages of adults who misunderstand rules of internet privacy. It is good to be up to date on this stuff. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:_o2WkzxhgTgJ:www.securitymanagement.com/library/Anneberg_privacy1003.pdf+Children%27s+Online+Privacy+Protection+Act
Finally, you can read this report by CBS
on cradle-to-grave marketing. It will give you an idea of how children are
targeted for products that they will hopefully use their whole life. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/08/opinion/main628291.shtml